Yes. I saved a stranger’s life once because I saw they had collapsed through the gap between the floor and the door and rescued them. It didn’t even really affect me as such until years later when another incident happened. I was in a situation where I didn’t realise there was a child a few feet from me behind the full floor to ceiling door. I didn’t help them because I couldn’t see they had collapsed. I do know, from the medical information afterwards, I could have prevented what happened to the child. This haunts me and I don’t want anyone else to go through this. And most of all I want to stop people being harmed through bad design.
So I thought I would try and do something positive and started looking into why toilet door gaps were being lost in recent toilet designs. I have gone through lots of government documents. I have emailed and spoken to many officials in different departments trying to find reasons why but no one could help other than ‘privacy’. One person involved told me that I should get a freedom of information request but then wouldn’t tell me why or exactly what on (?).
The Department of Education has safety and safeguarding as a priority throughout statutory documents and guidelines until it comes to a toilet cubicle building guidelines section which changed around 2021. No mention of safety for the secondary schools toilets section but now mentions privacy several times. This has been confirmed to me by the DfE who state it is schools and governors responsibility if a child comes to harm behind a full height toilet door, as they should know their cohort and therefore override the DfE designs document. In an average secondary school there will be around a dozen children who are at risk with known medical conditions. It can never be guaranteed that the present and future cohort are never going to collapse. Thats why we have defibrillators in schools. The child in my case had no known condition beforehand.
There is a real issue with mix sex toilet cubicles and I have had correspondence with several organisations who don’t realise the implications of what the last government did when Document T came into force last year - a design document for public toilets and offices (not schools). All mixed sex toilets designs are fully enclosed and these designs can be used for single sex toilets as well. There is no impact assessment on making toilet cubicles completely private. The government commissioned a private company to look into designs for Document T to help people with long term health conditions. It was a long document which I have analysed. There was no research or evidence to enclose toilet cubicles for people with long term health conditions. The reference they gave for their justification to enclose toilets was from an American journal article for gender neutral public restrooms in which the ‘relevant’ quote is ‘A better solution, supported by many transactivists, and increasingly found in trendy nightclubs and restaurants, is to eliminate gender-segregated facilities entirely and treat the public restroom as one single open space with fully enclosed stalls.’ There was also a Minnesota high school restroom referenced (which led back to the other article). Both of these references were irrelevant to the remit but have now impacted policy for U.K. toilets.
Ministers don’t understand the implications of closing the gaps in toilet cubicle designs. Kemi Badenoch was using single sex toilet regulations as an election winner. She said that women were voting for her based on the fact the single sex designs are safer. There are no designs in Document T that stipulate door gaps. The private cubicles, which are designed so someone can let themselves into from the outside without prior warning to the occupant, are not safer. These public toilet designs have been called rape cubicles by others for obvious reasons. Annoyingly, it’s now been confirmed to me in writing that one of the single sex cubicle designs in Document T can have door gaps - they just don’t specify them or mention them in the official document and the diagrams imply that they are full height. So full height is what manufacturers are likely to produce.
The more research I do and the more government departments I speak to shows that no one has thought this through or done due diligence for when people are at their most vulnerable. The news show more and more people are being affected by these designs being unsafe compared to the traditional toilet cubicle. It is adversely affecting the medically vulnerable, women and children the most. I now get people contacting me telling me their stories too so I write about those and my experience as a teacher. I believe the designs are breaking equality laws and laws to keep children safe in education.
It would be a very simple thing to correct on Document T and secondary school designs, by stipulating all single sex cubicles should have, at least, a specified safety gap height from floor to door. The benefit would be huge to the people that were saved, their friends and families.
Gaps under and over toilet cubicle doors have been a universal safety and cleaning (health) design feature across the world for decades. Because they work.