School uncontrolled pesticide use practices

[SchoolmumSW]

Our LO attends a private pre prep school which has been infested by some insects which bite children.

The school has spent month spraying all the classrooms with permethrin (insecticide/pesticide) twice daily (morning and evening) without telling the parents. It did nothing to resolve the issue.

A few times they had pest control coming in and doing spraying with higher concentrations of same permethrin and now plan to do more of that, though it’s been 1.5 years since the issue started and none of that helped.

The school refuses to share any risk/health and safety/GOSSH assessment reports. I’m really concerned about the amount of harmful chemicals children have been exposed to and poor safeguarding practices.

would you be concerned if your child was attending a school which was daily sprayed with pesticides? or am I overthinking it?

Would a report to council, DfE or somewhere else help? What would you do?

Isn’t Permethrin used to treat Scabies? I don’t know what else it’s used for.
I don’t think they would be doing this for a minor insect infestation, that level of pest control involvement would be very expensive.
Do they have bedbugs or something serious going on?

You are right to be concerned! Have you spoken with any other parents about it? I’d be really scared / angry and probably pulling my kid out. And I’m very far from precious. But these are powerful and potentially dangerous chemicals.

These are not bed bugs as over past 1.5 years as it’s been ongoing no spread has been noticed, just school premises. School can’t figure out where bites are coming from as they didn’t see any bugs and couldn’t catch any.

Daily spraying was done by staff not pest control with store bought insecticide (with permethrin being an active ingredient). Parents were never notified of this practice

I would suggest reporting it to the Health & Safety Executive and the Local Authority.

What concerns me isnt just the spraying but that the school dont seem to get their responsibilities about pesticide use and have not managed to take proper advice to deal with the situation

It sounds awful. What evidence do they have that it’s bugs causing a problem if they can’t find any?

I would be furious about this! How did you find out how regularly they’d been spraying? Were they doing it when kids were actually in the classrooms?

I would be very concerned. How do you know what has happened? Not sure what you can do as it’s a private school….

Flees. It’s the main active ingredient in Indorex. Not saying that’s the pest, but that’s what we have used it for.

OP I wouldn’t be bothered if it was once or twice but seems very off as a regular occurrence. I’m surprised the staff are OK with it.

I'd be even more worried about the 1.5 years of insect bites with no known source. Do you know if environmental health have investigated?

There was conflicting information coming from school on what they were doing to address the issue and I pressed hard on headteacher asking for a list of all treatments performed and it was then the first time I’ve heard about the twice daily spraying.

Pest control visited 3 times, couldn’t find anything. School maintenance team tried to investigate and also hadn’t found any bugs. Don’t think any other checks were done

Twice daily spraying for how long?

How long have they been leaving between spraying and the children coming in to the classroom?

Has your child been bitten? What do the bites look like?

I would be very unhappy about both the infestation and the prolonged/ineffective pesticide use. I don't know who regulates health and safety at private schools?

Twice daily spraying continued for 2 months. Every day one was done at 5:30am and one in the evening

my LO did get bites, these are similar to mosquito bites and very very itchy. some children ended up on antibiotics as bites got infected due to scratching.

Beginning of autumn and summer terms (September and April) these are usually worst, this September LO came home with 30 bites on just face/neck and similar number around body (back/legs), when back in April I showed this to Headteacher at the gate during pick up time - she just smiled and said: “it’s a mystery!”

They need to consider treating all their soft furnishings. We had to get rid of cushions and rugs etc during Covid times.

I’d honestly take her out. School clearly don’t care about the health of the children. What else has happened behind closed doors that the parents know nothing about! Also report them to environmental health.

There are plenty of pest traps that would be able to catch pest so that the type of pest could be identified. It seems odd to be randomly spraying not knowing what you are trying to exterminate. The source could be outside if bites are more frequent in summer and autumn.