Health and safety compliance checks allow you to screen your visitors and contractors before they enter your facilities. For schools, this is vitally important as they have a duty to keep their students safe. Compliance checks can help to ensure that unauthorized people do not gain access to your school.
Using a visitor management system, you’ll be able to keep your school safe by requiring anyone signing in to complete your required health and safety compliance checks. Keep reading to see how this can help keep your school safe.
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DBS check
This is one of the most common health and safety compliance checks a school will undertake on its visitors and contractors. Since April 2022 DBS has issued more than 1.7m Enhanced Disclosure certificates for staff and volunteers working in the education sector.
A DBS certificate provides details of both spent and unspent convictions, cautions, reprimands and warnings that are held on the Police National Computer.
Undertaking this check will identify if a person poses a threat to your pupils and staff as you’ll be made aware of any criminal actions they have made in the past. Based on this information you’ll then be able to prevent access to your school to anyone who does not have a clean DBS certificate.
With VisiPoint, you can include requiring those arriving at your facilities to input their DBS number to sign in. This ensures that your staff and contractors have all been checked and cleared by DBS to enter your school.
Contractor certificates
Your school will occasionally have contractors onsite to carry out certain duties such as maintenance and repairs.
It is therefore important to make sure that the individual or group of workers making fixes to your school are qualified and certified professionals. For example, if you have an electrician come to fix something you can ask if they have the required certificates when they sign in.
If you find a contractor does not have the necessary certificates then you will know to refuse them access to your school and not allow them to undertake any work. This will prevent unqualified contractors from working on your school, which will stop them from causing any damage. Undertaking a certificate check on your contractors means your school will only be worked on by those who are qualified professionals and have the appropriate knowledge to do so safely.
You can easily make these health and safety compliance checks part of your sign-in process for contractors, with our visitor management system for schools. You’ll be able to require contractors to have the necessary certificates for the job they’ll be doing when signing in. If they don’t have these they’ll simply not be able to sign in, keeping your school safe from unqualified contractors.
Terms & conditions
Your school will have terms and conditions in place that state what is expected of staff, contractors and visitors while onsite. This information is important for all your school’s visitors as it provides them with key knowledge such as emergency procedures and any rules they will be required to follow while at your school.
Presenting this when your visitors arrive allows them to fully understand what is expected of them before they have completed your signing-in process. This also means if they were not to accept your terms and conditions they would be able to leave before having entered your school. You’ll therefore be able to keep everyone safer and not have someone onsite who doesn’t understand your school’s rules.
With the VisiPoint visitor management system, you can set your terms and conditions to be part of your entry process and require anyone signing to agree to them. If they don’t then they won’t be able to sign in and will be refused access to your school.
ID badges
ID badges make it easy for your staff and pupils to identify that a visitor or contractor has the authorisation to be in your school. Making it mandatory for visitors to wear an ID badge will, therefore, prevent any unnecessary distress for your staff and students as seeing a stranger in their school with no ID badge would likely worry them.
A visitor sign-in system allows you to print ID badges when a visitor completes your school’s entry process. With VisiPoint, you can include a photo as part of the entry process, which will be added to the visitor’s profile.
Once they complete their sign-in, a badge will be printed that features the visitor’s photo ID, name and even the part of the school they are allowed access to.
This will make it clear to everyone at your school why this visitor is on site, who they are and where they are allowed to access.
Are you looking for a way to implement health and safety compliance checks at your school?
Then you should contact our expert team today and we’ll help provide you with a sleek and modern staff and student sign-in system.