School Fires: Familiar Story, Avoidable Costs

In the past few months, we’ve seen fires at Brooklands Primary in Ipswich, Ledbury Primary School, King Edward VI Community College in Totnes and the Bower Park Gymnastics Centre in Collier Row, Essex.

One detail is worth pausing on. Brooklands Primary was fortunate: the fire took hold at the start of the Easter holiday, when the building stood empty and there was no immediate scramble to find somewhere for several hundred children to learn the next morning. Move that fire forward or back by even one week and the narrative looks very different.

Further along the spectrum sits the Promise School in Okehampton, a school for children with special educational needs that was destroyed by fire in February. Pupils returned to face-to-face teaching in mid-March, spread across three different sites, while a permanent rebuild is planned.

This is the pattern to which we keep returning. A fire doesn’t need to destroy an entire school to force it to close. A blaze in a roof void, an attached gymnasium or a temporary classroom next to the main site can still mean days or even one week or more of disruption to education while damage is assessed and the site made safe. If the fire takes hold within the main school building that disruption to education can be prolonged.

Not encouraging

The latest Risk Protection Arrangement provisioning report, which covers claims data to December last year, gives us seven years of evidence on this. Across that period, the average reported fire claim has run at around £450,000, although the figure swings wildly from year to year (from as little as £70,000 to over £800,000 depending on the severity of incidents reported).

Early figures for the current academic year 2025-2026 are not encouraging either, with claims reported so far already averaging close to £1 million each, albeit on a small number of incidents and likely to move as they develop.

These are significant sums, but they only capture what can be valued in pounds and pence: buildings, contents and IT equipment. What the report cannot capture is the cost to pupils whose lessons are interrupted, to the teachers managing logistics on top of an already full workload and to the families and communities waiting for things to feel normal again.

Lifetime earnings

We know from the Department for Education’s own research that each lost day of education can strip around £750 from a pupil’s lifetime earnings. Multiply that across a school of several hundred children and even a short closure period starts to look like a six-figure impact before a single brick has been touched.

With fewer than one-in-ten new schools built with a sprinkler system installed, serious questions must be asked about whether enough is being done to protect educational buildings.

We’re not suggesting every fire warrants a full rebuild, but the recurring shape of these stories (ie fire breaks out, school closes, pupils and staff scramble for suitable premises) suggests we still haven’t found a way in which to value continuity of education as highly as we value the building itself.

Tom Roche is Secretary of the Business Sprinkler Alliance (www.business-sprinkler-alliance.org)