The School Toilet Project
You can lead a horse to a bathroom but you can’t make him use the facilities!
To be fair, this is quite the challenge, no matter what the bathroom looks like! But for children, we CAN provide clean, inviting, inclusive environments for them to be able to poo and wee.
And yet, unfortunately, this is not happening in a large number of schools across the UK.
Schools Week reported this week on a poll of National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) members. “Just under two-thirds of them said their toilet blocks were unsuitable, with 8 per cent saying theirs were closed.”
Schools are stuck in an impossible situation. Refurbishing toilets is costly, yet local authority and government funding often excludes this type of work. Industry grants tend to be directed towards charities, and asking parents for financial support is frequently not viable. Schools rely on maintaining parental confidence, and openly revealing just how poor the facilities are can be a risky move.
UK research highlights that inadequate school toilets are not a minor facilities issue but a significant public health, wellbeing, and educational concern.
Haines Lyon, C., Little, A., Dobson, E., Glover, O., Patterson, J., Telford, J., & Noret, N. (2024). Toilet talk: using a students as researchers approach to problematize and co-construct school toilet policy and practice. Gender and Education, 36(7), 801–816. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2024.2389108
Whale, K., Cramer, H. and Joinson, C. (2018), Left behind and left out: The impact of the school environment on young people with continence problems. Br J Health Psychol, 23: 253-277. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12284
Research, reports and articles date back decades and yet one of the most recent, a poll conducted by ParentKind in June 2025, shows the lack of progress:
State of School Toilets Report 2025
So why is the situation not improving?
That’s what we’re hoping to find out through the ‘Working Together Project’ and the ‘School Toilet Project’. I am loving working alongside the amazing Dr Charlotte Haines Lyon, Associate Professor at York St John University who, like me, can shoehorn the subject of school toilets into any respectable conversation!
We have teamed up with Dr Carol Joinson, Dr Lucy Beasant and Dr Katie Whale from Bristol University as well as Brenda Cheer and Sunni Liston, Paediatric bowel and bladder nurse specialists working with ERIC, The Children’s Bowel and Bladder Charity and Trish Wray, retired headteacher.
The group are passionate and committed to bringing about change and we hope to enlist the most incredible steering group to help us solve this conundrum. We need to find a way forward to ensure that ALL children have the access to hygienic toilets that they deserve.
If you are interested in the work we are doing or have a story to share, please do reach out via our ‘Contact Page’