Fire Doors and Comprehensive Competence

Looking back on 2023 and going into this year, probably the main and most relevant talking point has been about competence.
So, what is competence, how do we attain it and how do we prove it?

Competence and the Fire Safety Order
Let’s begin with a clear definition of competence. Seeing as we in the fire door sector must be aware of the requirements of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, this certainly matters.
Article 18 of the Fire Safety Order requires the Responsible Person at a building to appoint Competent Persons to assist them in undertaking preventive and protective measures. Of course, fire doors are an important fire safety protective measure and those who install them, inspect them and maintain them must possess the relevant competencies to carry out those tasks.
Paragraph 5 of Article 18 tells us that: “A person is to be regarded as competent for the purposes of this article where he has sufficient training and experience or knowledge and other qualities to enable them properly to assist in undertaking the preventive and protective measures”.

So, a competent person working with fire doors needs to have training, experience, and/or knowledge. What else is necessary and what might be ‘other qualities’?

Guidance about competence.
The Hackitt Report subsequent to the Grenfell Tower tragedy called for the development of competence in building safety professionals and BSI have recently issued BS Flex 8670 to explain the core competencies for the construction and fire safety sectors and this Standard defines competence as the consistent application of skill, knowledge, experience, and behaviour to achieve a specific outcome and the Building Safety Act has been amended to define a ‘competence requirement’ as one that relates to ‘the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours of an individual’. This is known as SKEB.

So, when we talk of competence, we mean more than just qualifications, more than just training, more than just knowledge. We must include skills, experience, and appropriate behaviours to help develop an individual’s knowledge from training and qualifications to a level of comprehensive competence. So, these are the ‘other qualities’ stated in Article 18 and if you have sufficient SKEB then you are competent.

The chart below tells us what is meant by that term SKEB:

SKILLS Ability to carry out a task to consistently achieve the desired outcome.

KNOWLEDGE Understanding of the theories, the practices and the facts relating to completing the task.

EXPERIENCE Taking part and discovering facts from events to improve an individual’s skills and knowledge.

BEHAVIOURS The way an individual approaches a task, the things they do and don’t do.

SKEB
Comprehensive competence.
More than training and more than knowledge.
The combination of training and knowledge together with experience, skills and behaviours to ensure that tasks are completed to achieve the desired outcome to ensure safety in buildings.

Comprehensive Competence
No doubt, competence frameworks will be devised to define what this means at different levels of competence and for different roles. Currently, there are competence working groups steered by the Construction Industry Council that have set out to improve competence for those that work in the construction and fire safety sectors. Details can be found at www.cic.org.uk

The importance of SKEB must be realised by clients so that, rather than specifying just a qualification from a training course or just the membership of a certification scheme, they should actually require the ‘competent person’ to provide a set of suitable credentials to demonstrate they are sufficiently competent to complete the task to a recognised standard.

An example of this could be: Can the fire door inspector clearly demonstrate the criteria used to inspect the fire doors, can they reference supporting evidence in respect of their findings and does their inspection report provide sufficient detail so that the client understands exactly what can be done to improve the likely performance of their fire doors? These are important competence-related questions.

This is why AFDI was formed by experienced fire door professionals, so that fire door inspectors across the country can improve their performance and turn the knowledge and skills they have learned into Comprehensive Competence.

Contact us for more information about how we can help you. https://afdi.org.uk/contact/