If you’re a health and safety or business manager in a school, you need to ensure you’re up to scratch with the risks and legislation related to fire safety. Otherwise, you could be compromising the safety of your staff and pupils.
Alex MacArthur, director at North West Fire Solutions, explains why fire risk assessments for schools are so important, how often you should review your assessment, and more.
What does the law say in relation to fire risk assessments for schools?
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 doesn’t specifically mention schools, but it does apply to schools.
As part of the legislation, schools need to get a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment in place with the premises. Quite simply, you need it by law.
What are the typical fire safety risks within schools?
Schools come in different sizes. They can be big, small, on low levels, or contain multiple storeys. They can be complex buildings with different blocks and escape routes.
These days, more schools have fences around them, which affects the level of access for the fire service.
Although there aren’t so many visitors to schools, per se, they will still be visited by contractors and parents.
People are moving around the site throughout the day, and schools have commercial kitchens on site, which pose their own safety risk.
Children being on site is another risk, as young people are not so aware of what to do in the event of a fire.
There are also lots of different activities going on in schools. Some people think of schools as just classrooms with a pen and paper, but the children could be cooking or conducting science experiments involving flammable materials or devices like Bunsen burners.
It’s also worth noting that lots of schools are older buildings. These buildings need to be well-maintained in order to avoid the extensive fire damage that could potentially happen in dilapidated buildings.
It’s important that all fire risks are managed correctly. Taking into account the fact that schools are complex buildings, and the types of people using the buildings, any number of things could go wrong, and it’s important to preempt them before they materialise.
School Governors, Governing Bodies & MAT Trustees must include fire safety & risk assessments within their duties!
The importance of staff training
The school staff must be sufficiently trained so they know what to do in the event of a fire and can evacuate everybody on the premises correctly.
Under The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, all employees within a workplace should be provided basic fire safety awareness training.
But if you work in a school, you need to ask yourself — is that really enough?
Should the school be looking at the next step up from basic fire safety awareness and be getting fire marshal training? We advise that they should get this training in some capacity.
One of the questions we’re often asked is, ‘How many fire marshals do we need to have?’
If you work in a school that has, say, 50 members of staff, it’s a workplace, but it’s different from other workplaces. If you were in an office full of adults, then as soon as the fire alarm goes off, you’d stand up and walk out of the building. There’d maybe be a few fire marshals ensuring everybody gets out.
But in a school, people won’t just evacuate the building. Everybody needs to help to ensure all the kids are out. So, we often recommend that everybody in a school is fire marshal trained.
Schools need to decide how they manage fire risk, but it makes sense to have more people trained and an understanding of what to do in the event of a fire. This training could encompass anything from showing them how to use an extinguisher to making sure they’re clued up on fire safety and evacuation procedures.
The management procedures within schools
Because there are children on-site and because of the nature of the site, schools typically should have quite extensive management procedures for different scenarios. The liability is huge, as you’re managing kids who are not your kids, and we have to remember — it’s also a workplace with staff.
There are so many factors to consider, which is why a fire risk assessment for a school is a unique type of assessment.
When we do fire assessments across all types of premises, sometimes they’re quite simple and straightforward as everybody’s doing the same activity and in the same location. However, with schools, assessments need to be thorough, rigid, well-rehearsed, and reviewed regularly to minimise and remove risk as much as possible.
Why do schools require fire risk assessments?
There could be a multitude of reasons schools need a fire risk assessment.
Maybe they’re well on top of fire safety compliance, but they need to review their assessment.
Maybe they aren’t happy with the last assessment that was carried out and want to get another one done.
Maybe they’ve made changes to the building or internal processes.
Whatever the reasons are, I come back to The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. You have to have a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment in place, and it has to be reviewed regularly. If you move away from that for any particular reason, you need to consider getting a new fire risk assessment done. It’s so important.
What does a school fire risk assessment involve?
A school fire risk assessment involves a physical site inspection whereby a fire risk assessor will attend the site, walk around the premises, and look for hazards.
