Let's start with an uncomfortable truth. A generic risk assessment template, downloaded, renamed and filed unread, is worse than useless in an investigation. It proves you knew risk assessment was required and shows you didn't actually do it. If that describes the document in your filing cabinet, this guide is for you.
A risk assessment is a careful examination of what could cause harm in your venue, who could be harmed and how, and whether your existing precautions are enough. The legal duty comes from Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: every employer must make a “suitable and sufficient” assessment of the risks to employees and to anyone else affected by the business. In a soft play centre, “anyone else” means every child who walks through your door and every adult supervising them.
If you employ five or more people, the significant findings must be written down. Below five you could legally keep it all in your head. Don't. The document is the point: it's what you show an inspector, an insurer, and a solicitor.
What does “suitable and sufficient” actually mean?
The HSE's own guidance at hse.gov.uk/simple-health-safety/risk is refreshingly plain: a risk assessment should be proportionate to the risk, specific to your workplace, and it should lead to action. Nobody expects a soft play centre to produce a nuclear safety case. They expect you to have walked your own venue with your eyes open.
Here's the test in one example. Two venues both write “risk of falls from play frame, controlled by impact-absorbing flooring”. Venue A's assessment stops there. Venue B's adds that the flooring under the rope bridge was replaced in February after the daily checks flagged compression, and that the frame's annual EN 1176 inspection is booked for October. Venue B's document would survive contact with an inspector. Venue A's is a sentence anyone could have written about any venue, and that's precisely how it reads.
Specific to your workplace is where templates fall down. A template that mentions “playground equipment” in the abstract, but not the fact that your toddler zone exits directly beside the café queue, has missed the thing an inspector will spot in four minutes. Use a template as a starting structure by all means. We publish a free soft play risk assessment template for exactly that. Then make it yours.
Who should actually write it?
You, or someone who runs the venue day to day. That's an opinion, and we'll defend it. A competent consultant can add real value, especially on the first pass or after an incident, and there's no shame in paying for a day of experienced eyes. But an assessment written entirely by an outsider tends to describe a venue that exists on paper. The manager who knows that the corner by the toddler gate floods with prams at 10:15 every Saturday knows things no consultant will find in a two-hour walkround.
The legal requirement is that the assessment is done by someone competent. Competence here means understanding the venue and the method, not holding a particular qualification. If you bring a consultant in, stay in the room. The conversation is where the assessment actually happens; the document just records it.
The five steps, done properly for a play venue
The HSE's five-step method has been stable for decades because it works. Here's what each step looks like when the workplace is a soft play centre rather than an office.
- Identify the hazards. Walk the venue as a user, not an owner. Climb the frame. Sit in the ball pit. Watch the toddler area at Saturday peak, not Tuesday morning. Check the accident book and near-miss log for what's already been trying to get your attention.
- Decide who might be harmed and how. Under-fives and over-fives have different failure modes. So do pregnant visitors, staff doing close-down alone, contractors on the frame, and the child with additional needs whose parent asked about quiet hour.
- Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions. The law asks for what's reasonably practicable, not what's conceivable. Netting gaps get fixed now. The theoretical risk of a meteor strike does not go in the document.
- Record your findings and put them into practice. An assessment that lists “daily visual checks” as a control is a promise. If your daily checks aren't being done and signed, the assessment is now evidence of a control you claimed and didn't run.
- Review and update. More on the triggers below, because “review annually” on its own is not enough.
Hazards worth walking the venue for
Every venue is different, and that's the point of doing this yourself. But these are the areas where play venue assessments earn their keep.
| Area | Hazards that belong in the assessment | Controls that answer them |
|---|---|---|
| Play frame | Falls from height, entrapment of heads and fingers, worn padding, loose netting | EN 1176 inspection regime, daily visual checks, repair log with dates |
| Ball pit | Hidden small children, hygiene, buried objects | Headcount procedure, cleaning rota, full empty-and-wash schedule |
| Toddler zone | Older children entering, equipment sized for over-threes nearby | Physical separation, height marking, supervision policy |
| Café and kitchen | Burns, allergens, slips at the servery, chemicals | Food safety controls, allergen matrix, cleaning chemical storage |
| Party rooms | Crowding, hot food near children, candles | Room capacity, host training, lighter policy |
| Entrance and reception | Child leaving unaccompanied, door finger traps | Tag-in and tag-out system, door guards, sight lines from the desk |
| Staff areas | Manual handling of equipment, lone working at close-down, ladder use | Two-person close policy, handling training, ladder log |
Fire needs its own assessment under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, and it's a legal requirement regardless of headcount. Treat it as a separate document with its own review cycle. The general assessment can reference it rather than duplicate it.
Employing under-18s changes the assessment
Play venues run on young staff, and plenty of weekend teams include 16 and 17 year olds. The regulations treat this as a specific duty: before a young person starts work, you must assess the risks to them in particular, taking account of their inexperience, their unfamiliarity with the workplace, and the fact that they may not yet spot danger the way an experienced adult does. The HSE's guidance on young workers is at hse.gov.uk/youngpeople.
In practice this means your assessment should say something real about what a 16-year-old party host does and doesn't do. Do they handle hot food urns? Are they ever the only person watching the frame? Are they doing close-down alone at 6pm in winter? If the honest answer to that last one is yes, the assessment just found something to fix. Write the restriction down, brief the team, and record who was told. Induction and training records for young staff sit naturally alongside the DBS and first aid records we covered in our DBS checks guide.
How often should a soft play risk assessment be reviewed?
There's no fixed legal interval, which catches people out in both directions. The regulation says review when there's reason to suspect it's no longer valid, or when there's been a significant change. For a play venue, the practical answer is an annual review as a backstop, plus an immediate review when any of these happen:
- New or modified equipment, including that secondhand toddler unit that arrived without paperwork
- A layout change, even a small one. Moving the party room queue changed your pinch points.
- An accident or a near miss that the current assessment didn't predict
- A change in who you serve: SEND sessions, teen nights, holiday camps
- Staffing changes that affect supervision levels or lone working
Date every version and keep the old ones. A visible revision history is one of the cheapest credibility signals you can show an inspector, and we covered what they actually ask for in our inspection preparation guide.
The failures inspectors see over and over
The venue name on page one belongs to a different business, because the template was borrowed from a franchise pack. The assessment describes three staff on the floor and the rota shows two. The controls column says “weekly equipment inspection” and nobody can produce one from March. The document was written by a consultant in 2023, laminated, and never touched again.
None of these venues were reckless. They all had the document. What they didn't have was the link between the document and the daily reality of the venue, and that link is the entire value of the exercise. An assessment isn't something you have. It's something you run.
Where SafePlay fits
SafePlay closes the gap between the paper and the practice. Risk assessments live in the Document Vault with version history, review dates get chased by automated reminders before they lapse, and the controls you promised (daily checks, weekly inspections, staff training) leave a timestamped trail in Daily Checks and Staff Compliance. When someone asks you to prove the assessment is real, the proof is the system running underneath it.