School Estate Management Failures

The Department for Education should review and strengthen its guidance to schools on monitoring and filtering systems, including ensuring that the systems used are appropriate and adequate from a technical perspective. The department should ensure schools understand these requirements and consider whether inspections by Ofsted should play a greater role in monitoring compliance.

The Department for Education should update the out‑of‑school settings guidance by reviewing the health and safety section to ensure terminology is clear and consistent, particularly regarding emergency plans and fire/evacuation plans for smaller providers. The guidance should also be updated to include a non‑binding cross‑reference to school entrance security guidance, emphasising that while out-of-school settings may differ from...

It is desirable that the guidance provided by the Education Service Advisory Committee in regard to violence to staff in the education sector should be extended to encompass the safety and protection of the school population as a whole (para 10.26).

Those who have the legal responsibility for the health and safety of the teaching staff and pupils at school should prepare a safety strategy for the protection of the school population against violence, together with an action plan for implementing and monitoring the effectiveness of safety measures appropriate to the particular school (para 10.19).