Lone Working in Schools: What You Need to Know

Every school depends on lone workers, usually without thinking of them that way. The caretaker opening up at six in the morning. Cleaners finishing after everyone else has gone. The business manager in over half term. A teacher running a one-to-one intervention in an empty wing of the building.

Lone working isn't illegal, and it isn't automatically unsafe. But it does change the risk picture — and the law expects you to have thought about it.

Who counts as a lone worker?

A lone worker is anyone who works without close or direct supervision, or out of sight and sound of colleagues. In a school context that typically includes:

• Site staff opening, closing and doing maintenance outside school hours
• Cleaning staff, whether employed or contracted
• Office and leadership staff working during holidays
• Staff running before- and after-school clubs at the edges of the day
• Anyone working alone in a remote part of the site — a sports pavilion, a detached block, a boiler room

Why it matters more than people think

The risks aren't exotic. They're the ordinary ones — made worse by the fact that nobody is there to help:

• Accidents and sudden illness. A fall from a stepladder is an inconvenience at 11am on a Tuesday. At 6am, alone, with your phone in the site office, it can be life-threatening.
• Higher-risk tasks. Work at height, electrical work and machinery use should generally not be done alone at all.
• Violence and confrontation. Staff who open up, lock up, or deal with intruders and angry visitors alone need a plan, not just goodwill.
• Medical conditions. Some conditions make lone working unsuitable for particular tasks — which you can only manage if you've asked.

What a sensible lone working system looks like

You don't need expensive technology to get this right. You need a clear, written answer to four questions:

1. Who works alone, when, and doing what? If you can't list your lone workers, you haven't assessed the risk.
2. Which tasks are banned when alone? Be explicit. Work at height, confined spaces and live electrical work are the usual candidates.
3. How do we know they're okay? Check-in arrangements proportionate to the risk — a start/finish text to a named person is often enough; higher-risk roles may justify a lone worker app or device.
4. What happens when something goes wrong? Who is called, who holds keys, who knows the alarm codes, and does the emergency contact list actually work on a Sunday?

Write it down, brief the people it covers, and review it when staffing or the site changes.

The trap to avoid

The most common failure we see isn't a missing policy — it's a policy nobody follows. A check-in system that quietly stopped being used two caretakers ago is worse than none at all, because it looks like a control while providing no protection.

How Schools Safe helps

Lone working assessments are part of our health & safety package. We identify your lone workers, build proportionate arrangements with your site team, and put the reviews and checks into the Schools Safe platform so the system stays alive — with alerts when reviews fall due.

If your lone working arrangements are a paragraph in a policy from 2019, a free safety review is a good place to start.