Discover some of the most effective ways to ensure safety in school.
Keeping your students, staff and premises safe at all times can be a daunting proposition. With so many potential risk factors at play, it’s completely understandable to feel unprepared when it comes to safety and security.
That’s why we’ve put together this handy guide on the best ways to ensure safety in your school, so you can feel certain that your staff, students and premises are as secure as they could possibly be.
Contact us today to find out how VisiPoint can help keep your school secure.
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Deterrence as a security measure
1. Planning for safety
It is the planning for emergency situations which is one of the most important ways to ensure safety in school. If the school management does not have a plan for a given situation, then you cannot expect junior members of staff or schoolchildren to do the right thing when a potential threat is identified. This is just the same in buildings like hospitals, museums and doctor’s surgeries as it is in places of education.
A visitor sign-in system can be extremely helpful in the event of an evacuation. VisiPoint can generate an emergency list of everyone currently signed in allowing you to act much faster and know exactly who needs to be located. Multiple admins and fire wardens can access the same live list which updates when anyone is marked as safe. This helps your team exactly know who is still not accounted for. Having a visitor management system in place will help your school to be prepared for any emergency and evacuation scenarios. Get in touch today to learn more about how VisiPoint could help your school.
2. Access control technology
One of the best ways to ensure safety in school from people is to control who is allowed entry. For example, your school may have guest speakers, workmen or work-experience teaching assistants who require temporary access to your facilities. The best way to manage these visitors is to invest in proper a modern visitor sign-in system. VisiPoint allows you to provide badges to your visitors which allow them access to your school. You’ll be able to set which areas they can access, for example, a contractor making repairs in the reception can be restricted access to the classroom areas of your school.
These badges will display the visitor’s name and can show a photo ID. This helps to prove who they are and identifies to other members of staff that they are allowed to be inside of your school. It also helps to identify anyone who shouldn’t have access to areas of your school and allows you to act quickly to remove them.
If you’re looking for a way to start providing ID badges to your visitors, contact us today and we’ll help you implement this in your facilities.
3. Deterrence as a security measure
Keeping people away who might have no right to be on school property is a key measure that helps to ensure the safety of teachers and students alike. In some schools, it is impossible to have a physical barrier to prevent unwarranted access all the way around its perimeter. In any case, such barriers are of no use when children arrive or are being collected from school. Nor are they helpful if intruders come through the given access point of the school, for example via reception.
To overcome these issues, connecting a visitor sign-in system to your door access can also help restrict unauthorised access to your school. This is an issue you should be aware of as 24% of schools have experienced trespassing and being able to stop unauthorised access through your entry points will help you prevent cases of trespassing.
With this solution, your doors will only open for someone who has access and can sign in, for example, a staff member who has an RFID access card can scan that on your kiosk and the doors will then open. This will help to keep your school safe and prevent easy entry for unauthorised individuals.
VisiPoint can help you restrict access to your facilities, speak with our team of experts to learn more about how our system could work in your school.
4. Fire safety
Frequent checks of your school’s fire alarm system are a must to prevent a potential disaster. On top of this, a fire drill each term will help pupils know what to do in the event of a real fire and where they need to muster safely. These are a must as between April 2015 and April 2020, 1,467 primary schools and 834 secondary schools were affected by fires. This shows that fires aren’t a rare occurrence and can certainly hit schools. Consult your local fire service if you feel your school’s fire safety systems need to be updated. As well as alarms, consider investing in smoke and carbon monoxide monitors which can save lives in schools as well as homes.
Our sign-in solution is designed to help you act faster when evacuating. You can access an emergency list from any device with a modern browser or by downloading the VisiPoint Passport app for even faster access. You can use them to practice fire drills or in the event of a required evacuation. In either situation, you’ll have a full list of everyone signed in at your school so your fire wardens will immediately be able to begin locating and marking your staff and students as safe.
Why are emergency evacuation lists essential to fire safety preparations? Find out in our blog post.
5. Locks and windows
A good many British schools, 38% of the Department of Education’s estate, are beyond their estimated design life. This means that windows are not always the most robust when it comes to preventing unwarranted access. In some cases, you cannot even check if the lock on a window works because it has been painted over many times.
In addition, door locks are often only adequate for preventing access from an opportunist. Ask yourself whether the locks on your school’s windows and doors are up to the job of preventing a determined intruder from getting in and fit new, multi-point locking mechanisms if you have doubts. This measure is among the most crucial ways to ensure safety in school from threats from outside.
6. Play and sporting equipment
Although children will inevitably injure themselves from time to time on the playing field, you can help to ensure they remain safe by offering them all of the protective equipment they should have access to. For example, school climbing frames and so on should only be installed on a rubber matting surface which helps to lessen an impact if a child falls. Equally, sports equipment should provide personal protection from impacts, especially where head injuries are a possibility. Cricket and hockey helmets are essential items nowadays and not an optional extra.
Want to learn more about why visitor management is essential for your school? Head to our education page!
If you’re looking for a visitor management system that will improve safeguarding and security standards in your school, VisiPoint is the ideal solution. Get in touch with a member of our expert team on +44 (0) 191 341 0016 or click the button below”