Is Your School or Trust One Incident Away From a Notice to Improve?

That quote, shared anonymously by a MAT estates lead in a 2024 industry survey of school estate professionals (Statlog, 2024), will sound familiar to many facilities and health and safety professionals across the sector. The problem it describes is not a minor operational inconvenience - it is a structural gap in compliance visibility that creates real risk.

According to the HSE, education is among the sectors with a statistically significantly higher rate of work-related ill health compared to the all-industry average, based on the most recent 2024/25 data (HSE Industries Statistics, 2025). In education, acts of violence are also among the most common kinds of employer-reported non-fatal injury (HSE Kind of Accident Statistics, 2025), alongside slips, trips and falls - risks that require consistent, documented management across every site.

These are not abstract statistics. Behind each one is an incident that had to be logged, investigated, and reported - and in too many cases, was not handled correctly or in time.

The compliance landscape for schools - particularly MATs - has shifted materially in recent years. Under the updated Academy Trust Handbook, poor estate management and safety can now trigger a Notice to Improve (NtI) from the ESFA, with the regulator extending its intervention powers specifically to cover estate management and safety (Academy Trust Handbook 2024, GOV.UK).

This is significant. Estates management is no longer treated as an operational concern sitting beneath the governance radar - it is now squarely a board-level accountability with formal regulatory consequences.

The HSE’s own prosecution record makes the stakes concrete. In December 2024, Welcombe Hills School and Unity Multi Academy Trust were fined £300,000 and ordered to pay £10,750 in costs following the death of a student, after an HSE investigation found that none of the staff in the student’s class team had received specific training on managing his identified safety risks - despite those risks being documented in his individual risk assessment (HSE Media Centre, December 2024).

In July 2024, West Sussex County Council was fined £16,000 and ordered to pay £4,294.60 in costs after an HSE investigation found a school technician had not been trained to use a bench circular saw safely, despite using it on multiple occasions (HSE Media Centre, July 2024).

Both cases share a common thread: documented risks that were known, but not acted upon through proper training, supervision, or follow-through. That is precisely the gap that poor compliance systems leave open.

The argument for continuing with manual systems is usually either familiarity or cost. Both are worth examining honestly.

On familiarity: MATs in particular struggle with inconsistent systems for tracking maintenance, compliance, and budgets across multiple schools. Without a centralised view, it is hard to prioritise tasks, make long-term plans, or ensure consistency (Statlog, 2024). When each school maintains its own version of a compliance tracker, trust-level visibility simply does not exist - which means risks remain invisible until they become incidents.

On cost: the fines, legal costs, and reputational damage from a single preventable incident far exceed the investment in a structured compliance system. The two prosecutions cited above together resulted in over £320,000 in fines and costs - and neither figure begins to account for the human consequences, the staff time lost, or the reputational impact on those institutions.

The 2025 Academy Trust Handbook signals a continued evolution in the DfE’s approach to trust governance, with trusts encouraged to adopt more structured approaches to estates planning and safety (Academy Trust Handbook 2025: effective from 1 September 2025, GOV.UK). The direction of travel is clear: reactive, fragmented systems are no longer adequate.

HSEQ software is not a new category, but its adoption in education has historically lagged behind sectors like construction and manufacturing. That is changing - and for good reason.

For a facilities or estates manager, and for the health and safety lead who relies on that infrastructure, the practical benefits centre on four areas:

You stop chasing and start tracking.

Rather than manually following up on inspection deadlines, certification renewals, and risk assessment reviews, the system prompts you. Scheduled maintenance, fire safety checks, asbestos management obligations, and water quality testing all sit in one place, with automated alerts before deadlines are missed rather than after.

Incident reporting happens in real time, from anywhere.

Any member of staff can log an incident from a mobile device the moment it occurs. This removes the lag between an event and its documentation, significantly reducing the risk of RIDDOR submissions being late or incomplete. It also creates an accurate, timestamped audit trail that holds up to scrutiny — including from the HSE.

You can identify patterns, not just incidents.

When incident data is centralised, trends become visible. If slips and trips in a particular location are recurring across different terms, that is actionable intelligence. If the same piece of equipment generates repeated near-miss reports, that warrants investigation before it produces a reportable injury. Manual systems rarely surface these patterns - digital systems do.

For MATs: a single view across every site.

Rather than relying on each school to maintain and submit its own compliance data, trust leadership can see the status of every site in real time - which schools are compliant, which have overdue actions, and where resource needs to be directed. 61% of MATs now operate on a fully centralised model (Kreston UK Academies Benchmark Report 2024), and estate management and safety oversight is increasingly expected to follow suit.

One of the quieter compliance failures in schools is training continuity - as the 2024 Welcombe Hills prosecution makes painfully clear. Schools have high staff turnover, a significant number of part-time and supply staff, and limited dedicated time for mandatory training outside of INSET days.

HSEQ platforms with integrated training management allow schools to assign, track, and evidence completion of health and safety training across the entire workforce - including sending automated reminders when refresher training is due. For a MAT, this means every school within the trust operates to the same training standard, regardless of its size or location, and that standard can be evidenced if the HSE ever comes knocking.

The 2025 Academy Trust Handbook directs trusts to further guidance on sustainability leadership and climate action plans, as part of the DfE’s wider education sustainability strategy (Academy Trust Handbook 2025: effective from 1 September 2025, GOV.UK). This is a direction of travel that facilities and estates teams will need to get ahead of - and which increasingly requires the same kind of structured evidence trail as safety compliance.

HSEQ platforms that incorporate environmental monitoring - tracking energy consumption, water usage, and waste across the estate - put schools in a much stronger position to demonstrate progress and identify where improvements will have the greatest impact on both emissions and operating costs.

Compliance in schools is not a static exercise. Regulations change, buildings age, staff turn over, and new risks emerge. The question is not whether your school or trust faces compliance obligations — it clearly does — but whether your current systems are robust enough to prove that you are meeting them, and to catch the gaps before they become incidents.

If the answer involves more than one spreadsheet, more than one version of a document, or more than one person who holds the knowledge in their head, it is worth exploring whether a more structured approach would serve your pupils, your staff, and your institution better.

MY Compliance Management is designed for organisations like yours. If you would like to understand how it works in practice across schools and trusts, get in touch with our team.

Sources: HSE Health and Safety Statistics 2024/25 (hse.gov.uk/statistics); HSE Kind of Accident Statistics 2025 (hse.gov.uk); HSE Media Centre prosecution records, July 2024 and December 2024 (press.hse.gov.uk); Academy Trust Handbook 2025: effective from 1 September 2025 (GOV.UK); Academy Trust Handbook 2024 (GOV.UK); Kreston UK Academies Benchmark Report 2024; Statlog Estate Leads Survey 2024.