Flooring for Schools and Other Specialist Areas

One area the team at Smithfield Carpets has direct experience of is flooring for schools. This is just a small part of our work, but the considerations used in choosing the right types of school flooring can be applied across many other types of working spaces. Here, we look at a couple of the different areas a school uses and what kinds of flooring work best in them – but like any workplace, there’s no ‘one size fits all’!

General Principles

• Like many public buildings and business settings, schools experience a lot of wear and tear – perhaps even more than the average! So if you’re looking for a type of flooring for areas with lots of footfall, you need something hard wearing and durable.
• We also now understand much better the need to have an attractive environment for learning and working, as this contributes towards overall morale, motivation and productivity, so aesthetic appearance of the flooring is a key consideration.
• Hygiene is an important issue in many environments too, and none more so than when the health of children and young people is an issue – so any flooring must be easy to keep clean and safe. Finding the right low maintenance flooring can pay dividends.

Examples of Key Areas

The entrance to a school, like any shop, office block or even factory, will see some of the heaviest footfall. It’s also likely to suffer from dirt, grime and wet conditions, as people enter the building from the outside world. With this moisture comes the risks of slips and falls, so rainwater entering the building needs to be minimised as well as considering slip resistant qualities for your flooring, as a health and safety issue. Carpet or carpet tiles are a good choice here, with the addition of matting just inside doors to remove moisture and dirt from shoes as staff and pupils enter the school. Using carpet tiles means individual patches can be replaced if they become worn or stained. Specialist safety flooring is also available for areas that see high levels of moisture or where slipping poses a particular hazard.

Classrooms need to provide the right conditions for children to learn effectively. So here, it’s good to look at the acoustic properties of any flooring. Flooring solutions should absorb sound, to prevent noise disturbing pupils and teaching in the room and neighbouring rooms too. Colour can be important – this can promote a stimulating atmosphere in which to learn. And again, any flooring should be resistant to spills and durable over the longer term. Vinyl and wood flooring, while great for other areas, might not be as suitable as carpet or carpet tiles in the classroom, which are acoustically comfortable as well as hard wearing. In laboratories, though, slip resistance and even conductive flooring that protects against static shocks will be far more suitable.

Find the Right Supplier

If you have queries about the type of flooring suitable for specific areas of your school, it’s worth talking to the experts. We have a great deal of knowledge here at Smithfield Carpets. A local, family run business, we also supply industrial flooring, flooring for wet rooms, vinyl & wood flooring, curtains and blinds.