The practical assessment

Morning. There are twenty-four of you and you will leave here tomorrow at five with a fire warden certificate, provided you complete the full hours and pass the practical assessment.

Anyone who misses half an hour does not get one. That is not me being strict, it is the standard, and I have already lost that argument about two hundred times.

I have been running this course since 2011, about forty groups a year, nearly always on company premises. You are from an electrical wholesaler and you were picked by HR, which means half of you did not want to be here.

That is fine. Over two days it changes, and it changes for a reason I will explain at the end.

Theory first, which is dull and short. The fire triangle, classes A, B, C, D and F, the right extinguishing agent for each, escape routes, assembly point.

After four hours of that you go out to the back car park, and that is where the interesting part starts.

Now you will pair up.

That pair is yours until the end of the course. You do not swap on the second day, you do not swap after lunch, you do not swap because it is not working. That is deliberate: in a real emergency you do not get to choose who you work with.

Pair up.

This part I do not say in the room: in fourteen years I have never seen a group pair up at random. Nobody draws lots. Everybody goes straight to somebody, it takes eleven seconds on average, and what happens in those eleven seconds tells you more about a company than any staff survey.

You took nine.

Extinguishers first. A tray two metres square, diesel over an inch of water, a flame about eighty centimetres high.

One of the pair puts it out, the other stands behind with a hand on their shoulder. The hand is not for comfort: it is how the one behind signals when to back off, because the person with the extinguisher in the face of a fire cannot hear a thing.

You will each do that four times, alternating.

Eight hands on shoulders per pair. Sixteen, counting both directions.

Second day, eight in the morning. Today is casualty handling, and that is the day nobody leaves the same as they arrived.

CPR on the manikin: thirty compressions, two breaths, five cycles, swap. A good compression goes five centimetres deep and tires the arms of a trained person in ninety seconds. You are going to find that out.

Then immobilisation on a spinal board, and there the casualty is not a manikin. The casualty is your partner.

One of you lies down on the tarmac, on the board, and the other passes three straps: chest, hips and legs. Then the collar, then the head restraint.

To tighten a hip strap on somebody lying down you have to pass your hand under the small of their back, find the buckle on the far side without looking, and pull until it locks.

That takes forty to seventy seconds the first time.

You will each do it twice, swapping who lies down.

This I also do not say: immobilisation is the exercise where I stop watching the exercise and start watching the group. Twenty-four adults in work shirts and lanyards, lying on the tarmac of their own car park, being strapped down by somebody from the department next door. There is no way for that to be neutral and the standard does not mention it anywhere.

Two things about the pair of you, which I will say here and did not say there.

The first: when she lay down, you did not ask. Everybody asks. In fourteen years everybody asks something before they touch, even if it is only "all right?", even if it is only to fill the silence. You did not ask and she was not waiting to be asked.

The second: you had the hip strap locked in twenty-two seconds, which is instructor time, not first-day time. Either you have done this before, or you were not looking for the buckle.

I blew the whistle on that exercise forty seconds later than I would have with a normal group. That is on me and I am recording here that it was deliberate.

Twenty to four: evacuation drill. Alarm, cold smoke, out by the stairs to the assembly point in the yard.

For that stage I lose sight of you for three and a half minutes, because I stand at the assembly point timing arrivals, and the building has six floors and three staircases.

Your pair came in at four minutes ten, which is the worst time in the group, and the reason recorded on my sheet is "checking floor 3", which is what you told me and what I wrote down without asking anything further.

Floor 3 is packaging storage. It has been locked since 2023.

Five o'clock. Done.

It has been a pleasure, the group was a good one, and I mean that: a group that takes part learns, and this can one day be useful in a way nobody wants to find out.

Each assessment sheet has eleven items and I mark either S for satisfactory or R for repeat. The two of you have eleven S, along with nine other people in this group.

I sign underneath, with my registration number, and the company files it for two years.

What I am signing is that the two of you can put out a tray fire, do thirty by two on a manikin, and immobilise an adult on a board without making an injury worse.

That is what I sign. There is no box on the form for the rest of it, and if there were I would not know what to put in it either.