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School furniture standard BS EN 1729 to be revised

Standards for chairs and tables intended for educational institutions are to be revised following a meeting of Task Group 1 of the Technical Committee responsible for European furniture standards.

The meeting in Germany agreed that the sizemark of a chair or table is not restricted to just its height, therefore to comply with BS EN 1729, both of its parts [size and shape, and strength and stability] need to be complied with.

Stools fall under the terms of BS EN 1729, as they are considered high chairs with or without backrests, but until this meeting they were not explicitly included. However, the size of seat pads is generally smaller in the UK than it is elsewhere in Europe, and consequently almost all UK-produced stools would not be able to comply with the standard. It was agreed that each country would provide the sizes of stools available in their jurisdictions, and these will then be subjected to ergonomic criteria at the next meeting. If smaller sizes are ergonomically acceptable, it may be possible to reduce the requirements in the standard.

Upholstered and swivel chairs with or without gas cylinder adjustments are within the scope of the standard, but measurement methods may need to be modified to suit their characteristics; this will be discussed at the next meeting.

The next meeting will also discuss dimensions for armrests (with FIRA’s Levent Caglar providing anthropometric data), and also the use of a dummy in the test method [as is used for example in BS EN 1335-1], taking into account backrest angle, seat depth and height of Point S.

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