Legionella risk assessment template for schools

A school legionella risk assessment template is the standard ACOP L8 assessment with four school-specific additions: a holiday flushing calendar, a thermostatic mixing valve register, a little-used outlet schedule for showers and laboratory taps, and a first-day-back recommissioning checklist. The reason a school needs its own version is the calendar. Most buildings run their water system all year; a school empties for roughly thirteen weeks a year, and the summer break is the longest and warmest of those closures.

This page sets out what those school-specific sections must cover, who signs what, and a worked example of a summer flushing regime you can adapt. It is aimed at school business managers, estates leads and site managers. Our legionella risk assessment for schools guide covers the risk itself; this page is about the paperwork that records your control of it.

Why the summer shutdown organises everything

Picture the system on the last day of the summer term. Several hundred pupils and staff stop drawing water within a single afternoon. Every branch that was turning over daily now stands still, through the warmest six weeks of the year, with cold feeds warming in roof spaces and hot water cooling in dead legs. Legionella grows between roughly 20°C and 45°C, and a stagnant school system in August spends a lot of time in exactly that range.

Then the system goes from zero to full demand on a single morning in September, and any spray outlet that was colonised over the break meets a building full of children at once. The HSE's investigations into water hygiene failures in schools have repeatedly pointed at poor management of the holiday period, which is why the holiday regime, not the term-time regime, is the section of the template that carries the most weight.

You have two honest options, and the template makes you choose one explicitly. Option one is a documented weekly flush throughout the closure: every outlet, every week, run through to temperature, logged. Option two is a recommissioning flush before return: the whole system flushed in the final week of the holiday, each outlet run until hot water reaches at least 50°C and cold drops below 20°C, with spray outlets handled gently or with heads removed. After a long closure, or where your assessment flags it, disinfecting the water system after the shutdown may be the right call rather than flushing alone. The detail of both approaches is in our guide to flushing little-used outlets.

Worked example: a six-week summer flushing regime

This is what option one looks like on paper for a typical two-form-entry primary school with stored hot water, a sports changing block, and around sixty outlets. It is an indicative starting point, not a prescription: your own regime follows from your assessment and your written scheme.

Option two compresses weeks 1–5 into a bigger week-6 exercise. It costs less caretaker time over the summer but leaves the system stagnant for longer, so the risk assessment has to justify it, and the recommissioning has to be thorough. Either way, the log book is what makes the regime real: an unrecorded flush is, to an inspector or an insurer, a flush that did not happen. You can sanity-check your readings against the HSG274 thresholds with the temperature checker.

The TMV problem: protecting children from scalds without growing legionella

Schools sit directly on the tension between two duties. Scald prevention wants blended water at a safe outlet temperature, especially in nursery, reception and SEN provision where young or vulnerable children cannot judge hot water. Legionella control wants hot water stored at 60°C and distributed hot, because the blended range is where the bacteria grows. The device that resolves the tension at the tap is the thermostatic mixing valve, and it does so by creating a short run of warm, blended water downstream of the valve, which is itself a growth niche.

The practical consequence for the template is that every TMV in the school is an asset with a schedule, not a fit-and-forget fitting. The template needs a TMV register: location, the outlets it serves, and its servicing and fail-safe check dates. A TMV that is never serviced drifts, scales up, and quietly becomes both a scald risk and a legionella risk at the same time. The balance is explained in scalding versus legionella, and the servicing regime in TMV servicing and legionella.

Showers, laboratories and the little-used outlet list

The second school-specific section is the outlet schedule. Sports hall and changing-room showers are the classic school problem: high-aerosol outlets, used for a few timetabled hours a week, idle the rest of the time. Science laboratory taps, food technology sinks, design-and-technology room outlets, disabled toilets, outside taps and the caretaker's own wash point all tend to the same pattern. Each one is a live dead leg between uses.

The template should list every one of these outlets by location and set a flushing frequency against each, normally weekly in term time and folded into the holiday regime out of term. Changing-room showers deserve a cleaning entry as well as a flushing entry, because scale on the head shelters biofilm. The monitoring schedule guide sets out how the routine checks fit together across a year, and the risk assessment builder can help you structure the outlet list before you write it into the template.

Who signs what: the responsible person in a school

School paperwork fails most often on roles, not on plumbing. The template needs three names, and they are three different jobs. The duty holder is the employer: the local authority or governing body in a maintained school, the trust in an academy. The responsible person is whoever takes day-to-day charge of the controls, almost always the site manager or caretaker. The overseer, usually the school business manager or the trust estates lead, checks that the responsible person's records exist and are current, and owns the budget line for servicing and assessment.

Two failure modes follow. First, the caretaker leaves, is off sick, or is on holiday, and the flushing regime silently stops because nobody is named as cover. The template should name a deputy responsible person. Second, the employer assumes the duty moved with the delegation. It does not: under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and ACOP L8, the employer keeps the legal duty however the work is shared out. The role is explained in full in the legionella responsible person guide.

The sections a school template needs

Taken together, a school template contains the standard ACOP L8 sections plus the school-specific ones above:

1. Premises and system description — every block, plant room, calorifier, cold water storage tank and water feature, including the age and quirks of the building stock.
2. Responsible persons — duty holder, responsible person, deputy, and overseer, with contact details.
3. Asset register — calorifiers, tanks, thermostatic mixing valves and any pool or hydrotherapy plant, each with its service schedule.
4. Little-used outlet schedule — every rarely used outlet by location, with flushing frequency.
5. Holiday flushing calendar — the choice between weekly holiday flushing and recommissioning, written down, term dates attached.
6. Temperature monitoring points — sentinel outlets, calorifier flow and return, cold tank, with the target figures: hot at 50°C within a minute, cold below 20°C within two, stored water at 60°C or above.
7. Recommissioning checklist — the first-day-back protocol for each holiday, signed off before pupils return.
8. Records and review — where the log book lives, the five-year retention rule, and the triggers that bring the assessment back for review, such as building work or a change of use.

The free template linked below covers the standard framework and works as the base document. The Pro Pack adds a complete worked example assessment for a school and a school preset log book, so the holiday calendar, TMV register and recommissioning sections are shown filled in rather than built from scratch.