I don’t know too much about primary schools toilets as I focused on secondary design as an ex secondary school teacher. Here’s what I have found out through a few years looking at this.
It absolutely does not surprise me in the slightest that this school was built in 2017 and had all mixed sex toilets. That was a standard design option. The Education Estates part of Department For Education were fully aware and signed them off for secondary schools. I have saved the DfE design briefs that up until last year were very different. Now they have changed them since FWS and state single sex toilet suites.
Schools are now in a mess. It’s been a big design experiment and many will have to change their toilets. The mixed sex toilet phase started gathering momentum at the time of Building Schools for the Future and academisation. Many designers thought they were an innovative way forward. Some schools resisted but school leaders had to opt out and give specific reasons why not have certain features in their approved designs, which I think is too big a responsibility when you are looking at whole school plans.
The reason designers could get away with it is because 1992 legislation and Approved Document T has exclusions for schools. Ironically, all this I believe has led to schools having worse health and safety standards than most other non domestic provision that conforms to British Standards and work legislation.
When the FWS verdict was announced, I thought this is going to cost millions to put right in schools. I am amazed there’s been nothing on the news. I think the money should come from the Department for Education to schools, not out of individual school budgets.
I have had quite a bit of correspondence with DfE and got information from doing Freedom on Information requests. I asked for risk assessments and equality and impact assessments for toilet cubicles being mixed sex and fully private in schools. They do not hold them. I then asked who is liable if a child comes to harm in these private designs and they gave me a list depending on the type of school but it does boil down to the governors in many.
My initial area of concern was children having medical emergencies and those with medical conditions. Once I started looking in to this and realised the extent of sexual assaults inside school premises, I expanded my concerns. I have concentrated on wider public provision more recently as what’s happened in schools is a good example of why not to do this in general.
I have got literature and links I can give you if you want. I am not sure if your toilets are floor to ceiling in privacy but I can try and answer more specific questions.
What is very interesting is I noted the Department For Education this year have been quoting BS6465. These are British Standards and are what Approved Document T was based on. I have not got access to them - they cost £££ each and there’s 4 of them. I have chatted to lots of people about them. What is frustrating in my campaign to put door gaps into toilet design, is the life-saving feature is not specifically shown in diagrams on the 2024 Approved Document T (long story and involves transactivists).
HSE told me only single sex cubicles within a single sex environment can have door gaps. Irrespective of door gaps, you will see in Approved Document T: ‘1.22 The layout when entering, exiting and using a toilet room or cubicle should cater for the safety,
privacy and dignity of users. Cubicle doors should only open into single-sex toilet accommodation’. I presume this is taken from the most recent BS6465 but I do not know if this would extend to schools, particularly primary schools as their toilets have always been designed with big door gaps for supervision.
This it what BS6465 said at the time of The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, which makes sense within the legislation that unisex toilets have to be a a separate enclosed room:
BS6465 from 1986:
WC compartments should be self contained, but where a range of WCs is provided, each in a separate cubicle within a single room, e.g. in schools, offices, factories, public buildings and public conveniences, it simplifies ventilation, cleaning and, to some extent, supervision and prevention of wilful misuse, if the cubicle walls terminate above the floor as well as below the ceiling. These advantages are gained only at the expense of a certain degree of privacy. Where cubicles are used, the whole room in which they are situated may be regarded as a single unit for the purposes of ventilation.
Where partition walls and doors of WC cubicles are kept clear of the floor, the clearance should be not less than 100mm and not more than 150mm. Partitions and doors that terminate below ceiling level should be not less than 2 m in height from the floor.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/ehrc-guidance-causes-trans-toilet-trouble-for-schools/