Is your school still hydrating students the way it did 20 years ago?

Urban Fountains & FurnitureSeptember 8, 2026Last Updated: September 3, 2026

0 2 minutes read

Walk through almost any school today and you’ll see water bottles everywhere. They’re on desks, tucked into backpacks, lined up outside classrooms and carried onto the sports field.

The humble water bottle has become part of everyday school life. But have the facilities used to fill them kept up?

For many schools, drinking water infrastructure was designed for a very different time – when students walked up to a fountain, took a drink and walked away.

Today, students are more likely to arrive at school with a reusable bottle, and when hundreds of students need to refill these throughout the day, the way water is delivered around a school starts to matter.

It’s not just about having water

Your school’s drinking fountain provides access to water but is it in a convenient place where students can easily access it? Can they refill a bottle easily? Is it possible for several students to access it at the same time during a busy lunch break? And, importantly in the Australian climate, is the water something students actually want to drink?

When these seemingly small questions are considered and resolved, they make a big difference to how easily hydration can fit seamlessly into the everyday needs of the school population.

Students shouldn't have to think about their drinking water; about whether they have time to get there in the break, or how many other people might be there doing the same thing. The goal should be to make drinking water the easiest option available.

Rethinking an everyday school essential

Many schools already have well-functioning water stations that can be upgraded instead of replaced. Retrofitting existing units is often more cost-effective, time-efficient, and practical compared to starting from scratch.

For instance, with the Urban+ wall-mounted bottle refill multi-strip, you can easily add bottle-refill capability to existing drinking facilities, while the wall-mounted bottle refill single tap provides a dedicated refill point if a more compact solution is needed.

For schools looking to create a larger central hydration point, the Urban+ hydration station series combines high-capacity chilled drinking water with bottle-filling and drinking bubbler combined, designed specifically for demanding environments such as schools.

The right solution for you will depend what your school needs, the location of the fountain and how students need to use the space.

Start with the students

Perhaps the simplest way to approach your next drinking water upgrade is to start with the students not the fountain. Start by watching what happens around it.

Where are the students coming from?
Are they filling their bottles or just taking a quick drink?
Are queues forming during breaks?
Could more students access water at the same time?
Would another refill point make water easier to access?

Those observations can tell you far more about what your school needs and get you a better outcome than simply replacing old infrastructure with a newer version of the same thing that replicates the old problems.

The best hydration solution isn’t necessarily the biggest or most complicated, it’s the one students actually use.