5 Tips for Setting Up Fire Safety Training at Your School or Child Care

Fire safety is essential, and if you run a private school or daycare, you may want to arrange a fire safety training course to ensure everyone at your facility is safe. Most fire safety training specialists work with a range of businesses and other organisations, and they can come to your facility and tailor a program to your needs.

However, you may want to keep the following tips in mind when arranging the safety training and for once it is over.

1. Ask for Guidance on Exiting During Fires

The fire safety team doesn't just have to talk about fire safety. They can also help you improve your existing processes. For example, they can come into your school or child care centre, look over your facility and figure out the safest paths for fire exits.

For instance, students from one classroom may want to head toward one primary exit, while students in another part of the building may want to use another exit. Then, the experts can work this protocol into the fire safety training.

2. Don't Scare Children

While it's important to let children know about the dangers of fires, it's also important not to scare them. You and the parents know these students the best, so you may want to work together to determine which details you feel comfortable including about the risks of fires in terms of potential injuries or talking about other instances of school or child care fires.

3. Remember the Teachers

Ideally, you should consider doing a few different fire safety training sessions. You should have one session (which may be broken up into multiple classes over a week or two) for everyone, but you should also have a separate session for just the teachers or caretakers.

There, you can focus on elements such as how to use fire extinguishers or what to do if there's a false alarm.

4. Ask for Handouts for Students and Teachers to Take Home

If desired, ask the fire safety training professionals to bring handouts. That can help to boost engagement, and it gives both students and caretakers or teachers the ability to review the information at home.

Handouts may include maps of fire exit routes, breakdowns on when to use different types of extinguishers, or whatever information you believe is the most important.

5. Identify a Point Person to Maintain Fire Safety Equipment

Finally, for after the training, you may want to identify one or two point people to stay abreast of fire safety in your facility. For example, they can check expiration dates on fire extinguishers, emergency lights, and other essentials. Then, they can report and order repairs or replacements as needed.


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