Electrical Safety – What You Need To Know For Your School

As a headteacher, you have a stringent responsibility to ensure the safety of your pupils and staff, and so strict rules are often put in place to help guide you towards making your school be as safe a place as possible. Of course, as with any huge responsibility, it can be overwhelming when trying to work out the right steps to take in safety planning, so it’s worth taking it one step at a time. A good first step is to look at electrical safety, as this can impact everyone on the premises and can be catastrophic if something goes wrong.

Buy Reliable Equipment
With budgets being a constant source of concern for many schools, it’s easy to start considering ways in which you can save some money. There are many ways schools can reduce their spending but buying cheaper models of electrical equipment is not a safe option at all. It’s important to remember that you should not do this to cut spending.

Make sure you’re always purchasing equipment that is up to British Standards, even if it means that you can’t buy as many devices as you would if you chose a cheaper option. If you were to use devices that aren’t compliant with British safety standards, there is a potential increase in the risk of fire and injury for your staff and students.

Arrange Safety Checks
It’s highly recommended that schools inspect their electrical installations at least every five years. These checks are going to allow you to remain confident that your devices and appliances are as safe as possible for your staff and students. These inspections can be done by a qualified electrician in the form of an electrical installation condition report. The electrician will check that all circuits, devices and systems are in good condition if any electrical work that’s been done is defective and needs to be replaced and will also check consumer units of devices to ensure they’re safe to use.

Implement Safety Plans
Remembering to arrange inspections and maintenance can be difficult without an adequate plan in place. Creating a full safety plan is a good way of ensuring that everything is done on time and nothing is forgotten about when making your school as safe as possible.

You should include a number of things in the plan, from scheduled inspections to systems in which you can identify, record, and remove faulty devices until they’ve been fixed so that you can make sure that nothing slips through the net.

Teach Electrical Safety
Another way to ensure the safety of your staff and students is to teach them about electrical safety. Knowing how to operate devices safely, reduce the risk of electrical fires or electrical shock, and what to do if one of these events should occur is valuable knowledge for both children and adults.

It may be worth arranging for your staff to run some electrical safety classes for your students to ensure that everyone has been informed about the risks and ways to deal with them. Remember that just because you’ve taught everyone about electrical safety, it doesn’t mean that the risks are completely eradicated. Encourage everyone to remain vigilant when using electrical equipment.