“Teachers know what they’re doing and are looking for hazards all the time,” he says. Many industrial concerns did not even think about the risks people might be running.

But not every school has a proper health and safety policy. They are forced to act when they have an incident and a subsequent inspection by the HSE.

Some schools have looked at the requirement for risk assessment, seen it as a problem and done nothing about it. But even when things go wrong, the HSE rarely prosecutes, usually imposing a time limit on putting the matter right.

In 1992, just before Christmas, a group of 16 and 17-year-olds used a mobile scaffold in the school hall to put up stage lighting for a school play. Without training or written instructions, and unsupervised, they tried to dismantle it from the bottom up. The scaffolding collapsed on a pupil.

Luckily the accident was not serious, but the play was cancelled pending an HSE inspection of the fallen apparatus.

Giving this incident as an example of how accidents can happen when a risk is not assessed, Mr Hill cites it as an instance of nobody accepting responsibility - each party passing the buck.

The headteacher apologised, but did not know the boys were unsupervised and untrained. It never occurred to the new drama teacher there was potential for serious accident - he only knew that traditionally pupils put up the lights every year.

And the local authority washed its hands of responsibility: the equipment had been given by parents and the LEA was unaware of its existence.

In this case the HSE sent the school a stern letter and arranged for the local authority safety adviser to visit.

In Mr Hill’s view, schools need advice, but not regular visits from the safety consultants increasingly offering their services to schools. “The expertise is there,” he explains. “Enough literature is available and given the high quality of people in schools they are perfectly capable of dealing with health and safety entirely themselves.”

Nevertheless, he regrets the expertise disappearing from local authority health and safety teams, the result of early retirement. “The friendly, practical advice of three to five years ago is not there any more, which makes it doubly difficult for teachers with the health and safety job thrust on them to get it right.”

The lack of time set aside for teachers to do the job “comes up again and again”, he says.

As does the lack of training - because of the need for supply cover. Without training teacher safety representatives felt “lonely and exposed”.

And among senior managers in schools there was a “yawning gap”, with deputy heads not being allowed to go on courses. The Health and Safety Commission Education Service Advisory Committee (ESAC) has recognised the need for guidance on risk assessment written specifically for schools. But it will not start working on it until 1996.

Meanwhile, Mr Hill recommends that schools buy the ESAC guidance booklets (from HMSO) and seek help from CLEAPSS (Consortium of Local Education Authorities for the Provision of Support Services) for its Hazcards on the risk from chemicals.

He advises schools to carry out regular internal inspections. In primary schools (using few chemicals) once a year is enough: secondary schools should inspect half of the school premises in the autumn, half in the spring and in the summer should examine all procedures (for example, fire drills) in an end-of-year review.

“Look at what you’ve done, what you found, what you propose to do in the future. This should lead to targets for action in the following year.”

HSE inspectors rarely exercise their statutory power to arrive unannounced and be admitted. Almost always he or she visits by appointment, having already met school management.

Only occasionally, when a worried parent alerts them to a serious safety hazard in a decrepit private school, is their arrival unheralded. This happened where two schools “operating on a shoestring” were “almost literally falling down”. The HSE had them shut down.