Tree safety management
Policy and compliance
Trees play an important role as a living landscape and green infrastructure in the rural and urban areas of Norfolk. They provide many cultural, financial, wildlife and amenity benefits. However, trees are large structures and have the potential to cause damage or injury if they fail.
If you have trees in your school grounds you will need to comply with the Tree Safety Management Policy (PDF) [2MB]. This policy is a management plan enabling the County Council to fulfil its legal duty to ensure that its trees don't pose a danger to members of the public or property.
It ensures a systematic planned inspection regime is undertaken to identify trees with obvious defects, so that appropriate proactive remedial work can be carried out.
Please note that due to the recent spread of Chalara, or Ash dieback, we've also produced an addendum to the Tree Safety Management Policy. This is called Addendum 1 - Chalara ash dieback (PDF) [1MB] and has guidelines on how to deal with inspections in your grounds.
Implementing the policy will balance the benefits that the trees in your school provide with the foreseeable hazards that they pose and will help to keep the trees safe for the future.
Compliance - Forms A and B
Form A
This is the inspection sheet for your school to complete to show that the school trees have been inspected according to the intervals in the Site Zoning regime shown in Appendix 1 of the policy.
It must be filed by your school for auditing purposes and retained for ten years.
Form A - Site tree inspection form (Word doc) [12KB]
Form B
This must be completed and sent to the aboricultural officers where a tree is found to have a significant defect, or if a Level 1 inspector wants to make a referral for a more comprehensive inspection.
The arboricultural officers will inspect the tree(s), fill in the relevant parts of the form and return it to your school for action. Once any recommended work is completed, the arboricultural officers must be informed, and Form B should be filed by your school, as per Form A.