Enhancing Fire Safety in New Educational Facility

January 8, 2024

Livingstone Academy Bournemouth is a brand-new all-through school that combines excellent education with an innovative skills development programme, ensuring students from the ages of four to 18 have the skills and qualifications they need to succeed in modern life.

The school has over 1800 occupants including students and staff and covers four stories of brand-new purpose-built facilities alongside historical buildings. This unique setting also includes a magistrates and coroners court, which will be preserved as part of the school site and used by the students for lectures and staging parliament style debates.

Preserving this incredible educational facility as well as ensuring the safety of the next generation was of the upmost importance to the facilities management team. With a proven track record of over 40 years in design and build contracting, J&B Hopkins Ltd were the M&E contractor who engaged with Southern Fire Alarms as the fire installation team.

With the opening of the school imminent, there were strict deadlines to be met so the team at Southern Fire Alarms wanted to install a system that was quick and easy to fit, as well as simple to maintain. They opted for Hochiki Europe’s ESP range of products, and in fact over 400 devices were installed at this state-of-the-art educational facility.

Hochiki Europe’s ESP product range offers many benefits that ensure optimal protection and peace of mind, particular in school settings. Its cutting-edge technology guarantees swift and precise detection of potential threats, enhancing response times and minimising damage. The ESP range boasts unparalleled reliability, reducing false alarms and ensuring accurate alerts in critical situations. Moreover, these products are intelligently designed for easy integration with existing systems, making upgrades seamless and cost-effective – something which appealed to the project managers for this install.

We caught up with Naomi Fell, the contract manager at Southern Fire Alarms to find out more “We’ve worked with Hochiki products for several years across multiple projects and industries. We chose Hochiki almost every time because they know how to design and manufacture reliable and easy to fit devices.

At Livingstone, as well as standard smoke detectors we also fitted multi-sensors. We needed to ensure the risk of false alarms was completely reduced; with almost 2000 people here you can imagine at full capacity what chaos a false alarm might cause. We chose the ACD Multi-Sensors from the ESP range because they are fully EN54 accredited and work across three sensing elements, heat, smoke and CO – all vital in a school environment. These were fitted across areas that had a high risk of false alarm, areas such as food technology and science laboratories.

Our fit-out team also really liked the fact that there’s a common mounting base for all the ESP devices, when compared to the rest of the market, Hochiki devices really are some of the simplest to fit, but they aren’t comprised on quality.

Despite an industry-wide shortage in components, our contact, Cathy at Hochiki, was invaluable in helping us to solve any supply chain issues, she was on the ball and her communication was brilliant.”

Opening in September 2023, everyone at Hochiki would like to wish the students and staff at Livingstone good luck in their first academic year and beyond.

To read the full interview, download our Dec/Jan issue for free here