Work at height: the school estate blind spot

By one important measure, work in Great Britain is safer than it has been for decades.

HSE published the 2025/26 fatality figures last month: 126 workers died in Great Britain, provisionally the lowest single-year total recorded once you set aside the pandemic years. Twenty years ago it was 217. In 1981 it was 495.

Falls from height remain the most common single cause of fatal workplace injury, accounting for 31 of those 126 deaths.

In sectors where work at height is routine, the principle behind controlling it is well established: plan the work, assess the risk, use appropriate equipment and make sure competent people carry it out.

A case sentenced at Warrington Magistrates’ Court last month shows what can happen when a small, reactive estates job falls outside that process.

What happened

On 2 September 2024, an INSET day, a site supervisor at a primary school in the North West climbed an unsecured ladder to the roof to collect footballs.

He fell onto the playground and was later found by a member of the public.

He suffered bleeding on the brain and fractures to his face, hand and foot. Nearly two years on, he still has difficulty with memory, speech and ordinary daily tasks.

HSE found the roof had no edge protection.

It also found something larger. There was no standalone work-at-height risk assessment and no safe system of work covering this kind of task.

Before you file this under “someone else’s trust”

The reflex is to read that as an unusually careless organisation.

Schools are, in fact, very good at risk assessment. A school produces them constantly — science practicals, D&T, trips, individual pupils with specific needs, the Christmas production, the sponsored walk.

The instinct is real and the paperwork is genuine.

But one potential blind spot is the small, reactive estates job: the task that does not feel like “work at height” because it takes two minutes and was never on a works programme in the first place.

A stuck window. A light in the hall. Ceiling tiles. A display board. Bunting for sports day. A ball on the roof.

The problem is not necessarily that nobody understands the risk.

It is that the job can happen before anyone has stopped to apply the system that is supposed to control it.

That is why this case should be read less as an isolated failure and more as a reason to ask whether the same gap could exist elsewhere.

Why the national trend should not make schools complacent

Now put that beside the falling national numbers.

Where work at height is planned, there is usually a clearer opportunity to control it. Someone else knows it is happening. The task can be assessed. The right equipment can be selected. Responsibilities can be made clear before anyone leaves the ground.

The challenge for a school estate is often the work that is not part of a planned project.

Gutters. A stuck window. A light in the hall. Ceiling tiles. A display board. Bunting for sports day. A ball on the roof.

Two minutes each, sometimes decided on the spot by whoever noticed.

That kind of work can bypass the processes that would almost certainly be applied to a planned roofing project or contractor visit.

So falling national fatality figures are not, by themselves, reassurance for a school estate.

The relevant question is whether the same controls apply to the small, everyday jobs as they do to the obvious ones.

One thing to check this month

The ladders are out. Summer works are in full swing, and the new term is only a few weeks away — which is roughly where that INSET day sat in the calendar.

So ask one question:

Can you point to your school’s or trust’s documented arrangements for work at height — who owns them, how tasks are assessed, and what safe system applies when an unplanned job comes up?

Or does the arrangement exist mainly as an assumption, held separately in each school, where everyone believes the process is obvious but nobody has tested what happens when somebody decides to “just quickly” get onto a roof?

The rules here are not new. The Work at Height Regulations have been in force since 2005 and nothing about them changed this year.

What changed is that we now have a fully documented example of a trust discovering, nearly two years after the fact, precisely what its arrangements had failed to cover.

HSE provides a general risk assessment template, but every working-at-height assessment must reflect the actual school, task, people and equipment involved.

This downloadable guide gives premises teams practical questions to consider, a blank assessment record, an optional 5 × 5 scoring matrix and portable-ladder prompts to help a competent person prepare the school’s own site- and task-specific assessment. It is guidance, not a completed risk assessment - but I hope is useful.

This week’s Let’s Talk Premises asks:

Do you need a new working-at-height risk assessment every time?

Watch the podcast on our YouTube Channel.

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