Fire Door Inspections in Schools

Effective fire doors are essential to enable the safe evacuation of people from school buildings, to provide safe entry points for fire fighters, and to minimise damage to other parts of the building in the event of a fire. Fire doors in schools are often subject to abuse and not maintained, which reduces their effectiveness. Fire door inspections enable the identification of defects so that they can be rectified. The most common defects which we find in school fire doors are:

• Excess gap between door leaf and frame, another door leaf or floor;
• Missing or damaged smoke or intumescent seals;
• Fire doors not closing properly (defective closers, door leaf warping and lifted floors);
• Leaking door hinges.

The first three of the above defects will result in smoke being able to pass into the next fire compartment, which is a serious concern as smoke kills more people in fires than actual flames do. Also when the fire reaches the door itself it is likely to breach into the next compartment much sooner than the fire door's specification (e.g. 30 minutes/60 minutes etc.).

Under British Standard BS-9999:2008 (Code of practice for fire safety in the design, management and use of buildings) fire doors should be subject to inspection by a competent person every 6 months. This could result in a substantial outlay just on inspection due to the number of fire doors in the average school, without allowing for any expenditure on remedying identified defects. It also does not take into account that fire doors in eductional establishments are subject to higher levels of abuse than those in most other workplaces. We advise school clients that a risk assessment could show that a greater level of protection (and assurance) would be achieved through annual formal fire door inspections in conjunction with a monthly in-house inspection regime; with the money being saved on the 2nd formal inspection being used to help rectifying defects.

Schools often want to know which of their building's doors are fire doors. Unfortunately the answer to this question isn't as straight forward as as one might hope. In an ideal world the school would have a fire strategy document which contains a "red line" drawing showing the compartmentisation and the specification of every fire door. Very often we find that schools (even those constructed in the recent past) do not have these important documents. In these situations an assessment needs to be made to identify walls with fire integrity and also a review of current evacuation routes to identify where fire doors should be in place. It's worth noting that even if you have doors which have mandatory (blue) fire door signs fitted that they may not actually be a fire door or may not be able to function effectively (we have seen numerous fire doors fitted under suspended ceilings where there isn't any fire compartmentisation above the door.

Fire Door monthly checks - The video below shows how to undertake the visual checks which need to be completed on a monthly basis between formal inspections of your fire doors (whether annual or six-monthly).

Our fire door inspection service is thorough (The Team's fire door inspectors are trained at the Building Research Establishment [BRE]) and clients are provided with a detailed report for each fire door. We also provide an overall summary of the establishment's fire doors, which includes if they have passed or failed the inspection, and if the latter what the defects are. On average our fire door inspectors can check 3-4 doors per hour whilst on site. On the first inspection visit we will add unique identifer tabs to the school's fire doors if these are not already in place. This means that the establishment will always know which door our reports are referring too.