They will mark them up effectively, include them in the report, point out what hazards exist, and provide recommendations to mitigate or remove those risks.
The assessment will also involve a review of policies, procedures, and how fire safety is managed on site. This review will typically focus on evacuation procedures, who calls the fire service, and where everybody should assemble in the event of a fire.
The assembly point should be assessed for its level of safety. For instance, do the staff and children have to cross busy roads? Some schools will have plenty of space to get people away from any burning buildings, but some schools within central cities might not have that space. This point requires careful consideration.
A fire risk assessor will also make sure maintenance, training, and fire drill records are up to date. The assessor is assessing fire safety as a whole on the premises, not just the physical things they can see.
A fire risk assessment for schools will look at how everything is managed. For example:
- Is the maintenance work being done correctly?
- Are the drills being carried out as they should be?
- When a school has carried out a fire drill, could anything have been done better?
It’s vital schools make sure they’re following up on everything they’re doing and continuously looking to make improvements.
How much does a school fire risk assessment cost?
We look at a number of factors when we price up a fire risk assessment.
For instance:
- Where is the school located?
- How much time will be spent on site?
- How much work is going to be involved in doing the write-up?
Again, schools are complex sites that vary in their usage and occupancy.
We could go to a really small primary school in a rural area where there are two or three children per year, or we could visit a school that has 200 to 300 children per year.
If we conduct an assessment for a specialist school and the students have special needs, that school will require additional management procedures.
Taking all of these factors into account, prices can start from as low as £350 to £400 and go up to several thousand pounds. The price depends on the type of school, what goes on there, and the level of risk.
It’s also worth bringing educational facilities like universities and colleges into the discussion. The fire safety risks within these facilities go beyond the typical risks of science departments and cooking facilities.
For instance, one educational institute we visited had a mechanics workshop on site because the students were studying for an NVQ in mechanics. We’ve also attended a hairdressing training centre that contained flammable canisters. You can encounter all kinds of things, which is why risk is one of our price factors.
We don’t provide a fixed price for fire risk assessments. Every job must be priced on a case-by-case basis.
How often should schools review and update their fire risk assessments?
There are two areas to look at here.
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 says you have to review your fire risk assessment regularly. But what do we mean by regularly, and what do we mean by review?
You need to review your fire risk assessment when something significant changes. In a nutshell, if your fire risk assessment no longer becomes suitable and sufficient for your premises, something’s changed.
Maybe you’ve had a fire, which has prompted you to review things. Maybe you’ve added an extra storey to your building. Maybe you’ve made changes internally. Maybe the occupancy levels within the building have changed.
Any of these changes could be enough to justify going through and reviewing your fire risk assessment.
But what does a review actually mean?
Does it mean reading through your old fire risk assessment and coming to the conclusion that everything is the same? Or does it mean having another walk around, reviewing your policies and procedures, and updating your training and maintenance records?
The background of the person conducting the review is really important, too. You should get someone competent to do it. If you’ve outsourced the review the first time, you should probably outsource it the second time. It’s worth bearing in mind that the review could be carried out by a different assessor who sees things in a slightly different way.
It’s worth going through the whole process from start to finish again and making sure you’ve not missed anything off. Of course, you’d take previous assessments into consideration, reviewing any findings to see whether they’ve been completed.
In most cases, if nothing within the school has changed, you should look to review your fire risk assessment every 12 months.
It could be sooner or longer. But for a school, I’d be very surprised if it’s any longer than 12 months.
Don’t leave your school unprepared for fire
You’ll keep your school and its occupants safe by working with our team of qualified risk assessors.
These assessors have built up years of on-the-ground experience, assessing schools of all shapes and sizes.
This experience has enabled them to understand all the fire safety risks within schools and how to mitigate and remove them.
We don’t just make any old recommendations. We make recommendations that are feasible in the real world.
To arrange for us to visit your school and conduct a fire risk assessment, reach out to us at 0151 665 0124 or email info@nwfiresolutions.co.uk.