Fire Fire Fire - how does your school do the register?

[5nowman]

Hi,

 

Primary school.

 

We have a visitor panel that records staff in.

 

How are you all doing registers for pupils?

 

What if one left at 10am and a drill happened at 11.30 ?

How do you know which pupils are in without having to go into sims?

does your visitor system record pupils that are in?

 

I just want to get a feel on what others are doing?

 

Do let me know please. Any info / insights would be very grateful.

 

Kind regards.

 

5nowman

[steveg]

We use sign in app, which is great for taking a register for visitors, has worked flawlessly on the last 3 fire drills. I believe it does also support registers for pupils, but we haven't used this yet.

 

All our classes are required to keep an up to date number of how many children are present, normally written on a whiteboard by the door, they keep this up to date throughout the day. It's always easy for them to identify any missing children. We normally gather up 4 or 5 children every fire drill and they have always identified them all.

 

Last time I spoke to a fireman they said they would ignore if we say the building is clear and check it anyway, which does make sense.

[Ketlane]

 

Last time I spoke to a fireman they said they would ignore if we say the building is clear and check it anyway, which does make sense.

 

In terms of safety, that's the key point. The firefighters are trained not to trust anyone who says that everyone is accounted for. In bigger premises there's also the issue of accounting for outsiders - contractors, delivery staff, sales people, random visitors, parents... some of whom may have escaped any log-in system.

 

In our (secondary) setting there's a clipboard with a register of every group timetabled to be taught, in that room. Teacher grabs clipboard, evacuates with class, uses clipboard to call the roll, will know which children were not in the lesson for whatever reason. Person i/c evacuation then has teachers come up to him/her to confirm that the respective room is clear.

 

We've never got anywhere near resolving what you do before registration in the morning, or in a break time or lunchtime, or after close of play when you don't know for sure where each child (or staff member) should be or indeed whether they have entered the premises or left already. In those circumstances all assemble and a roll is called in tutor groups - at least you'd know who is accounted for!

[Andrew_C]

A bggrs muddle here.

 

School spread over 1/4 of the city. Different plans for different buildings, and a night/wet weather plan too. Not really an option for a "one size fits all" plan, so it may be the best option.

 

We use paper on a clipboard in science. We try to keep the set lists and timetables up-to-date. It is however impossible to be 100% accurate.

[icechris]

We have laminated class registers kept in reception that are updated by the admin team when pupils leave or are not present that day so that if the alarm goes they take the clipboards outside to the class teachers who then have an up to date copy of the register. End of the day the marks get wiped off ready for the next day. Only the pupils who are missing or any reason are marked on the register so its not time consuming.

[gaz350b]

No registers here. Fire marshal system each team has responsibility to clear their area.

 

It’s like a big game of herding cattle on to our 2 Astro pitches.

[EntrySign_Dev]

Our EntrySign system offers multiple options in the event of a fire or other emergency. Evacuation reports can be printed to a dedicated printer (or multiple printers) and also sent to a person (or group of people) by email. Evacuation reports can even be automated using our fire alarm interface, so when the fire alarm is activated the reports are printed and/or emailed automatically. Reports can be split by site/year/form/person type etc. which is useful if your organisation has multiple muster points.

 

EntrySign LIVE is an optional cloud service which provides customers with an 'always up-to-date' snapshot of who is on your site, which you can view within a web-app on any internet connected device. You can mark people as 'safe' when you take your roll-call/registers and this doesn't need to be 'triggered' as it is always accessible, whenever you need it.

 

If your class / form teachers use the school registers for your roll-call, EntrySign will keep a record of the 'differences' between the registers and the actual status (i.e. those pupils/student who arrived late, after registration or those who may have left site for medical appointments etc.) so you can easily reconcile these, and also integrates with most school management systems to update registers and even pull the current attendance marks to include on evacuation reports if required.

 

If anyone would like any further information on EntrySign, just let us know and we'll be happy to answer any questions or arrange a demo.

[PotNoodleTech]

It's not really the systems it's the people - people just don't understand that signing in properly and signing out again could literally be life and death for someone or even a poor firefighter not going home to their family.

