Legionella in schools: who is actually the duty holder?

The honest answer to who holds the legionella duty in a school is that it depends on the school's governance type, and for a lot of schools the answer changed the day they converted to an academy. Get the type right and everything else follows from it.

Here is the split. It comes down to who is legally the employer and who controls the premises, which the governance type decides:

Underneath the split, the duties are the same whoever holds them. A school's water system falls under the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, COSHH and the Approved Code of Practice L8. What changes with governance is not the standard. It is the name on the hook.

Academy conversion is where the confusion starts

The day a maintained school becomes an academy, the duty moves from the local authority to the trust. The council is no longer standing behind you. Under HSWA the trust has full control of its premises and full responsibility for them, with no local-authority backstop underneath.

Newly converted trusts get caught here more than anyone. Last September the LA arranged the water hygiene. This September nobody did, because everyone assumed someone else still would. The paperwork transferred the buildings; it also transferred the duty, and that second transfer is the one that gets forgotten in the handover.

Even once you are clearly the duty holder, one thing does not move when you delegate the tasks. A trust can hand the flushing and the monitoring to its estates team or to an outside contractor. It cannot hand over the accountability. If the control fails, the duty holder answers for it, whatever the service agreement says. You can outsource the work. You cannot outsource the liability.

If your school has converted recently, four things are worth confirming in the first weeks, because this is exactly where duties fall down the gap:

• The legionella risk assessment names the trust as duty holder, not the council it used to name.
• There is a current written scheme setting out what is controlled and how.
• Someone is named, by role, to carry out the monitoring and the flushing, and they know it.
• The holiday flushing regime is booked in, not assumed.

None of that is onerous. It is a morning's work, and it is a great deal cheaper than discovering in an outbreak that the water hygiene stopped the day the LA's contract ended and nobody picked it back up.

The summer-holiday trap

Schools have a stagnation problem built into the calendar. Six weeks of empty pipes in warm weather, then a thousand children and staff back through the doors on the first morning. A closed school is a textbook scenario for legionella growth: a warm building, no water movement, and outlets sitting idle for the longest stretch of the year.

In term time you can lean on the building's own use. A busy school moves water through most of its outlets every day, so the flushing effort concentrates on the few that get missed, the store-cupboard tap, the shower in the medical room nobody uses. A holiday erases that advantage. With the building empty, every outlet becomes a little-used outlet at once, which is why the regime steps up from targeted flushing to running every outlet, every week, for the whole closure. The work grows precisely when the site is emptiest of the people who would normally do it.

The response is a flushing regime that spans the closure. During the holiday, flush all outlets weekly, flush the system down before the building closes, and flush it through again before it reopens, with sentinel temperature checks across the period. The reopening flush matters as much as the closing one, because that is the water the first pupils will drink and shower in. We wrote up what a proper reopening flush involves for buildings coming back from any long void, and a school summer is exactly that.

The failure mode is not usually a school that ignored the holiday. It is a school that half-did it: flushed the first fortnight, then a caretaker went on leave and the last three weeks have no entry against them. Three empty weeks in August is enough.

Flushing only counts if it's written down

A flush with no record, to an inspector, did not happen. That is the standard, and it is the one schools most often fall short of. Each flush needs four things captured at the time: which outlet, who did it, the date, and the temperature. A tick in a diary with no temperature is not evidence that the water was safe; it is evidence that someone turned a tap. A note that says only "flushed outlets", with no way to tell which of two hundred taps were run, is not much better. The value sits in the detail, captured at the outlet, not written up from memory that evening.

This is the same discipline as any little-used outlet, proved per outlet rather than per building. A school has dozens of them, from the science-block taps to the changing-room showers, and each needs its own line in the record, not a single "all outlets flushed" note that no one can stand behind two years later.

Before any of this, get the duty holder written down correctly for your school type. If your governance changed and the risk assessment still names the council, fix that first. Our guide to the responsible person versus the competent person covers who holds the duty and who does the work, and why the two are not the same role.

For a contractor running holiday flushing rounds across a dozen schools, the hard part is not the flushing. It is proving every outlet in every empty building was covered on the right days, weeks after the fact, when a trust's business manager asks. Booking those rounds and evidencing each outlet is what BlueWave's scheduler is for, so the empty-building weeks show up as planned, dated work rather than a gap someone hopes went unnoticed. A single small school with a diligent site manager and a paper log can manage without it. A trust with fifteen sites and a summer to cover is a different problem.

A school's water risk lives in its calendar. The long holidays are when the pipes go quiet, and the first day of term is when several hundred people arrive to use them again. Cover the gap between those two dates, on paper as much as in the pipes, and the rest of the year mostly looks after itself.