HSE is knocking on school doors again — and it’s your asbestos paperwork they want to see

The Health and Safety Executive inspected schools’ asbestos management in 2023-24. Its verdict was that most schools were complying — but the deficiencies it kept finding tell a story every site manager will recognise. According to HSE’s own bulletin, the recurring gaps were:

• No clear assignment of roles, or no contingency when the asbestos-responsible person is away
• Missing permit-to-work systems for contractors
• Management plans without documented emergency protocols
• Asbestos registers lacking photographic documentation
• No method statements for in-house maintenance work
• Patchy staff training records

Now HSE has confirmed it is running a further programme of school inspections in 2025-26. If an inspector arrives at your gate this term, those six items are effectively the checklist.

Notice what they have in common: not one is about removing asbestos. Every single one is about documenting how you manage it.

Parliament is pushing the same way

In February 2026, the House of Commons Education Committee published Foundations of Learning, its report on RAAC and school buildings. Among its recommendations: government should commission a national digital register of asbestos in the education estate, with annual reporting on HSE compliance.

The same report paints the wider estate picture that makes this urgent: 38% of school buildings — around 24,000 blocks — have exceeded their original design life, and roughly 700,000 pupils are learning in schools that need major refurbishment or replacement. The National Audit Office’s January 2025 report on public building maintenance found a government-wide backlog of at least £49 billion, with schools accounting for £13.8 billion of it — and pointedly noted that the underlying condition data is old and incomplete. The evidence base for the entire schools estate is, in effect, a records problem.

What an HSE visit costs when the records aren’t there

HSE inspections aren’t advisory. Material breaches trigger Fee for Intervention — you pay HSE’s costs for its own enforcement time. Improvement and prohibition notices follow, and in serious cases prosecution: academy trusts have been convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act for premises failures in recent years, with fines, costs, and every conviction publicised by HSE. For a trust, the reputational hit lands just as hard as the fine.

Turning the six gaps into six habits

Each deficiency HSE found maps to a simple, repeatable digital record:

1. Roles and cover — a named responsibility log that survives staff turnover, not knowledge in one person’s head.
2. Contractor permits — digital permit-to-work forms completed before any contractor touches the fabric of the building, stored against the date and the job.
3. Emergency protocols — documented in the management plan, with review dates that trigger automatically.
4. Photographic registers — timestamped photos of each known or presumed asbestos location, updated when condition checks happen.
5. Method statements — attached to every in-house maintenance job in areas where asbestos may be present.
6. Training records — who was trained, on what, when, and when it expires.

This is precisely the workload FitForAudit Schools was built for. Site staff report checks and evidence by email — no new app, no logins to forget — and the platform assembles timestamped, photographic, inspection-ready records mapped to DfE and statutory frameworks, covering the full compliance calendar from fire safety logs to premises checks. When an inspector, auditor or trust board asks, the audit pack is already built. Customers typically save 5–10 hours of staff time a week, and deployment takes less than a day.

The takeaway

HSE told schools exactly what it found last time and exactly when it’s coming back. Parliament is calling for the education estate’s asbestos records to go digital. The schools that will have a quiet 2025-26 inspection are the ones whose registers, permits and training records are already built — one logged check at a time.

Sources: HSE bulletin on school asbestos inspections (2025-26 programme); House of Commons Education Committee, Foundations of Learning (Feb 2026); National Audit Office (Jan 2025).