Fire safety for education premises

Occupancy on a school or college site is high relative to floor area for most of the day, and a significant proportion of that occupancy is made up of children or young people who need clear, well-rehearsed evacuation procedures rather than an assumption that they will find their own way out. That is why fire drills matter more here than in most commercial settings: pupils and students need to know the route from their classroom to the assembly point before they ever need to use it in earnest, and staff need to know how to account for a class register once everyone is outside.

Specialist teaching spaces add hazards a generic office or retail assessment would not encounter. Science laboratories involve gas supplies, chemicals and heat sources. Design and technology workshops bring machinery, dust extraction and sometimes welding or soldering equipment into the building. Art rooms can involve solvents, kilns or other heat-producing equipment. Kitchens, whether serving a full catering operation or a smaller preparation area, sit alongside general teaching space rather than being isolated from it in the way a standalone commercial kitchen might be.

Building use also changes through the year in a way most commercial premises do not experience. A school or college is at its busiest during term time, largely empty during holiday periods, and often in between the two during exam seasons or staff-only inset days. An unoccupied building over a summer holiday still needs a working fire alarm and a maintained means of escape, even though nobody is walking those corridors day to day, and servicing visits often have to be scheduled around the academic calendar rather than a standard commercial pattern.

Out-of-hours community use adds a further layer on many sites. Halls, sports facilities and meeting rooms let out to community groups, clubs or evening classes bring people onto the premises who do not know the building the way pupils, students and staff do, at times when fewer staff are present to manage an evacuation. A fire risk assessment needs to account for who is actually in the building at any given time, not only during the school day.

A fire alarm system on an education site, designed in line with BS 5839-1, needs to cover classrooms, corridors, halls, specialist teaching areas and any parts of the building let out for community use, with a design that reflects how those spaces are actually occupied through the week. Clear zone plans let staff identify which part of a large or spread-out site an activation relates to, which matters when a fast, coordinated response is what keeps an evacuation orderly rather than confused.

Once installed, a system only stays effective if it is tested and serviced on the schedule BS 5839-1 sets out, ideally arranged around the academic calendar so that routine servicing does not clash with exam periods or the start of term. Our fire alarm servicing and maintenance covers those periodic visits, and where a site goes largely unoccupied over the summer holiday, keeping the alarm tested and any monitoring arrangement in place matters just as much as it does during term time.

Fire doors carry a lot of the compartmentation strategy in a school or college, since a building with hundreds of occupants and long corridors depends on doors holding back fire and smoke for the time an evacuation is designed to take. Our fire doors service covers supply, installation and inspection of door sets rated to what the building needs. Doors propped open between lessons for ease of movement, self-closers that have been disconnected, and damaged seals are common findings on education premises, and each one removes part of the protection the door is there to provide.

Pupil or student numbers, room use and out-of-hours lettings can all change from one academic year to the next, and each change can affect whether an alarm’s zoning, a fire door schedule or an emergency lighting layout still matches how the building is used. Reviewing your fire risk assessment when building use changes materially, and scheduling alarm, door, lighting and extinguisher servicing around the academic calendar rather than against it, is what keeps a school or college compliant rather than accurate only on the day the assessment was carried out.

Tell us about your school or college, how the building is used across the year and what is already in place, and we will talk you through what it needs. We work with education premises across our service locations, including Birmingham, Walsall, Worcester, Worcestershire, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, South Gloucestershire, Herefordshire.