Amy Rowe reports on a fire service initiative on show at Fire and Rescue 2010 which claims a 75% reduction in school fires over the last seven years.

In 2003, Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service had a job on their hands. Government FDR returns had just told them that the county was the second most badly hit area in the country for school fires. In that year, there were 52 school fires alone.

“We just thought, this can’t go on,” says John Foolkes, area fire safety manager. He and his colleagues are manning a stand for the Service at the Fire and Rescue show in Harrogate. “There were two actually quite considerable fires that year, and a £1m school was completely trashed.”

But fast forward seven years and figures show incidents are now down by 75%. This success has been largely attributed to a joint council and fire service initiative called SCARE, something Mr Foolkes has been heavily involved.

“SCARE is made up of three parts,” he explains. “Technical approval, visits to schools, and theatre in education, where we organise a theatre company to bring plays about fire safety into schools for year 8 pupils. That’s offered to every school but it’s voluntary. We get a lot of interest. It looks at things like peer pressure and its consequences.”

The fire service had already been speaking to headteachers and school governors around the area about best safety practice and, at the same time, the government had just released its BB100 guidance document for fire safety in schools. Part of it, the risk assessment toolkit, caught the attention of the fire service.

“We thought it was a really good idea to risk assess the schools,” John Foolkes says. “So we talked to health and safety advisors in three councils who agreed and got involved. It was they who did the bulk of the admin work, setting out the scheme with regards to the toolkit and visiting the schools,” he explains.

The assessment looked at factors such as how many fires there had been in the immediate area, how many fires had been in that particular school, and then more practical things – such as whether bins were placed in potentially unsupervised areas. Once identified as either high risk or medium, the fire service then offered the school its SCARE initiative. “It doesn’t mean you’re a good school, or a bad school,” firefighter Thomas Warner explains. “Really the toolkit is geared towards finding risk, so you have to bear that in mind.” But, he agrees, looking at the much improved statistics, the proof is in the pudding. Around Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service’s stand at Fire and Rescue 2010, they’ve put up posters that show graphs and statistics to show the results of the scheme in the past seven years, and it is at these that Mr Warner points to proudly.

But Bedfordshire fire service didn’t just stop at involving the local authorities. Around about the time that representatives from the council started visiting institutions they realised the local police were also assessing schools for security risks. It was then that the LAs, the fire service and the police signed what was known as the joint memorandum of understanding. This document acts as an agreement to a common purpose of reducing crime and arson in schools and goes countywide next week.

With a 75% success rate, do they think that other fire services might look into setting up a similar scheme? Thomas Warner’s answer is simple: “We hope so.”

Watch SCARE video: