Last year’s decision to have a presumption in favour of sprinklers was hailed as a big step in protecting new school buildings from fire. But as Andrew Nicholson suggests financial realities may still be a hurdle to their installation.
The arson prevention bureau estimates that school fires cost the UK GB pound 100m each year, with an average of 20 schools suffering a major fire every week. A third of these occur during normal school hours and around 90,000 children are affected by school arson each year. Resulting issues include disruption to education provisions and the loss of irreplaceable course material and teaching aids.
In response, the government announced last spring that it was putting school sprinklers ‘on the curriculum’ by indicating that most new and refurbished schools would need sprinkler protection, although it stopped short of making this compulsory. A spokesperson from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) told FSE (April 2007) that there would be a presumption in favour of sprinklers being fitted in all new schools, while figures from insurer Zurich Municipal (in the same edition) confirmed that only around one per cent of UK schools have sprinklers.
The resulting guidance, Building Bulletin 100: Design for fire safety in schools, was published by the DCSF last summer and includes extensive guidance on the use of sprinklers and their importance as a weapon against arson. It requires local authorities and schools to use a new risk assessment tool to establish whether there is a need for sprinklers, and the document has since become the principal guidance on the issue.
BB100 confirmed the DCSF’s new policy on sprinklers, and their value as a measure against the risk of fire and arson and its position that “all new schools should have fire sprinklers installed except in a few low-risk schools”. Also, “although the provision of sprinklers is not a requirement of the Building Regulations, DCSF expects that the education authority, funding body or overall ‘client’ of the scheme should request, as part of the employer’s requirements, that a risk assessment be undertaken to assess the validity of providing sprinklers in the scheme.”
Design impasse?
To assist design teams in assessing the level of fire and arson risk, BB100 contains two design aids. The first is an interactive fire risk analysis tool and the second a cost-benefit analysis tool. Designers apply these on a case-by-case basis, with the first determining if a school is ‘low, medium or high risk’ and the second taking into account the cost-benefit of incorporating sprinklers.
Based on our experience in the use of both tools, the application of BB100 certainly tends to favour the inclusion of sprinklers in that it rarely identifies a ‘low-risk’ school’. This reinforces the DCSF’s earlier policy statement that all new schools should have fire sprinklers installed, except in a few low risk schools. Arguably, this means that the objectiveness of the design tools is undermined, in the sense that they rarely identify ‘low risk schools’ that do not require sprinklers or identify a negative cost-benefit scenario. But the question is, are most schools really medium or high risk?
Without doubt the tools do assist local authorities and design teams to understand the issues at stake and the need for sprinklers. However, because there is no statutory requirement for sprinklers in schools and there is often a lack of funding, the application of the tools can create a ‘design impasse’ resulting in increased project costs and delays while the need for sprinklers is debated.
In addition to this design impasse there is pressure from approving bodies, fire authorities and building control authorities to include sprinklers – most insurers also prefer their inclusion but take up different positions on their benefits.
Parents hit out
As recently as April this year, the issue of sprinklers in schools made the headlines, with concerned parents hitting out at Gloucestershire County Council’s decision not to install sprinklers in their children’s new GB pound 28 million secondary school – concerns reportedly shared by the county’s chief fire officer. But in this case the council’s insurers had not requested the inclusion of sprinklers and the ‘government assessment’ had shown that they were not required. A local councillor said that installing sprinklers in the new school would cost more than GB pound 1 million and, because extra expenditure on the project would impact on funding for other schools, if sprinklers were installed savings would need to be made elsewhere on the project.
This case highlights the key issues at stake – sprinklers are expensive and not mandatory in schools but their inclusion is certainly expected by parents and encouraged by the DCSF. This kind of ‘design impasse’ is creating conflict, with associated delays and rising costs.
The Peterborough experience
In 2004, Buro Happold’s FEDRA (Fire Engineering Design and Risk Assessment) team was appointed by the Department for Education and Skills (DFES) to develop a fire strategy for the Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough. At the request of the Mayor of Peterborough and the chief fire officer, and due to local concerns about school fires following several local arson attacks, we were asked to demonstrate why sprinklers were not proposed in the building design. This was before BB100 was published and contrary to local policy – but with Peterborough in the process of rebuilding 25 per cent of its secondary schools and refurbishing and extending a further 50 per cent of them, the issue was clearly critical.
FEDRA carried out a full risk assessment on the fire loads within the school, the ignition sources, the nature of the space, the construction materials and the people using the space, to identify any additional risks over and above a typical school building. We presented the detailed fire engineering strategy to the council’s members, including the detailed assessments on fire sizes, construction materials, human behaviour and protection systems. This clearly demonstrated that students could safely evacuate the building, reinforcing the conclusion that sprinklers were not essential for life safety and were more beneficial for property protection.
A further significant element in the school fire safety design was the collaboration with security consultants. Statistics on the occurrence of arson fires in schools highlighted a trend for evening attacks. The refuse strategy meant that waste would be securely locked in masonry blocks 15m from the main building. Motion sensing cameras, linked to a remote monitoring centre with a one-way communication system, were also incorporated. The CCTV cameras would detect movement around the facade and alert the monitoring centre and on-site facilities management team.
Ultimately, the safety of any project will depend on the quality of management, as well as built provisions. It was important to consider in the design phase the role of the management, so that a design did not lead to onerous management requirements that were not achievable when the school was in use. We developed this fire strategy with in consultation a member of the school user group and agreed appropriate design principles.
We also developed the fire safety management strategy for the academy. This involved producing the operational fire safety plan and manual and policies for fire safety, which highlighted the general and specific issues associated with operating the school from a fire safety viewpoint, as required under the Regulatory Reform (Fire safety) Order 2005. This was endorsed by the local fire authority and also accepted by the client. This last stage effectively closes what can be described as the ‘circle of fire safety’, harmonising the design with the management.
We successfully made the case that fire safety, in this instance, required a practical and proactive approach rather than a reliance on reactive measures such as sprinklers. In conjunction with the other fire safety provisions in the building, a holistic fire strategy, unique to this particular building, was developed.
Conclusions
The objectiveness of BB100 with respect to sprinklers can be questioned. While designers are not required to follow its guidance, holistic building design should always involve a risk assessment of the type set out in BB100 to determine whether an automatic suppression system is necessary.
Future revisions of the guidance and the design tools in BB 100 could quantify a clearer number and type of passive fire protection measures, and also the levels of security design and fire safety management as further preventative measures. Sprinklers control fires and usually extinguish them and have a role as part of a holistic fire safety design. Ideally, therefore, sprinklers would be made a statutory provision for every school and new funding would be made available based on the widely accepted risk of fire and arson, and the loss this can cause to schools and wider communities. In reality the insurance industry may well have the final say on sprinklers, should education authorities be unable to secure competitive premiums for their buildings.
Andrew Nicholson is associate director at Buro Happold www.burohappold.com
