Fire Safety in Schools: How to Keep Controls Reliable During the School Day

• Paper compliance is not protection if fire doors do not close and latch, escape routes are not kept clear, and alarm signals are not investigated and closed out during the school day.
• Schools need fire safety to work as a routine system that links role competence, site-specific briefing, real-time checks, and defect follow-through, not as disconnected documents.
• Primary fires still occur in education premises, including deliberate ignitions, so schools must plan for containment and evacuation reliability as well as prevention.
• Fire safety improves when checks test performance at busy times and when defects are owned, fixed, and re-checked so the same issues do not recycle as repeat findings.

England recorded 417 primary fires in educational premises in 2024/25, based on incident records completed by Fire and Rescue Services. A “primary fire” is not a minor false alarm or a trivial incident. It is the category used for fires that result in harm to people or damage to property.

That number matters because it sits on the far side of a long-established duties framework. Schools are operating in a regime built around risk assessment and maintained precautions, yet serious fires still occur often enough to be tracked and reported nationally.

In 2024/25, 355 fires were recorded as accidental and 62 as deliberate, with 18 non-fatal casualties. The operational implication is that “prevention” cannot be treated as a single lever.

A school therefore needs three types of control that work together:

• Reduce accidental ignition risk: Controls that lower the chance of an unintended fire starting by managing common ignition sources and predictable maintenance/process failures.
• Limit fire growth and spread: Controls that contain fire and smoke and provide early warning so a small fire does not escalate before evacuation and response.
• Support evacuation under unpredictable ignition: Controls that keep escape routes, exits, and evacuation arrangements workable even when a fire starts deliberately or without warning.

Paper controls are easy to show. The failure pattern in UK school incidents is that controls can exist and still be unreliable in the conditions that matter. The cases below are useful because they show “compliance on file” sitting alongside basic control degradation in routine use.

In the Wakefield Grammar School Foundation case, reporting described escape routes lined with coat hooks, exits obstructed, and a final exit blocked by chairs. That is not an unusual “emergency mistake.” It is what drift looks like when circulation space is treated as practical capacity and the boundary is not defended day to day (West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, 2019).

A route is only a control if it stays usable during the busy week, not if it can be cleared for an inspection.

The same Wakefield reporting described essential fire doors removed from cloakrooms and other fire doors not closing properly. That is compartmentation failing quietly before any fire starts. A door can be listed, labelled, and “present,” while its protective function has already been lost in routine conditions (West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, 2019).

This is why door performance has to be treated as a live control state, not an asset on a register.

Wakefield also shows how paper can fail in a more structural way. The prosecuting authority reported guilty pleas for failing to make a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and for failures in general fire precautions, with the former fire risk assessor also pleading guilty for inadequate assessments across multiple sites (West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, 2019).

The implication is not “schools need an FRA.” It is that an FRA can exist and still be operationally untrue, which means assurance activity can look complete while it misses the pressure points that are actually changing conditions.

A UK school incident reported by ITV described a wheelchair user left at a refuge point during a fire because there was no safe way to get him down stairs and out of the building at that moment. Whatever the intended plan, the system could not execute it when conditions demanded it (ITV News, 2025).

Evacuation “works” only if it can move the people who cannot self-evacuate, without improvisation, delay, or reliance on luck.

The London Oratory School fire is a reminder that some ignitions are deliberate or reckless acts by individuals inside the system. ITV reported the incident caused around £2 million in damage. That kind of event defeats a prevention-only story, even in a high-profile setting (ITV News, 2024).

School fire safety cannot be designed as “stop fires starting” plus paperwork. It has to assume some ignitions will still occur and make containment and evacuation performance non-negotiable under routine conditions.

In schools, “good” is not a bigger folder. It is a short list of protections that still work during the busiest parts of the day, backed by routines that spot small slips early and put things back right before they become the normal way of running the building.

A fire door is not “in place” because it appears on drawings or an asset register. It exists only if it closes and latches during the loud, high-traffic parts of the day.

The education premises fire risk assessment guide is explicit that heavy day-to-day use makes self-closing doors vulnerable to being rendered ineffective, and it describes compliant ways to hold doors open so they still release on alarm and close when needed (Home Office, 2023).

What this looks like in a working school:

• Door closure and latching treated as a daily condition, not a periodic check.
• Where doors must stand open for operational reasons, compliant hold-open/hold-open release solutions used rather than informal propping, so doors return to protective function on alarm (Home Office, 2023).
• Checks done when the building is “truthful,” such as changeover, not only during quiet walkthroughs.

Route reliability fails when circulation space becomes overflow space. The drift is not dramatic. It is functional.

Wakefield is a concrete reminder of what this looks like when it becomes enforceable. The enforcing authority describes the organisation pleading guilty to fire safety offences, including failures tied to a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and general fire precautions (West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, 2019).

