“Training? Why bother?”
“Everyone here knows what to do”
Introduction
Your staff are your strongest asset when it comes to fire safety. A well informed, well motivated workforce may be the difference between success and failure in the event of a fire and/or evacuation.
Alternatively poorly trained workforces who are ill prepared will definitely be your weakest link in an emergency.
Unless your staff know exactly what to do and when – and sometimes, what not to do - the whole exercise in establishing a fire safety strategy, installing a fire alarm system and maintaining extinguishers may be a waste of resources.
Worse than that, without the necessary training, someone may get hurt
Legal Obligations
Current fire safety legislation (The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 states (in Article 21):
“The responsible person must ensure that his employees are provided with adequate safety training”
and that any training provided must:
“include suitable and sufficient instruction and training on the appropriate precautions and actions to be taken by the employee in order to safeguard himself and other relevant persons on the premises;
Note: The ‘Responsible Person is usually the employer or, if there are no employees, the person in control of the premises.
Our Training Sessions
Some fire training companies provide hands on fire extinguisher training sessions using the latest state-of-the-art gas powered fire simulators and other fancy I.T. solutions, sometimes operated by a team of professionals. These pieces of kit are very impressive and perhaps worthwhile if you are in a high risk environment (e.g. a CIMAH site), but perhaps merely an expensive gimmick for the majority of customers
In our desire to offer a value for money no frills service, we have steered away from expensive gimmicks to give a back to basic service. We provide a range of training sessions from one hour ‘refresher’ courses to intensive fire warden training sessions.
All our training is bespoke – designed around your actual business needs. Before a training session begins, we will contact you and discuss your requirements. Where necessary, we may request a loan of a copy of your ‘Emergency Plan’ and even your ‘Fire Risk Assessment’ in order that our training is tailor-made for your staff and as site specific as possible.
Trainers are experienced former Fire Officers with both operational and fire safety experience which allows them to go ‘off script’ when necessary for instance - to deal with unexpected questions or to relate actual scenarios.
All sessions are bespoke so the content will obviously vary. A typical fire awareness course may contain the following elements:
- Introduction
- Fire statistics
- Responsibilities and the Law
- Prevention
- Causes of fires
- Passive fire safety infrastructure (protected routes and identifying fire doors)
- Active fire safety infrastructure (Fire alarm types and fixed installations)
- Action to be taken upon discovering a fire
- Evacuation rules
- Safe use of extinguishers (theory)
- Safe use of extinguishers (practical)*
- Premises ‘Emergency Plan’
- Q&A session
 *If a practical fire extinguisher training session is to be part of the course, we will usually use extinguishers from your site during the session. Obviously this does reduce our overheads (which we pass back to you in lower prices) but it also means that your staff use the actual extinguishers they will be expected to use in the event of a fire, rather than any unfamiliar design that we decide to bring with us.
The end result is that staff are more confident in their ability to select and safely use the correct extinguisher for any given task – and perhaps just as importantly, when to withdraw for their own safety
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