Safety does not end with the completion of construction.
Communities need to learn how to use and maintain their
safer schools in the Post-Construction Stage. The safer
school project can also solidify into a broader culture of
safety at the school and in the community, as well as at the
organisational and global level.
• Drafting maintenance and user manuals. Design
and construction teams, government authorities and
school staff jointly develop a manual for safe operation,
maintenance and future use.
• Handing the school over. A commemorative handover
establishes institutional memory about safer schools.
Students and staff identify and reduce hazards inside the
completed school.
• Developing a maintenance plan. Stakeholders create
regular maintenance plans and identify how the school
may be altered in the future. These plans help ensure the
school remains a safe building during its entire use.
• Supporting cultures of safety in schools. The safer
school can continue to teach communities about hazardresistant construction and valuing safety. Commemorative
events, signs and school safety committees support the
ongoing learning process.
• Scaling-up and promoting accountability. Development
organisations and government agencies can promote
and scale-up safer school construction, whether through
community-based or external approaches, by making a
public commitment to safer schools.
SECTION II: OVERVIEW
5. Key activities of the PostConstruction Stage: Operations,
Maintenance and Safety
Stage 5. Post-construction operations, maintenance, and safety
Advantages
Challenges
Strategies
• Improves understanding of nonstructural mitigation
• Lack of awareness about nonstructural hazards
Provide orientation and training on
non-structural mitigation for the school
management committee, parent-teacher
associations and older students.
• Familiarity with building
technology increases ease of
community maintenance
• Competing priorities
and insufficient funds for
maintenance, or inappropriate
alterations to safe schools
Develop maintenance and user manuals
to alert school staff to their role in school
maintenance and inform them when
alteration requires technical review. Work
with local communities to develop an
income-generation strategy to support
routine and non-routine maintenance when
government support is insufficient.
• Builds and sustains a culture
of safety within and beyond the
school
• Assumption that safety efforts
end with construction
Ask that school management committees
display their continued commitment to
comprehensive school safety through
commemorative events, months and even
years after school completion. Involve
local officials and original stakeholders to
increase accountability. Include long-term
monitoring of safer school projects and their
ongoing impacts.
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