The week your fire strategy gets propped open

It’s 30 degrees outside, but step inside a south-facing classroom mid-afternoon and it feels closer to an oven. The air is dead, and thirty kids are visibly melting.

The natural, human response? Grab a wedge, a chair, or a heavy textbook and prop open the corridor door to catch a breeze. Let's be honest, you can't really blame the teaching staff—they’re just trying to make the room bearable and get everyone through to the end of the day.

It’s easy to see a door wedge as a harmless, temporary fix. What some staff often don’t realise is that wedging open a fire door essentially tears up the assumptions in your Fire Risk Assessment (FRA).

If the worst happens:

• Smoke and fire have a free pass right into the escape corridors.
  
  
• Your primary escape routes fill up with smoke way faster than the FRA calculates.

Fire doors do exactly one job: they buy you time. Prop one open, and you're just giving that time away. Yes, the fire brigade could theoretically issue enforcement notices, but we all know the immediate, daily headache is just trying to keep the building safe without getting into a tug-of-war with overheated staff.

The problem isn't going away—classrooms do get uncomfortably hot. So, rather than just doing the daily summer patrol to kick the wedges away, it helps to arm staff with a few practical alternatives:

• Get ahead of the heat: Crack the windows first thing in the morning when the air is still cool. Once the sun starts baking that side of the building, suggest they shut them and pull the blinds down to keep the heat out.
  
  
• Kill the unused equipment: Interactive whiteboards, projectors, and PCs pump out a surprising amount of ambient heat. If they aren't being actively used, get them turned off at the wall.
  
  
• Change the scenery: If a room is genuinely unbearable, have a backup plan to move the lesson. A north-facing hall, the library, or even a shaded spot outside is a much better workaround than breaking the fire line.
  
  
• Keep them hydrated: It sounds obvious, but encourage the kids to keep their water bottles topped up. Letting them nip out to the toilets to splash cold water on their wrists is also a surprisingly effective way to cool down.

At the end of the day, we aren't confiscating door wedges to be difficult. We're doing it so that if the alarm actually goes off, the building does exactly what it was designed to do.