Fire strategy reports for schools

A school fire strategy covers the same subjects as any building, with school-specific answers: dense occupancy in short bursts, pupils who evacuate under supervision, laboratories and workshops with ignition sources, halls used by the public out of hours, and estates built in phases across decades. Building Bulletin 100 is the sector design guidance in England.

Schools are unusual for one reason above the rest. The occupancy is dense, young and directed. Evacuation depends on staff moving whole classes rather than on individuals finding their own way out. That changes the design assumptions, and it changes what the document has to say.

The guidance that applies to schools

Schools fall under the Building Regulations like any other building, and Approved Document B applies. England and Wales publish separate versions, and they are not close: England uses the 2019 edition incorporating the 2020, 2022 and 2025 amendments, while Wales still works from 2006-edition documents last amended with effect from 20 December 2025.

Building Bulletin 100, “Design for fire safety in schools”, is the Department for Education’s guide and dates from 2007. Its status has moved, and this is the single most important thing to get right on a school project. The Department consulted on a revised edition in 2021, the consultation closed on 18 August 2021, and as at 3 August 2026 gov.uk still shows the outcome as under analysis, so the 2007 document remains the published version. Meanwhile the DfE Technical Manual: Employer’s requirements, dated January 2026, states plainly that “the use of BB 100 (2007 version) is no longer required” and directs designers instead to its own fire safety section, to Approved Document B volume 2 and to BS 9999:2017. That manual is contractual on DfE-funded work, so a school project can now sit under two quite different expectations depending on who is paying for it.

Welsh schools are not covered by the DfE documents at all. BS 9999:2017 is often used where a risk-based approach suits the building better than the prescriptive route.

Funders add their own layer. The Department for Education sets output specifications for its own programmes, and academy trusts and local authorities frequently impose estate standards on top of both. Establish which of those apply before anyone scopes the work, because they change the deliverable.

Sprinkler provision in new schools is a moving policy area, and the position sits in sector guidance and funder requirements rather than in the Building Regulations. It moved again in 2026 when the DfE Technical Manual displaced BB100 on funded projects, and the change drew public criticism from fire sector bodies. Do not assume either way, and confirm the client’s own estate standard at project outset as well.

Occupancy: the defining school problem

Occupancy in a school is not steady. It peaks hard and then empties.

A hall used for assembly may hold the entire school. A dining hall runs at capacity for forty minutes and is nearly empty either side. Corridors carry the whole population in a three-minute changeover. A sports hall laid out for exams has a completely different density from the same hall used for PE.

The strategy has to set occupancy figures space by space, based on actual use rather than a single floor area calculation, and size exit capacity for the peak. Halls, dining spaces and sports halls are where under-provision is usually found: large rooms with high densities and often fewer exits than the numbers require.

Corridor width and stair capacity follow from the same analysis. So does door swing direction, which sounds trivial until a doorway carrying two hundred pupils opens against the flow.

Evacuation: supervised, not individual

Most schools use simultaneous evacuation. Everyone leaves on the alarm. The strategy needs to state that and size the routes accordingly.

The mechanism, though, is nothing like an office. Pupils evacuate as classes, led by staff, to designated assembly points, followed by a roll call. The document has to address class-by-class routes, assembly point capacity and location, since several hundred children may stand there for an hour in February, and the sweep of toilets, changing rooms and practical spaces where a pupil may be alone.

Assisted evacuation needs specific attention. A school will have pupils and staff with mobility, sensory, cognitive or behavioural needs, and the population turns over every year. Refuges, evacuation lifts and personal emergency evacuation plans have to be designed for a roll that changes annually, not for a fixed set of individuals. Special schools, and provision for pupils with special educational needs within mainstream schools, change the analysis substantially.

Early years provision inside a primary school needs separate consideration, because very young children cannot follow instructions independently and staff ratios drive the achievable evacuation time.

Hazards specific to school buildings

Science laboratories with gas supplies, flammable liquids and chemical stores. Design and technology workshops with dust extraction, hot works and machinery. Food technology rooms with multiple domestic-scale cooking stations. Art rooms with kilns. Theatre and drama spaces with lighting rigs, drapes and stored scenery.

Each is a genuine ignition source and each affects compartmentation and detection design. Chemical stores need containment. Kilns need separation and ventilation. Dust extraction ductwork can carry fire between spaces if it is not treated properly.

Then there is arson, a well-recognised risk in the school sector. It drives decisions about external storage, bin locations, boundary treatment, roof access and external wall construction. The strategy should address it explicitly rather than leaving it to the security consultant.

Estates that grew in pieces

Very few schools are one building from one year. A typical secondary is a 1950s block, a 1970s extension, a 2000s sports hall and two temporary classroom units, joined by links, with a corridor that was once an external route.

This creates the sector’s most common documentation problem. Each phase may have had its own approvals, and no single document describes the site as it now stands. Compartment lines that made sense when a block stood alone now run into a link corridor. Alarm systems from different eras are interfaced rather than integrated.

A whole-site strategy resolves it. It establishes what each part of the estate is doing, where the compartment lines actually run, whether the alarm zones make sense across the site, and how connected blocks interact during an evacuation. Temporary and modular classrooms get assessed in the same exercise rather than assumed away. For most existing schools that is a retrospective fire strategy, and the drawing set it produces is usually more valuable day to day than the text. See fire strategy drawings.

Out-of-hours and community use

Schools are used by other people after the bell: community sports lettings, adult education, polling stations, holiday clubs and weekend religious use.

Out-of-hours use changes almost every assumption. The occupants do not know the building. Trained staff may not be present. Only part of the building may be in use, so parts of the escape route may be locked.

The strategy should identify which parts of the building are lettable, what escape provision each zone has when the rest of the site is closed, and what management arrangements a letting requires. If a hall can only be let safely with a named person on site who knows the evacuation procedure, that belongs in writing rather than in somebody’s head.

How to take this forward

For a new build or major refurbishment, the document wants commissioning at concept stage and developing through the design, with school-specific analysis of occupancy, evacuation, hazard rooms and community use. A fire strategy report is the deliverable.

For an existing estate, the priority is a whole-site document plus drawings the site team can use and a fire risk assessor can check against. Trusts with several schools benefit from every site being documented to the same structure.

Schools are treated as a high-liability sector here, so they are taken case by case rather than as standard work. Tell us the project, the estate and the stage it is at, and fit will be confirmed before any quote is issued. Reports are arranged across England and Wales through a network of chartered fire engineers, and the right match matters more in this sector than the speed of a quote. For the wider service and what the deliverable contains, see fire strategy consultant.