It is not just the sprinkler industry that wants to see schools sprinklered. The insurance industry does, the fire brigades do and the ODPM do too. Some local authoroties insist upon them, and obvioulsy school governours, head teachers and parents might demand them given the increasing trend of daytime fires they are a life safety as well as a property protection strategy.
Remember, if a school goes on fire, there is not much else that will put that fire out or control the fire until the fire brigade turn up.
Schools frequently get set on fire by arsonists, on average once every 7 or 8 years. That figure is higher for high schools and inner cirty schools, but it is not exclusivly an inner city problem. In fact many inner city schools are the ones best geared up to solve the problems.
When a cause has been identified (i.e. excluding unknown ones) depending on what figures you use, arson accounts for between 70 and 90% of fires in schools.
I've recently been to two new PFI schools, both in the most deprived areas of the UK, both lacked sprinklers because the people building them did not have to worry about the costs of insuring them and they were designed to comply with the minimum legal requirements rather than incorporate good risk management.
In 2004 arson caused £74m of damage to UK schools, it was £96m in 2003, these were the direct costs and don't take account of stress, lost teaching aids, the cost of transporting students to alternative locations, impact on education, loss of reputation, loss of community facilities etc etc.
Of course these costs were born by the insurance industry but ultimatly they will be passed back to society.
It would be interesting to compare figures with the US where schools tend to have sprinklers, even though they don't tend to have the same arson problems as us (in fact I'm not aware of any country that does, it seems to be a UK issue) but after some deaths many decades ago in schools, the US took the approach of installing sprinklers. We are fortunate to have not suffered from any deaths due to fire in UK schools for a long time. I worry, having heard about daytime fires in schools, that our luck might run out.
As always, I would remind readers that these are my personal opinions.
PS Owen I am looking into such a fire, but all the biggest ones that spring to mind are consortia type constructions or traditional buildings where the fire has spread through roof spaces.
PPS Examples of exist where sprinklers have saved schools in the UK recently, but no examples exist of a fully sprinklered building has been lost if a fire (any class of building).
