Treat school laboratories seriously, they’re the ultimate stress test environment for products and procedures and for shaping behaviours, urges Isabel Murphy. Even lab managers and suppliers can learn something.

From mislabelling conical flasks in school to million-dollar recalls, sample integrity is paramount. It ensures quality control in the laboratory, specimen preservation in stable, undegraded states and maintains originality from collection to analysis. Some 70% of experimental errors arise pre-analysis, so protecting result compliance and reproducibility via sample integrity is key to empirical science.

School labs are the first place sample integrity is pressurised, yet it is often assumed that mistakes made there do not matter as the science isn’t real. However, foundations are laid in school labs, concreted in higher education and highly controlled in the workplace, owing to the fragility of sample integrity regardless of research level. Good practice becomes part of one’s professional identity regardless.

From school to research labs, what changes?

In schools, students typically learn to label samples, avoid contamination and record observations, having closely followed a protocol.

However, Jane [name changed for publication], a laboratory technician at a co-ed state secondary school and sixth form in Essex, notes: “Any mislabelling would just be corrected by myself. I tend to put out chemicals for class use in petri dishes, I always write on the lid and the base in case the lids get mixed up.”

Evidently, school technicians and science teachers alike act as informal integrity officers, bearing partial responsibility for handling samples and teaching students how to do so with increasing independence over time.

Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) theoretically becomes habitual from a young age, translating into early research lab work and beyond. Habits often outlast technical skills, emphasising the need for worthwhile, formative sample integrity in lower education.

Typical constraints in schools

Integrity becomes difficult to uphold with the high turnaround school lab apparatus and reagents experience. Communal reagent bottles are the standard, passing through hundreds of hands daily with little ownership once experiments end. If spatulas, pipettes or stirrers are not used with care, stock bottle integrity rapidly depletes, impeding future experiments.

Jane acknowledges: “In a learning environment this is not necessarily much of a problem. If samples were left in the labs, contamination by other students could occur, so I always provide suitable containers for any samples being kept and remove them from the lab until needed again.”

Concern lies at the point where contamination becomes a safety risk. Here, fortunately, CLEAPSS supports educators to deliver safe, high-quality practicals, something Jane favours accessing regularly.

School technicians and science teachers alike act as informal integrity officers, bearing partial responsibility for handling samples and teaching students how to do so with increasing independence over time

“I can only speak for myself as a technician, but I do quite a lot of research on the CLEAPPS website and YouTube into the best way of performing experiments requested by teachers. I bear in mind safety, effectiveness, ease of procedure and try to minimise use of large quantities of chemicals and apparatus.”

She herself often provides teaching staff with her own version of instruction cards, an example perhaps of how much these environments are dependent on an individual’s degree of motivation.

“I am fairly sure this is not the norm for a science technician role,” she admits, “but, as I am the sole technician in a new school, I have made the job my own and this is something I enjoy doing.”

GLP, established in training ground school laboratories, and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), underpin sample integrity. These practices are escalated in research labs with greater respect for contamination prevention and labelling accuracy.

Documentation of ethical data handling and chain of custody (CoC) permit increased traceability. This becomes more prevalent in industry with greater budgets, time and automation, though sample integrity-protective behaviours still build on foundational habits acquired in school.

While science staff bear responsibility for handling samples and teaching students how to do so, suppliers also contribute. Pre-custody, they provide containers, labels, CoC forms and shipping materials. Following collection, a technician usually completes CoC documentation which is procedural rather than legally required in schools, witnessing perhaps more gaps than in industry.

Reagent storage is then often limited by physical space and climate-controlled facilities in schools. Jane details: “I do a stock take once a year around the same time I do my main order; I check the dates on the chemicals then.”

However, most of the chemicals used don’t degrade, she outlines, while “lots don’t even have an expiry date on the pot”.

That said, the existence of a few chemicals that are hygroscopic requires her to take into account the likelihood students may be less careful with the products.

Inaccuracies arise more often and are harder to ignore. They act as stress-test environments for labware too, offering durability proof and troubleshooting opportunities. Equipment and materials are repeatedly used by mixed ability students and in imperfect conditions

“I only decant small quantities of these for class use and keep the main stock in the chemical store in an airtight container. If I do have to dispose of a chemical, I refer to the guidance on the CLEAPPSS HazCards.”

Additional integrity constraints include capped budgets leading to improper apparatus cleaning; not all schools can afford autoclaves for example. Time-restricted teaching labs often cause students to rush note-taking, recording results and labelling too.

School labs are not simplified professional labs, they are compressed versions where sample fundamentals are taught under constrained conditions. Inaccuracies arise more often and are harder to ignore. They act as stress-test environments for labware too, offering durability proof and troubleshooting opportunities. Equipment and materials are repeatedly used by mixed ability students and in imperfect conditions.

There is a symbiotic relationship between school and research labs; practicals test equipment and people ahead of professional work, benefiting both parties.

Schools act as high pressure, low margin environments to reinforce careful sample handling and integrity.

That said, Jane confesses: “It would be great if more complex apparatus the like of which would be seen in professional labs could be provided and used in school science labs. “It would be great to carry out more complex science with ‘real world’ equipment.”

• Isabel Murphy is a BSc Biomedical Science graduate from the University of Warwick