Electrical Installations in Schools

[DmackG]

I have been trying in vain to identify whether there is or indeed has been, specific wiring regulations for schools/colleges or universities. eg New Zealand Ministry of Education have an "Electrical Installations: Standard for Schools" in which they state the requirement for all sockets to have RCD protection.

I hope that in the last 30 years I am aware of what the Regs say (and more importantly do not say), the interpretations, the cross referencing but nowhere, that certainly I can see, does it mention schools. The reason I have been looking at this is particularly over the last 18 months as we have undertaken EICRs on multiple schools, from the 1960's concrete construction with numerous additions, board changes, redundant circuits to a primary school built in 2015 with all the mod cons....except one RCDs on the socket circuits. I have spoken at length with the NICEIC, STROMA, NAPIT, Building Control (for our local borough) and The Department of Education; the majority point you towards The H&SW Act 1974 and the Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations 1999, The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 and 2 simply could not field the question at all.

I don't feel that simply having a documented risk assessment as per 411.3.3 is sufficient when dealing with children. Any direction and comments would be welcome

 

[westward10]

Schools are no different to any other commercial installation. Providing it is installed in compliance to relevant standards there should be no issue, the fact children occupy the building is not relevant BS7671 do not identify children as being of higher risk.

 

[Andy78]

I used to work for a company that did lots of school work. All jobs would be covered by the local authority generic specification for electrical works. A copy of this was held in the office and all tenders would refer to this document. It would be surprising if a document such as this would allow omission of RCD protection for sockets. The ones we worked to certainly did not.

 

[James]

I think the point is, although there are no specific mentions of schools in the regs,

for installing new, the customer should provide information about what they require as to there own risk assesments.

for existing instalations then the blue book is the bible, it either meets current standards, meets the standards of when it was installed or does not meet either.

The risk assement is in my opinion the key to the whole thing.
this is not your risk assesment but the one carried out by the school. they are the ones to assess the risk. not you.

 

[FatAlan]

Doesn't Hightower or his reincarnation do school electrics?