Health and Safety in Schools: 12 Duties Education Settings Miss
Schools are unusual workplaces. They contain a large number of people who are not employees, occupy buildings that are frequently old and were rarely designed for their current use, run activities that would be assessed carefully anywhere else, and do it all on a budget that leaves little room for specialist support.
They are also governed differently depending on what type of school they are, which is why the first question is not what the duties are but who holds them.
Twelve duties, and the first two decide how the rest apply.
1. Who the duty holder is depends on the type of school
The question to settle before anything else.
The employer holds the main duties under section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and who the employer is varies by school type. For some maintained schools it is the local authority. For academies and free schools it is the academy trust. For independent schools it is the proprietor or governing body.
Confirm the position for your setting, because responsibilities are then shared in practice between the employer, the governing body or trust board, and the headteacher, and the split should be written down rather than assumed. The Department for Education publishes health and safety advice for schools.
2. Pupils are covered by section 3, not section 2
The legal distinction that shapes everything a school does.
Employees are covered by section 2. Pupils, visitors, contractors and parents are not employees, and are covered by section 3, which requires an employer to conduct its undertaking so that persons not in its employment are not exposed to risks to their health or safety.
That duty is owed to people who are, in many cases, children, and whose behaviour is less predictable than an adult workforce. It is the reason school risk assessments look different from office ones.
3. Risk assessment covers premises, activities and people
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Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires assessment of risks to employees and to others affected.
In a school that divides into three: the premises, the activities carried out in them, and specific groups whose needs differ. HSE's education pages are explicit that the approach should be proportionate, and that sensible risk management is not about eliminating every risk from childhood.
The failure is usually volume rather than absence. Schools frequently hold a great many generic assessments and struggle to say which ones are current.
4. Proportionality is the point, and it is official
Worth stating because schools get criticised in both directions.
HSE's position is that health and safety law should not be used to stop reasonable activities, and its education FAQs exist largely to correct myths about what the law prevents.
The useful framing for a school is that the duty is to manage significant risks sensibly, not to remove challenge, and a defensible assessment is one that shows the balance was considered.
5. Educational visits and off-site activities
The area with the highest perceived risk and a well-established approach.
HSE publishes guidance on school trips, and the principle is proportionality: routine local visits need very little, while adventurous activities, residential trips and overseas visits need more.
The practical elements are the same each time: who is leading, what the activity involves, ratios, what happens if something goes wrong, who holds medical and consent information, and what the provider's own arrangements are where an external provider is used.
6. Curriculum activities with their own risks
Science, design and technology, art, food technology and physical education each carry risks that a general assessment does not reach.
These usually need subject-specific assessments and, importantly, staff competence: the person supervising a workshop or a laboratory needs to know the activity, not just the pupils.
Where technicians or specialist staff have left and not been replaced, that is a risk assessment trigger rather than only a staffing problem.
7. Premises: asbestos is the big one
School buildings are frequently old, and a substantial proportion of the estate predates 2000.
Regulation 4 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 places the duty to manage on the person with the repairing obligation, requires materials to be presumed to contain asbestos unless there is strong evidence otherwise, and requires information to be given to anybody liable to disturb them.
In a school that reaches caretakers, maintenance staff, IT installers, and anybody putting up displays. The last of those is the one nobody thinks about.
8. Fire, water and the rest of the estate
Alongside asbestos sit the ordinary premises duties, and schools carry more of them than most workplaces.
Fire risk assessment, recorded in full since October 2023 and covering evacuation for pupils with additional needs. Water hygiene, where intermittently used showers and outlets in sports facilities and unoccupied holiday periods are a genuine factor. Electrical and equipment maintenance. Playground and outdoor equipment inspection.
Holiday periods matter here: systems sit unused for weeks, which affects water systems in particular.
9. Contractors, in term time and out of it
Schools have work done constantly, and the pattern is unusual.
During term, contractors work in a building full of children, which raises segregation, supervision and safeguarding considerations alongside the ordinary coordination duties. During holidays, larger works happen in near-empty buildings, which raises lone working and security.
Both need the same discipline: what the contractor will do, what they need to know about the building including asbestos, and who is coordinating.
10. Staff workload and stress
The risk that produces the most days lost in education.
Work-related stress is assessable under regulation 3 in exactly the way it is anywhere else, and the drivers in schools are well documented: workload, pace during term, the emotional demands of the role, and the difficulty of taking breaks.
The same discipline applies: assess by group, look at the data you hold, decide what will change, and tell people what you decided.
11. Reporting, including incidents involving pupils
A category schools get wrong in both directions.
Incidents involving pupils can be reportable, and the test is not simply that a child was hurt. Where a non-employee is injured in an accident arising out of or in connection with work and is taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment, the incident is reportable.
An injury arising purely from a pupil's own behaviour, unconnected with the way the school conducts its undertaking, is treated differently. Schools that report everything and schools that report nothing are both misapplying it, and the distinction is worth getting advice on once and then applying consistently.
12. Governance: the board has to be able to ask
The oversight duty, and it is where the arrangements hold or fail.
Governing bodies and trust boards are accountable, and in practice receive a report from the headteacher or a business manager. The question is whether anybody at that level can interrogate it.
Three things make that possible: an open action list with ages, a clear statement of which statutory checks are current, and something the board sees that did not come through the person being assessed. That last is what periodic health and safety audits provide.
The 12, in short
| Duty | The common gap |
|---|---|
| Who the employer is | Assumed, not confirmed |
| Pupils under section 3 | Treated as employees or overlooked |
| Risk assessment | Many, none current |
| Proportionality | Over-assessment or paralysis |
| Educational visits | Provider arrangements unchecked |
| Curriculum activities | Competence gaps after staff changes |
| Asbestos | Displays and fixings |
| Fire, water, estate | Holiday periods |
| Contractors | Term-time segregation, holiday lone working |
| Staff stress | Treated as wellbeing |
| Reporting | All or nothing |
| Governance | Report received, not interrogated |
Rows one and two are the foundations. Rows seven and eleven are where schools most often find they have a problem.
For international schools and groups
Two considerations.
International schools sit in the local framework. A British-curriculum school abroad is governed by the host country's occupational safety law, not by British regulations, however British its policies look. Several jurisdictions covered in this series prescribe the appointment, the document and the author, and a school operating on a British template will not satisfy them.
Group operators need a per-entity view. Where a group runs schools in several countries, each one has its own duty holder, its own reportable categories and its own inspection regime. Holding that in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with education settings on the parts that need external input: the premises duties, the audit that gives a board something independent, and the assessments that need specialist knowledge. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years.
Our health and safety consultants work with education settings alongside professional services and finance and banking organisations, and our fire risk assessment and asbestos work covers the two premises duties that matter most in an older school estate.
Where a group operates schools in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current.
If your school estate predates 2000 and staff put up displays without checking anything, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
