Association Of Teachers & Lecturers

ONE SCHOOL EVERY WEEK IS COMPLETELY DESTROYED BY FIRE

Dr Mary Bousted, General Secretary, Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL)

Over 90,000 pupils a year in the UK have their education disrupted as a result of fire damage to classrooms or school property. Around 40 people are injured in school fires and 2,000 schools are damaged or destroyed by fire every year, with one school destroyed every week. Yet only 1 per cent of UK schools have a sprinkler system.

In 2006 school fires cost the UK taxpayer £74mn. However, in the USA, which has 150,000 schools compared to the UK’s 30,000, the cost was only £50mn last year. School for school the cost was seven times lower in the United States. And why was this? This huge disparity was because the US ensures almost all schools have sprinklers installed.

ATL believes that the lack of sprinkler systems in UK schools is totally unacceptable. Last year not one school in the UK with a sprinkler system had a major fire. Sprinklers dramatically reduce the amount of fire damage and mean schools can be back in operation faster, with less disruption to schooling and lower costs for repairs.

We are calling on the government to make it a legal requirement for sprinklers to be installed in all new education buildings and school and college refurbishments to ensure all education staff and pupils are protected against the danger and destruction caused by fire.

We launched our campaign in April 2007 at ATL’s annual conference in Bournemouth. Entering into the spirit of the occasion ATL General Secretary, Dr Mary Bousted, donned a fire-fighter’s helmet and jacket and joined fire-fighters from Westbourne Green Watch in Bournemouth to publicise the campaign. ATL members at the conference voted to urge the government to make the installation of sprinklers in all new and refurbished school and college buildings a statutory requirement.

In support of the campaign, ATL surveyed education professionals in membership to get their views about the importance of schools being equipped with sprinklers. Seventy-three per cent supported the mandatory installation of sprinklers.

The call to make sprinklers a legal requirement in schools does have parliamentary support. Last November (2006) a hundred MPs from all parties signed an early day motion, put down by Conservative MP John Penrose, which called on the government to review its schools sprinkler policy and have them installed wherever possible when major refurbishment is carried out.

However, at a debate in the House of Commons on fire precautions earlier this year (March 2007), the then Minister for Schools, Jim Knight, said that some low-risk schools should not be compelled to install fire sprinklers as the costs would outstrip any benefits. Instead, local authorities and schools would be given the power to determine whether they were low risk by using a risk-assessment tool and by referring to guidance, which would be issued following consultation.

We think this does not go far enough and leaves pupils and staff at risk. While the government consults on whether to make sprinklers mandatory, the lives of ATL members working in schools and colleges and those of their pupils are in potential danger. An announcement earlier this year by the then Department for Education and Skills about risk assessments was a step in the right direction — they are a valid tool in our health and safety work — but the government needs to do more. In particular, the government should provide adequate funding for sprinklers to be installed to alleviate already overstretched local authority budgets.

Across the UK arson is the main reason for school fires — in April our members cited arson as the cause of 52 per cent of the fires in their schools over the last five years. However, while we appreciate that schools and colleges in socially deprived areas may be at a greater risk of being destroyed by arson than those in rural areas, arson is not the only cause of fires. Rural schools may be at less risk of arson, but they are equally at risk of electrical faults — another major cause of school fires.

More sprinklers in schools would protect teachers, lecturers, support staff and pupils from the danger to their lives and disruption to their education. They would also mitigate the thousands of pounds worth of damage caused by fire every year. Replacing and rebuilding fire-damaged buildings at Tideway School in Newhaven, East Sussex, this summer is likely to cost the local authority £11mn — and that sum is just for one school.

When a former pupil set light to Copleston High School in Suffolk in 2006 nearly £1mn worth of damage was caused. And unfortunately, as happens too often, the disruption to the school did not end there. The local authority lacked an emergency contingency fund to fast track the claims for damage and get funding in place quickly. The resultant delay between the fire and rebuilding meant the school was without a staff room for 18 months, which caused major stress for the 200 staff.

More positively, following the launch of ATL’s sprinkler campaign, Lancashire County Council has said that eight of its new schools will have state-of-the-art fire sprinkler systems installed in a £3mn project. Oldham County Council is also making sprinklers mandatory in all new school buildings. A spokesperson for Oldham Council said: “All new schools built in Oldham for at least the last 10 years have had sprinklers fitted to them. Sprinklers are part of the fabric of a building and really have to be fitted when buildings are being built”.

We are encouraging ATL members to sign a petition on our website at www.atl.org.uk, which asks the government to make sprinklers compulsory, and encourage their colleagues to do the same. To publicise the campaign and petition, we have sent posters to all schools in England and Wales.

Fire brigades up and down the country are also encouraging people to sign a petition calling for sprinklers to be made a legal requirement in schools. And all the chief fire officers have written to the government asking it to look into installing sprinklers in schools.

If retailers like Debenhams and Marks and Spencer think it is important to have fire sprinklers installed in all their shops, why is it not seen as important for all schools where our children are based every day? Surely our children’s lives are equally as valuable?

It seems crazy that the government has promised £5bn to improve school buildings under its Building Schools for the Future programme but so far has not made sprinklers compulsory. This is a totally false economy. The cost of the equivalent of 45 new primary schools goes up in smoke every year. Yet installing sprinklers costs just 1–2 per cent of the cost of building a new school.

The government will miss a huge opportunity if it fails to make sprinkler installation compulsory while it is funding a major school building and refurbishment programme over the next 10–15 years. Now seems the ideal time to recognise the protection provided by sprinklers. Failure to do so will lead to more fires, at greater cost, and more disruption and risk to life. Is a short-term cost-saving really worth more than children’s lives?

Biography of Dr Mary Bousted, General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Dr Mary Bousted has been General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) for four years. ATL is the UK’s fastest growing education union, with over 160,000 members — teachers, students and newly-qualified teachers, headteachers, lecturers, support staff and other education professionals across the UK.

Mary was previously Head of the School of Education at Kingston University, where she led a team of 40 colleagues devoted to the education of undergraduate and postgraduate student teachers. She has also worked at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk, where she was Head of Secondary Education, and at the University of York where, in 1992, she re-established the English PGCE course and became Director of Initial Teacher Training.

Prior to this, Mary was an English teacher in comprehensive schools in north London, including being Head of English at Whitmore High School, Harrow. In addition to a PGCE, Mary holds a degree in English from Hull University and further educational qualifications at Masters and PhD levels.