Health & Safety: It's not Just Safe Buildings - How to Use Planned Preventative Maintenance Effectively

This session focused on understanding what planned preventative maintenance programs are; reviewing delegated responsibilities for school staff; managing contractors - competency and safe working; and remedial works - priorities, budgets and record-keeping.

What Are Planned Preventative Maintenance Programs?

Understanding what planned preventative maintenance programs are can help you see the broader picture in terms of managing all the different components across your buildings.

Whilst every day will include some form of ad hoc facilities related requests or repairs, these are reactive. For health and safety, it is always better to be in a position where the majority of compliance-related work is proactive to prevent incidents - like the saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

Preventative maintenance programs allow you to categorise the key areas of maintenance across all the services and equipment in your building to then apply the statutory time frames and competent people required.

• Legionella survey and management
• Window surveys
• Tree surveys and management
• Work equipment including gas systems
• automatic gates
• extraction systems
• fire alarm
• emergency lighting
• LOLER – Lift Testing
• pressure systems
• lightning conductors
• Electrical systems – fixed wired and PAT testing appliances

Poll

Reviewing Delegated Responsibilities for School Staff 

Within the remit of health and safety, there are several areas that do not come directly within premises management.

Often, we find that subjects outside of the premises team remit are not subject to safety audits.

The Headteacher/Principal will delegate responsibilities to relevant staff across the school, but it is not formalised.

1. Policy, communication, monitoring and business continuity plan
   • SLT responsibility
2. First aid and Medicines
   • Trained medical lead and lead first aider
3. Practical department management
   • Head of Departments and technicians
4. Educational visits, including Sports Fixtures
   • EVC and Trip Leaders
   • For information regarding EVC training we offer please click here.
   • For our previous summary notes regarding school trips and visits click here.
5. Stress management and staff welfare
   • SLT (and Well-being Lead if in place)

Managing Contractors - Competency and Safe Working

• Do you have a managing contractors’ policy? If so, what does it include?
• How do we ensure contractors are competent and can work safely?
• How do we vet contractors?
• How do we respond to emergency works?
• How do we manage contractors on site?
• Have you seen their risk assessment?

We need to ensure it is clear what the process is for selecting contractors for work, how we ensure they are competent and will work safely.

• Who within the school is responsible for vetting contractors?
• How written evidence will be obtained before they start work?

Vetting and selecting contractors:

• prequalification questionnaires to clarify competency/qualifications
• insurance
• risk assessments
• method statements

Planning work and site inductions (including access outside of term time):

• security arrangements
• fire evacuation
• accident and incident response
• who from the school is supervising contractors

Remedial Works - Priorities, Budgets, and Record-keeping 

Reports such as legionella surveys, asbestos surveys, emergency lighting or fixed wiring condition reports often contain a lot of detail. Prioritising the important information can be difficult.

Some key questions to ask are:

1. Who checks the reports and understands them to log what work is required?

2. How would you approach prioritising large or expensive projects such as fire door replacement?

3. How do you track remedial works to ensure they are completed correctly by a competent contractor, and you have written records of what has been completed?

Judicium offers a great deal of support to our clients when service reports are reviewed during the audit process to provide a fresh pair of eyes on what can be 80+ page reports discussing what is required.

Our clients utilise the Judicium Facilities system on Jedu to log, monitor and sign off remedial works.

3 Key Points to Take Away

1. Review roles and responsibilities within your policies and organisational charts for local provisions at school level and central management provisions to ensure your policies remain fit for purpose into September 2022.

2. Review who is on site over summer from your own staff and in the form of external contractors, e.g. Trade contractors for servicing/remedial works OR activity providers such as Bob’s Football academy OR hiring out your facilities to third parties.

3. Review service reports to identify and prioritise remedial works to allow sufficient pre-planning for budgets and onsite arrangements.

Additional Info:

The Health and Safety Service is also providing CPD accredited training courses. For more information please click here.

HSE Guidance on Stress Management: https://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/

HSE Windows Guidance (Regulation 14, pg 29) – https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/l24.pdf

To review Judicium’s forthcoming sofa sessions please click here.

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