How Often Should Fire Safety Training be refreshed?

The best way to protect against fire is to prevent them in the first place. As such, fire safety training for your team is essential to the well-being of your workplace and should be practised. It should be remembered that it is a legal requirement, however, most importantly it can save lives. But how often should fire training course be taken? 

Our guide explains what the course is about, why it is so important to the workplace and how often your staff should be refreshing their training.

Find out more about Fire Safety in the workplace

What is Fire Safety Training?

Fire Safety courses are held to educate on the risks and causes of fire as well as teaching how to best react and respond in the event of a fire and how to help extinguish the fire safely. The courses include a mix of both practical and theoretical learning and can be taught in various group sizes.

There are a range of different courses available including:

• Fire Warden Training
• Fire Marshal Training
• Fire Awareness Training
• Fire Extinguisher Training
• Evacuation Chair Training
• Ski Pad & Ski Sheet Training

Why is Fire Safety Training so important?

Having staff trained in fire safety and fire awareness is a great asset to your business and the safety and well being of your staff and customers. Fires in the workplace can have a significant impact on businesses with companies potentially losing significant amounts of money, work and business as well as posing a risk of health problems, injury or even fatality to staff and customers. With trained staff and the correct knowledge, both the risk and consequences of a fire can be greatly minimised.

When should we do fire safety training?

It is crucial that all staff in the workplace have Fire Safety Training as part of each staff member’s induction.

We recommend this training is refreshed annually to ensure staff have refreshed awareness of fire safety and procedures.

More regular training may be required for those with particular responsibilities in the event of fire such as department heads, fire marshals and those who look after vulnerable people such as carers. 

Regular training may be required in other instances, such as:

– If there have been regular fire safety-related accidents at a particular place of work or if the same accidents keep reoccurring. For example, if there are frequent smoke creation problems with appliances in the kitchen like people leaving toast in a toaster etc, then you may want to highlight this in your training. 

– Many members of staff may simply have not had the appropriate training for their place of work. Regular fire safety training exercises can help this. 

– If you have bought any new pieces of equipment or tools that may produce a fire then you will need to update your training with that. Ideally, once you have acquired the item then you should do a training session as soon as possible. 

– Internal business development such as a high turnover of staff or part-timers should also be taken into account when deciding how often and when you want to provide your fire safety training. 

– If there is a generally high risk of fire at your business then naturally more fire safety training sessions may be necessary. 

How often do day staff require training?

Your day staff should be having training as discussed above, at least once a year, and if your business fits into any of the criteria listed then you should consider booking more dependent on need. The idea is not necessarily the volume of sessions you have per year, but how well each member of staff understands the procedure and can correctly carry out an evacuation if necessary. In order to ascertain this, it may be necessary to carry out test alarms. 

How often do night staff require training? 

Another aspect of fire training to keep in mind is night fire training, which requires a specific time schedule to accurately simulate the experience of a fire at night. If you have staff that work night shifts then it should be a priority to make sure that they receive the appropriate training to their job description.