Cardiff Council is rising to the perpetual challenge of enabling pupils with special needs to integrate as fully as possible into mainstream school life.

Cardiff Council’s Building Services has worked with Closomat to adapt existing facilities within a number of schools across the city so that disabled pupils and their support staff are suitably accommodated.

Safe, hygienic, and dignified use of the WC.

A key feature of the adaptations has been fitting of full room cover ceiling track hoists.

In the past two years alone, Closomat has supplied and installed 10 hoists within wheelchair-accessible WCs, hygiene rooms and changing rooms.

Closomat’s hoists :

  • enable safe transfer of the child from wheelchair to any point within the WC or hygiene, changing room.
  • can, if the space has structural limitations, be secured via discreet, slimline gantry legs/stanchions. – – can accommodate a 200kg/31stlift, and
  • can descend as low as required- even allowing pick-up from the floor.

Thus any pupil with special needs can be safely transferred without any undue strain on support staff, whilst their intimate hygiene needs are addressed.

Explained Claire Haymes, Closomat’s moving & handling expert:

“Every child is different, and has different specific requirements. Equally, each school is different in terms of its facilities, available space and capacity for adaptation. Closomat understands that, and can execute solutions for each specific, in a timely and cost-efficient, compliant manner, that will work. The schools we work with are really happy with the smoothness of the installation, and the difference it has made in enabling a safe process for pupils and staff.”

Part of the whole

Closomat’s range of hoists are part of its comprehensive fixtures to equip a fully functioning wheelchair-accessible toilet or hygiene room within schools, including height adjustable washbasins, wash & dry/ smart WCs, and height-adjustable changing beds.

In addition, Closomat offers an innovative project management service, whereby it can survey, provide design advice, supply, install, and commission assisted accessible WCs, hygiene rooms and Changing Places, to ensure anyone using the school who has special needs, or who supports someone with needs, has an appropriate space, with appropriate equipment, to enable dignified, independent, hygienic and safe intimate hygiene.

White paper

Its expertise is such that it has produced a white paper to help LEA’s comply with all appropriate considerations and Regulations. ‘Considerations & Specification of Assisted Accessible Toilet Facilities in Educational Buildings’ can be downloaded here.

Closomat is believed to be the only specialist provider of assisted toilet solutions that is fully CDM compliant. Its credentials, amassed over almost 60 years of meeting the toilet needs of disabled people, include accessible toilet provision at all levels of educational establishments – special, primary, secondary and tertiary, from a village primary school to Cambridge University.