FIRE SAFETY LIVE AND LEARN Malcolm Crummey, Sales Manager UK & Ireland at TOA Corporation UK,


explains why FMs need to be aware of the impor tance of school lockdown procedures and why an integrated alarm and communication system can make children safer.


The word lockdown might appear to be a dramatic ‘Americanism’ that is usually associated with riots in prisons, but it is now being used to refer to situations where invacuation is more appropriate than evacuation as a means of preventing people moving into danger areas.


Schools and other educational establishments are not immune to events that could require such a measure to be taken and a terrorist incident, a traffic accident, an intruder, air pollution, a nearby fire, or even a dangerous animal roaming around outside are just a few of the situations that could necessitate a lockdown.


GROWING CONCERN Reports of educational establishments in the UK that have had to resort to this procedure are now commonplace and in June 2017 three unrelated incidents caused three separate schools in the West Midlands to go into lockdown within 24 hours – one of which involved a gunman shooting at a cyclist who fled into a premises.


Meanwhile, in March this year a number of schools in London, Durham, Cambridgeshire, Devon, Cornwall, the West Midlands and Northumbria received threatening emails warning that children were to be mown down by a car at a specific time. Although the emails were treated as a hoax many of the schools kept pupils inside as a precaution.


Although such incidents are the stuff of nightmares for parents, schools now realise that they need a coherent strategy for lockdown procedures. Surprisingly, there is no statutory requirement to have a lockdown policy or procedure, and schools can simply choose to have one if they feel that it would help them to manage risks.


There are growing calls for this to be addressed, with the Department for Education’s (DfE) advice that all schools should have their own emergency plans, ‘which they can develop with the help of local police forces and their local authority’ considered highly unsatisfactory.


The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) has been vocal in its call for more specific government guidance and Chris Keates, its General Secretary, recently commented: “The safety of children and staff in schools should be a key priority for the government. Their health and wellbeing cannot be left to ad hoc arrangements. The government needs a coherent national strategy on lockdown procedures.”


TAKE NOTE This is a far cry from the situation in many countries such as Germany, for example, where the DIN VDE V 0827 standard for emergency and danger response systems was implemented


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