We have previously shared an activity timetable (below) encouraging you to forward think about what you could do throughout the year to ensure your emergency planning arrangements make you prepared to respond to any incident that might occur in your school.  

As suggested above, we encourage you to undertake a live exercise this term. The reason this is the only suggested activity this term is because a live exercise can be quite time and resource consuming, however despite this it is highly rewarding and is the best way to test arrangements. A live exercise is hands-on and involves simulating a real-world event. Live play exercises are good for testing operational readiness under tension and can be used to mimic the commotions of an incident.  

It is important to note that exercises should support, not replace other types of training. It is best practise if participants have attended a specific training or pre-briefing session prior to attending the exercise to prevent distractions and questions at the time of the exercise.  

The Resilience Academy (Cabinet Office) has recently released ‘Exercising Good Practice’. The purpose of this document is to provide a practical guide for individuals and teams who plan, prepare and deliver exercises. Some of the key principles which are outlined in the document include how an exercise should be:  

Some key considerations for an exercise include: 

• Purpose. The single most important question is ‘what is the exercise for?’.  

• Improvement-orientated goals. Exercises are held to understand how any proposed action, strategy, or policy might occur in the real world, but lowering the risks of finding out what might happen should it occur for real. Exercising is not about predicting the future in an exact way, but instead enabling the participants to better understand the consequences of their actions in an environment. 

• Scale, scope and methods. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to conducting and exercise  

• Record and implement lessons identified. Record any lessons identified and implement improvements or at least track the effort to do so (even if not practicable to implement for whatever reason).  

• Clear roles and responsibilities. Even though you might be designing an exercise, it is the established lead who owns the event, including the risk by doing an exercise.  

• Not achieving desired outcomes in exercises is okay; and can be essential. The best way of learning how to design better exercises is by doing more of them in a relatively safe-to-fail environment. 

• Diversity is genuinely mission critical. Developing an exercise is a collaborative endeavour that works best with genuine diversity of viewpoints and experiences. 

Nottinghamshire County Council have developed a suite of documents which are specifically useful for providing examples of emergency planning exercises for schools LINK. 

This suite of documents is recommended by Central Government and includes an Exercise planning Document and some tabletop scenarios. Although we are encouraging you to do a live exercise, you might like to use these scenarios as inspiration for school related incidents. An example of a live exercise might include invacuation, off site evacuation or loss of utilities. 

You might wonder what sort of incidents might you need to prepare for? Here are some examples of emergencies that have previously affected schools: 

• Heatwaves 
• Bomb Threat 
• Loss of Utilities
• Off-site evacuation 
• School Trip Accident 
• Flooding 
• Fire 
• Snow