 

Until the staff and pupils are *forced* to take it seriously you will always have out of date/incomplete fire registers and basically be muddling through and hoping everything is ok but if there is an actual fire you will be putting people at risk.

[Ketlane]

I have had the misfortune to be a school fire officer - absolutley thankless, makes running the H&S committee look like a luxury holiday.

Our analysis, on a widespread campus, was that an electronic system wasn't viable as the chances of failure (server goes up in flames, cabling gets fried, mains fails....) were too high. We discussed the times when there was highest risk of not knowing where people were. Break time / after school where adults and pupils would be milling around, some in their next classroom, some outside, some left the premises. Consider a teacher who isn't timetabled for lesson 3. Is she (a) in the staffroom (b) meeting a parent somewhere © in her classroom ...? What about the contractor who is working on the plumbing - is he (a) in the area he's contracted to work on (b) in his van having a break © somewhere else looking for the stop tap (d) in the office having a row with the bursar? Consider a pupil has has asked to make a toliet break in the middle of a lesson - are they (a) in the corridor on the way there or back (b) in the toilet block © hiding behind the bike sheds?

Even if we got 100% compliance on registration and entry/exit, we decided we'd still struggle. If there were one building with one entrance/exit there's be a hope, but with porous borders (we had public footpaths through the campus and also a road) we'd never be certain.

We discussed with the fire brigade and shared the potential difficulties.

Best solution was printed lists of tutor groups, and evacuation leading to forming up in tutor groups, with tutors being relied upon to know who was absent that day. For other staff, teaching and support staff, assembly under their manager.

The fire brigade will always search a building even if they're told it's empty. Not that it's always perfect either - colleague was asked to place a dummy in a rambling Victorian building in the school holidays, while the fire brigade would search for it as a training exercise. Eventually they had to ask where it was.....

[mikeprice]

I saw a system on trail at one school where I was the IT Tech for a couple of terms

 

The Site Manager asked my opinion of it - it was basically an iPad (yes - I know) with an App on it

all visitors were checked in and out on it and it printed an ID badge for them - and yes it had to have its own printer for that (!!!!)

 

but anyway - the salesperson came in to see how it was going and was all confident

he talked to the reception staff who loved it

and spoke to the bursar who also said it was working well

 

then the Site Manager arrived and asked what to do in a fire

 

Easy - a member of reception staff grabe the iPad on the way out and you check off all visitors on it - it has a separate section specially for that purpose

 

err - fine - sound good

 

what if the fire is IN reception and the admin staff can't get to the ipad

 

Oh

 

err

 

dunno

 

it was ditched for an android system that was far less pretty but could connect to a file share on the network and the app could be installed on any android system so the visitors could be checked off on the field on any android phone - they had a cheap one anyway for SMT to use if they didn;t have their normal phone for $reasons

[Andrew_C]

We can't even do the tutor group thing, too many buildings, spread across a fair chunk of the city. My building (Science) the technicians aim to leave via a prescribed route, checking rooms on the way (not so as to introduce risk). This is even less doable in other areas.

[SignInApp]

We use sign in app, which is great for taking a register for visitors, has worked flawlessly on the last 3 fire drills. I believe it does also support registers for pupils, but we haven't used this yet.

 

All our classes are required to keep an up to date number of how many children are present, normally written on a whiteboard by the door, they keep this up to date throughout the day. It's always easy for them to identify any missing children. We normally gather up 4 or 5 children every fire drill and they have always identified them all.

 

Last time I spoke to a fireman they said they would ignore if we say the building is clear and check it anyway, which does make sense.

 

Thanks @steveg

 

Yes, indeed we do support pupil registers in evacuations via our Wonde sync with compatible MIS.

When an authorised user selects the evacuate button in our portal, reception kiosk or our free 'Companion app' for mobile devices, we not only list everyone who has signed in today on the evacuation list (Staff, visitors, contractors etc), but we pull a copy of the register and populate the list with everyone who is currently in the building.

As we are a cloud based solution, there is no concern if there is a power outage at any point during the evacuation.