The right school lockers cut corridor congestion, reduce lost property and give pupils somewhere secure for coats, bags, devices and PE kit. The wrong ones jam, get climbed on, or cost several times what they needed to. This guide covers how to specify school lockers for a UK primary or secondary setting — sizes, locking, safeguarding, and the arithmetic that decides most of the budget.
A correction to an earlier version of this guide
An earlier version of this page told you that we supply "a full choice of cam, hasp, coin-return and electronic locks" on "welded steel" lockers. We have since audited all 67 Probe lockers in our catalogue against their published specifications, and neither half of that was right.
- "cam lock" appears 201 times across the 67 products.
- "cold-rolled" and "mild steel" each appear 182 times; "powder" appears 197 times.
- "hasp", "padlock", "coin-return", "electronic", "welded" and "sheet steel" each appear zero times.
So the lockers we sell are cold-rolled mild steel, powder-coated, with a Type A cam lock on every compartment. They are formed, not welded, and they do not come with hasp, padlock, coin-return or electronic locking. The general education about lock types below is still worth reading — but where this guide previously implied you could order those locks from us, it was wrong, and it has been corrected. Our locker lock types guide explains the wider market honestly, including what these alternatives cost to run.
What a school locker from us actually is
Every Probe locker in the range shares one specification, and the variation is all in format:
- Full height — but not one height. The metric, PowerBox, vision panel and perforated ranges are 1800 mm; all 19 Standard Imperial lockers are 1780 mm. That 20 mm, on top of the 5–7 mm depth difference, means metric and imperial nests will not line up at the top or sit flush at the face in a single run — check which standard an existing installation is before you extend it. Cold-rolled mild steel, powder-coated.
- Type A cam lock on every compartment, fitted as standard.
- Door counts of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 and 16 per column.
- Single, double, triple or wide-format — one, two or three columns joined into a single nest.
- Flat or sloping tops; solid, laser-cut perforated or vision-panel doors.
- Metric (300, 380, 450 mm) or imperial (305, 381, 457 mm) column sizes.
- Three carcass colours and seven door colours — 21 combinations, all at the same price.
Door count is stated per column. A 10-door triple-width nest is 10 doors across 3 columns, so it holds 30 pupils, not 10. That distinction is where most locker quotes go wrong.
Getting the size right — and the sizing advice that costs six times more
The conventional advice, which this guide used to give, is that primary pupils need a tall compartment for a coat, bag and lunch, so "a 1 to 3-door locker works well". That is true about the compartment and expensive about the purchase.
Across all 67 lockers we stock, price per compartment runs from £52.89 to £366.91 — a spread of nearly seven times — and the tall single-door units sit at the top of it. A 1-door locker is £324.04 to £366.91 for one pupil. A 10-door triple-width nest is £1,621.61 for thirty, or £54.05 each.
| Configuration | Pupils per unit | From | Per pupil |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Metric 10-door double (300 mm) | 20 | £1,057.87 | £52.89 |
| Standard Metric 10-door triple | 30 | £1,621.61 | £54.05 |
| Standard Metric 6-door triple | 18 | £990.64 | £55.04 |
| Perforated 6-door triple | 18 | £1,040.17 | £57.79 |
| Standard Imperial 6-door double | 12 | £801.18 | £66.77 |
| Standard Imperial 4-door triple | 12 | £954.26 | £79.52 |
| Vision Panel 1-door | 1 | £324.04 | £324.04 |
Worked properly, for a year group of 180:
- Six 10-door triple-width nests — 180 compartments — £9,729.66.
- Ten 6-door triple-width nests — 180 compartments — £9,906.40.
- Fifteen imperial 6-door double-width nests — 180 compartments — £12,017.70.
- One hundred and eighty 1-door lockers — £58,327.20.
That is a factor of six on the same steel to the same height. The honest way to read it: decide the compartment size the pupils genuinely need, then buy it in the largest nest the wall will take, because carcasses cost money and doors do not. Three columns share their internal walls; three separate single-width bays do not.
For primaries, where a coat and a bag really do need the height, the compromise that usually works is a 3 or 4-door column bought in triple width rather than a 1 or 2-door column bought singly. For secondaries, 6, 8 and 10-door columns fit a whole form group along one corridor wall.
One more sizing note that costs almost nothing: going deeper is cheap. Moving a 300 mm column from 300 mm to 450 mm deep — half as much usable space again — costs roughly 5 to 10 per cent. If bags, coats and PE kit are all going in the same compartment, take the depth.
Sloping tops in corridors cost £24.77 a column
Sloping tops stop litter and bags accumulating, and stop pupils sitting or climbing on the units. That advice is unchanged, and it is now possible to price it exactly.
We compared every configuration that exists in both tops. The premium is not a percentage — it is a flat £24.77 per column, on every range and every door count:
| Configuration | Flat top | Sloping top | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metric 10-door triple (3 columns) | £1,621.61 | £1,695.92 | +£74.31 |
| Metric 6-door triple (3 columns) | £990.64 | £1,064.95 | +£74.31 |
| Imperial 8-door double (2 columns) | £1,005.19 | £1,054.74 | +£49.55 |
| Imperial 6-door double (2 columns) | £801.18 | £850.72 | +£49.54 |
| PowerBox 16-door (1 column) | £1,058.65 | £1,083.42 | +£24.77 |
Because it is charged per column rather than per door, the sloping top gets cheaper per pupil the more doors the column has. On a 10-door column it is £2.48 a pupil; on a 4-door column it is £6.19. For that 180-pupil year group in 10-door triples, sloping tops add £445.86 to a £9,729.66 order — 4.6% — to remove climbing and litter from a corridor permanently. That is an easy decision, and it is easiest of all on the high-density units.
