As I work in a wooden workshop fire safety is particularly important to me. Last time I completed any formal training was at Dowty in the 1990s and I mostly remember the demonstration of the effectiveness of halon extinguishers vs water extinguishers and the difficulty in firefighting a flamable liquid fire. Since then halon has been banned due it causing damage ozone layer so it’s time to update my knowledge. 

High Speed Training got in contact and asked me to review their courses, after perusing their long list of courses I decided their online course for fire safety would be a good to bring me upto date.

As High Speed Training point out in their blog, there are other reasons why you should be concerned about fire safety at the moment.

“The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has asked for businesses across the country to prove that they are complying with fire safety regulations as part of the government’s Focus on Enforcement campaign.”

The course is both CPD and RoSPA Accredited and there are clear objectives and a fact sheet that can be downloaded from the HST website. The course is an hour long and divided into five modules against which progress is recorded.

• Introduction to Fire Safety
• Fire Safety in Practice
• Fire Precautions part 1 and part 2
• Fire Safety Assessment

Each module is provided in the form of a slide show with a clear audio track and interactive questions.

From running the course, it was clear that it is aimed at a work place environment with multiple employees, for example, the intro explains the responsibilities of the employer and employees. There is also the option for corporate users to manage course allocation and progress via a management suite. However, there is plenty in the course that applies to a small setup too. If like me you use your workshop for multiple different tasks then it should be possible to run through the risk assessment quickly before a new type of activity such as welding is undertaken. It is important to note that home fire extinguishers may not be labelled in the same way as described on this course so you need to make sure you know what you have purchased and if it is applicable to the situation you are in. Also if you are in a specialist workshop or lab then you may need additional training or equipment on top of this course.

One key issue I picked up from this course is that it is important that information is made available to relevant accident and emergency services to enable them to prepare their own response. So in my case I think I should be looking about getting some signage for the outside of the workshop incase the services need to visit whilst I am not there.

Contact details

High Speed Training
http://www.highspeedtraining.co.uk/
@hstofficial