Our Taking Safe Decisions e-learning course will equip rail professionals at all levels with the understanding they need to boost safety and reliability on the rail network.

The course content explores what safety obligations organisations have and what good practice looks like. It’ll help you foster a culture where safety is considered in a consistent, methodical, and robust way in the decisions your organisation makes.

The course, which we’ve developed with the close support of the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), offers practical guidance on topics including:

  • your legal duties to ensure safety
  • how to carry out effective risk assessments
  • how to implement changes and improvements safely.

Here’s what ORR’s Richard Hines, HM Chief Inspector of Railways, has to say about the course.

What to expect

  • Comprehensive information: Our course contains several thorough modules, each carefully designed to guide you through the key principles of Taking Safe Decisions.
  • Interactive elements: You’ll have multiple opportunities to test and apply your understanding of the key principles.
  • Free access: This course is free for anyone in the rail industry to complete whenever suits them best.
  • Flexibility: Each of the main modules takes 30–45 minutes to complete, and you have the flexibility to decide which modules are best for you. There’s even a quick, 6-minute overview of the key messages you should be aware of. Also, the course material contains useful links to extra information. So, you can go into as much detail as you need in the time you have.

What you’ll learn

  • By the end of module 1, you should have a good basic awareness of what Taking Safe Decisions is about, what it contains, and when it might be useful for you or your teams to refer to it.
  • Module 2 goes into more detail on some important principles, which will give you a more thorough understanding of the elements introduced in module 1.
  • In module 3, which is coming soon, you’ll have a chance to apply your knowledge in some worked examples based on real industry challenges.
  • By the end of the course, you should have a good appreciation of Taking Safe Decisions, including its framework and principles. You should also know the right things to look for in your organisation and the organisations you work with, know the right questions to ask, and know how to challenge when something doesn’t look or feel right.

At the end of the course, you might realise that you or your teams need to go deeper into the topics covered. You can contact RSSB for further support and with any questions you have.

The course is free, but we do ask that you share it with colleagues, teams, and organisations whom you think would benefit from understanding and using Taking Safe Decisions in their work.

A taster of the course

Listen to Ben Gilmartin, our Principal System Safety Engineer, describe the fundamental principles of Taking Safe Decisions and what to expect in our e-learning course.