Where the run sits under a window line, a low ceiling or a shelf, or where the top surface is genuinely useful, flat tops keep the overall height down and save the £24.77. Otherwise, in a corridor, specify sloping.
Locking: what you get, and how to handle keys
Every compartment comes with a Type A cam lock. That is the whole locking specification, and planning around it is more useful than wishing for something else.
The practical school problem with keyed cam locks is not security, it is key administration across a year group. What works:
- Ask about suiting and master keying at the point of order. Retro-fitting a master system to an installed bank is far more expensive than specifying it up front — and note that our Probe product data does not state a master-key or suiting option, so this is a question to put to us in writing rather than an assumption. See the caveat below.
- Issue keys against a signed register, with a deposit if your policy allows one, and a single named owner of the spare set.
- Allocate for the year, not the term. Cam locks suit allocated lockers with a named user; they do not suit a day-use pool where compartments must free themselves.
- If you need a day-use pool — common in leisure-style PE changing rooms — coin-return or resettable combination locking is the right tool, and it is not something this range provides. Our lock types guide sets out what those systems cost to own, including the point most quotes omit: an electronic lock is a maintenance item with a replacement cycle, and two hundred of them is a recurring job somebody has to be given.
PE kit, wet areas and ventilation
Damp PE kit in a solid steel compartment is the single commonest complaint about school lockers. The answer is laser-cut perforated doors, which give constant airflow through every compartment while keeping the carcass and floor in full solid steel and the doors reinforced.
The constraint is worth knowing before you plan the room: we stock four perforated configurations and every one of them is triple width — 4, 5 and 6 doors, sloping top, plus a 6-door flat top. There is no perforated single or double-width nest. If the PE changing room only has a narrow run available, ventilated lockers will not fit it, and the alternative is a solid-door locker with the room ventilated instead. Browse the perforated locker range to see the four.
For permanently wet areas — poolside, shower lobbies — steel is the wrong material regardless of perforation, and a laminate or polymer product is the correct specification. We do not stock those, and would rather say so than sell you steel for a pool.
Device charging for one-to-one schemes
Where pupils are issued laptops or tablets, PowerBox charging lockers combine a cam-locked compartment with an on-board charging outlet, on certified internal wiring with a single mains feed and an external safety isolator, CE/UKCA marked.
Two figures decide the specification:
- Mains is the cheap option and USB is the expensive one. A 16-door column with 3-pin UK mains is £1,058.65; the same column with USB-A and USB-C is £1,661.48 — £602.83 more. But adding mains on top of USB costs only £109.13, about 6.6%. If USB is on the specification at all, take the combined unit.
- Buy the tall column. The 16-door mains locker works out at £66.17 per pupil — cheaper per compartment than several non-charging imperial configurations. At the other end, the 4-door charging locker is £243.93 per compartment, and the 8-door costs only £11.59 more in total for four more compartments.
Our laptop charging locker guide covers sizing a charging bank against a device fleet, and if the school is charging lithium devices in bulk it is worth reading how to charge lithium batteries safely alongside it.
Child safety, safeguarding and installation
Specification points that matter more in a school than anywhere else:
- Fix every bank. Lockers should be fixed back-to-wall or bolted into banks so a column cannot be pulled over. This is not optional with younger children. Note that floor and wall fixings are not supplied with the lockers — the fixing method has to suit your floor construction and is a design-stage decision, not a delivery-day one.
- Plan authorised access. Safeguarding sometimes requires a locker to be opened without the pupil. With cam locks that means a controlled spare-key or master arrangement and a written procedure for who may use it.
- Vision panels where oversight matters. Vision panel lockers carry a reinforced acrylic panel in a powder-coated steel surround so staff can check contents without unlocking. They are a single-column product at premium rates — sensible for a targeted safeguarding need, not for fitting out a corridor.
- Check the layout against fire routes. Banks must not obstruct exits or reduce corridor widths below your evacuation requirement. Allow for door swing as well as the locker footprint.
- Use colour to zone. Seven door colours at no extra cost means year groups or houses can be colour-coded for free. Numbered door plates make allocation and roll-call simple.
- Plan the changing room, not just the lockers. Bench seating, circulation and the gap between a bench and a locker door decide whether a PE room works at changeover. Our changing room layout guide and the cloakroom benches range cover it.
What the product data does not state
Across all 67 Probe lockers, the specification gives no warranty period, no lead time, no stock status, no master-key or suiting option, and no steel gauge. Every one of those terms appears zero times. We will not invent them. If a warranty, a delivery date for the start of term, or a suited master-key system is a condition of your order — and on a school project at least one of them usually is — ask us to confirm it with Probe in writing before you commit. Treat a competitor quoting a gauge or a warranty on a comparable product as something to see the document for.
One thing we do not do
Two of the top ten results for "school lockers" in the UK are locker rental businesses, where the school pays nothing up front and pupils or parents pay an annual fee. That is a genuinely different commercial model and for some schools it is the right one. We sell lockers; we do not rent them. If a rental scheme is what your budget needs, those suppliers are the ones to talk to — and it is worth comparing their total cost over a locker's service life against the per-pupil figures above, because a Probe locker specified properly lasts decades.
Where to start
Work in this order: decide the compartment size, choose the largest nest your wall run will take, add sloping tops if it is a corridor, add perforated doors if it is PE, and settle key administration before the order rather than after. Then browse the full lockers category or the Probe collection, and read how to choose metal lockers for the workplace for the general sizing and locking logic. Fitting out a leisure-style changing room instead? Start with gym and leisure lockers. Kitting out staff areas at the same time? Staff and workplace lockers covers that side, and steel cupboards versus lockers settles the case where what the department actually needs is a shelved cupboard.