What this looks like in a working school:

• Protected routes managed as “do not borrow” space, with clear ownership.
• Storage and display capacity designed so corridors are not the pressure valve.
• Checks aimed at predictable pinch points, not generic inspections.

Alarm reliability fails in the handling as much as the hardware. If unwanted activations are frequent, people learn a restoration routine and the signal loses value.

Kent Fire and Rescue Service advises silencing but not resetting until the indicated area/device has been checked, because resetting removes information needed for investigation (Kent Fire and Rescue Service, n.d.).

What this looks like in a working school:

• A defined “silence, locate, check, then reset” routine, with no reset-to-restore shortcut (Kent Fire and Rescue Service, n.d.).
• Repeat sources treated as engineering work, not staff reminders.
• Logs capturing zone/device and cause well enough to drive corrective action.

Written arrangements do not prove evacuation capability. UK guidance on means of escape for disabled people is explicit that arrangements must work in practice and must not depend on fire and rescue services to complete evacuation (UK Government, 2023).

What this looks like in a working school:

• Plans built around pupils who cannot self-evacuate, including who assists, how, and what happens if that person is absent (UK Government, 2023).
• Drills used to expose bottlenecks and capability gaps, then corrected through changes to conditions, not just reminders.

Paper compliance is most fragile during change. A school can run stable routines, then lose control when works introduce hot work, altered compartments, and temporary route changes.

A Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service investigation concluded the Harrington Junior School fire was accidental and most likely caused by hot works during refurbishment (Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service, 2020).

The Department for Education also maintains specific guidance on fire risk from school maintenance or building works because these activities introduce distinct risks that must be actively managed (DfE, 2016).

What this looks like in a working school:

• Temporary precautions treated as the live system, checked daily.
• Hot work control verified on the day, including supervision and close-out checks that match the actual work (Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service, 2020).
• Contractor handover usable for school leaders, including what changed in routes and protection measures (DfE, 2016).

Fire safety training is a legal requirement, not an optional extra. The Responsible Person must provide adequate safety training for employees, including on first employment and when exposed to new or increased risk (Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005).

The operational risk is treating “trained” as a proxy for “ready.” Evidence on occupational safety training shows it can improve knowledge and safety practices, but large effects on harm outcomes should not be assumed from training alone (Robson et al., 2012).

Training only carries through into real work when the environment supports transfer, including opportunity to apply learning and reinforcement from the job context (Grossman and Salas, 2011).

Fire-specific evidence points to the same limitation. A randomised trial of online fire training improved generic knowledge strongly, while gains in site-specific knowledge were smaller, meaning people can learn “the right answers” without becoming reliably better at acting in their own building (Lee et al., 2018).

In practice, awareness does not translate into dependable performance when the system still allows the following:

• Decision points stay vague: People know principles, but are unclear on what they personally must do, and when.
• Learning is not tied to the building: Staff can describe evacuation theory but remain weaker on local arrangements, routes, and constraints (Lee et al., 2018).
• No reinforcement exists on the job: If supervisors never look for the expected behaviours or corrections, the system signals that completion matters more than performance (Grossman and Salas, 2011).

This is why fire safety training works best as an enabler, not a control. It has the most impact when it is role-based, building-specific, practice-led, and followed by simple verification that the expected actions actually happen during routine pressure, not just that training was completed .

Most schools do not fail because they lack a fire risk assessment or a training record. They fail because the parts that make protections dependable are managed in different places, by different people, on different cycles. Small losses of performance then show up as repeat findings, not as early signals.

The practical fix is a closed loop that connects four things:

• Competence Coverage: Who is trained, who is new or due, and where role cover is thin for specific decision points.
• Site-Specific Training: Short, role-based sessions that are built around this school’s layout, known pressure points, and local routines, so staff practise the actions that actually need to happen here, not just learn generic principles.
• Routine Verification: Simple, repeatable checks that confirm doors, routes, alarm handling, evacuation arrangements, and contractor handbacks are still workable during normal school conditions, not just documented.
• Follow-Through That Holds: Defects recorded with ownership and deadlines, then re-checked so recurring problems stop recycling as “known issues.”

When those elements sit together, the school stops relying on “completed” paperwork as evidence of readiness. It starts managing fire safety as something that has to keep working by mid-morning, not something that only needs to look complete on paper.

Human Focus supports schools with a structured approach to managing fire safety across buildings and during the school day. This includes an extensive range of fire safety courses for education settings, including fire door inspection and fire extinguisher inspection, where staff are trained to carry out defined checks and record findings accurately.

Schools also use Human Focus’s mobile, digital inspection system to plan, complete, and evidence routine fire safety inspections. Checks are completed on site using mobile devices, defects are logged with ownership and follow-up, and leaders can see whether fire safety controls are being checked, maintained, and closed out in practice — not just recorded on paper. To learn more contact Human Focus.