School fined after pupil loses 8 fingers

Giles School in Lincolnshire has been fined £16,500 and ordered to pay £2,500 costs following an accident where a student lost 8 fingers when her hands got stuck in a bucket of plaster of Paris during an art lesson.

In January 2007 the girl was making a plaster cast of her hands as part of an art lesson. She had been told by the teacher to put her hands into wet clay to make a mould. However, she put her hands up to the wrist in a bucket of plaster, which within minutes began to set and heat up causing her hands to become trapped. Teachers and paramedics could not remove her hands and the plaster was eventually removed using power tools at Nottingham City Hospital.

The 16 year old girl suffered serious burns and had 12 operations to try and save her fingers including a number of skin grafts from other parts of her body which has left her severely scarred. The girl has been left with no fingers on one hand and only two on the other.

HSE investigations showed that the girl had been shown the correct way to make a mould, but another pupil had immersed his or her hands in plaster in a previous lesson. The school admitted breaching health and safety rules and failing to report the matter to the HSE, which only found out about what happened from the girl's plastic surgeon.