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and to all those who haven’t realised or thought about the importance of gaps when you are at your most vulnerable….
Mind the Gap
Toilet door gaps are vital for safety and safeguarding. Yet across the country new toilet block designs are getting rid of the gaps at the bottom and tops of toilet doors and partitions, to make cubicles fully enclosed.
Medical Safety
If you feel nauseous or ill you are likely to head to the toilet. If you collapse, you are more likely to survive, or avoid suffering long-term damage, if someone notices and rescues you.
There are known medical reasons for a disproportionally high frequency of cardiac arrests and strokes while an individual is in the toilet room. There are no UK statistics that list where people collapse. However, it is known there are around 100,000 hospital admissions due to heart attacks in this country, equating to one every five minutes. It is estimated there are 400,000 people in the U.K. with undiagnosed heart failure. There are also around 100,000 strokes in this country, equating to one every five minutes. Around 1% of people in this country have epilepsy and around 80 people are diagnosed with epilepsy each day. There are many other conditions that lead to collapse where you need to be noticed and accessed quickly eg. diabetes and asthma.
Children are particularly at risk now more than ever. In the last few years the Department of Education has changed the toilet designs in secondary schools, putting privacy ahead of safety and health. The building schools document now specifies a 0.5cm floor to door gap for privacy. As far as I am aware, there has been no impact assessment on closing the safety gaps. The words ‘safe’, ‘safety’ do not appear in the toilet section but ‘privacy’ in mentioned and this is the reason they gave me.
To put figures into perspective for UK schools there are around 9 children with epilepsy in an average secondary school. There will be on average another 2-3 with Type 1 diabetes. Several hundred children are diagnosed with strokes each year. Every week on average 12 people under the age of 35 are lost to sudden cardiac death.
The DfE understands the important of quickly getting emergency help - it now expects all state funded schools to have at least one defibrillator on site because defibrillation can increase the survival rate by as much as 75%. But knowing the person has collapsed in the first place, and therefore getting help as quickly as possible, is vital.
Like wearing a car seatbelt, toilet door gaps can make the difference in those critical moments.
Governing bodies must ensure arrangements are in place to support pupils with medical conditions. Some children and staff, such as those with epilepsy, may be considered disabled under the definition set out in the Equality Act 2010, and governing bodies must comply with their duties under that Act. When I complained to the DfE they said the governors are responsible for knowing their cohort and that there should be supervision. And that if a pupil did collapse it is ultimately the school and governors’ responsibility. How are governors supposed to know who is about to collapse from a fever, a spiked vape, a hypo, a stroke, a heart attack, a seizure?
Prevention of Sexual Assaults
In any space that becomes private, more offences are likely to take place as there are no witnesses. In Parliament it was discussed that there was at least 1 rape inside a school premises each day (over 600 in a 3 year period). The data, collected by the BBC, mentions an example occurring in a private cupboard. This was in 2015, before many schools decided to change their toilet designs to fully enclosed and mixed sex. The toilet door gaps are vital for safeguarding to help prevent activities that stop pupils, especially girls, going to the toilet.
There is no available data on these new toilet designs but, teachers and pupils are now reporting many problems with ‘drug dealing, drinking and dirt’. In one newspaper article, school staff reported, ‘Kids would go in there to have sex, to drink alcohol. They’d push other kids in and lock themselves in with them. They’d block the drains and flood the corridor.” Another responded: “The toilets were really smelly and unpleasant. Because they were fully enclosed spaces they weren’t properly ventilated, and harder to clean.”
One teacher was worried someone could collapse unnoticed in a completely enclosed cubicle. They said: “The CCTV in the corridor was only any good retrospectively. The toilets had turn locks, so you could open them from the outside if you needed to, but you couldn’t hear through the door, couldn’t see whether there was one or two people in there, or if someone had collapsed.”
Other Health, Safety and Welfare concerns
Toilet cubicles with insufficient ventilation present a high cross infection risk. If toilets are fully enclosed, premises have to rely more on efficient mechanical ventilation to prevent disease spread then school absences rising. The practicalities of cleaning a vomit-covered floor are difficult when the mop can not go under the doors and partitions and the cleaner can not soak the floor with disinfectant from outside the cubicle. Ensuring each individual cubicle is always lit and not vandalised is a concern.
More staff supervision is needed outside these fully enclosed designs as it has been shown that pupils are more likely to engage in multiple occupation activities (sex and drug dealing), illegal activities (taking drugs) and self harm due to the privacy. Staff have the responsibility of checking toilets in the event of an emergency evacuation. This becomes a much longer process without the door gaps to aid quick identification of occupation.
Of course the problems in secondary schools are repeated across the whole country when it comes to unisex toilets in public places. Particularly with women being spiked and nightclubs. And also in disabled toilets which are traditionally mix sex.
I saved a young woman’s life by entering the ladies toilets and saw a blue hand on the cubicle floor through the gap and we rescued her in time. Unfortunately another time it was too late to prevent damage to a child because of a full height door. It is for this latter time I want to educate people and try and get the Department of Education in particular to prioritise safety rather than privacy.
Gaps save lives and prevent assaults.