Do a quick online search for school lockdown incidents in the past 12 months and you might be surprised by how many news stories appear. Thankfully, the majority were precautionary and didn’t escalate. But if an incident suddenly unfolded at your school, how prepared would you actually be?
What happens in a school lockdown?
Locking a school down involves being able to rapidly restrict the ability of people to enter and leave the building (or part of it) by using physical measures as soon as a threat’s detected. It stops someone who wants to cause harm from reaching others, keeping pupils, staff and visitors in as safe a location as possible and preventing them from moving into a more dangerous area.
A partial lockdown could result from an external risk such as a reported incident in the community, in which case pupils and staff would remain inside school buildings with all external doors locked. A full lockdown could be an escalation of a partial lockdown or invoked in its own right if the threat was targeted directly at the school. It could involve additional actions like locking internal doors where possible and closing blinds to keep people out of the sight of the perpetrator.
School lockdowns can be triggered for various reasons
Accepting that schools need to be prepared for these kinds of threats is difficult. But sadly, some schools have suddenly found themselves facing situations with the potential to escalate fast. And in those circumstances, they had to react quickly. An ex-student refusing to leave school reception triggered lockdown at this school in Lichfield. In this incident in north Wales, the threatening behaviour of one pupil towards another led to a precautionary lockdown to protect everyone in the school.
Sometimes situations in the community lead to lockdowns to reduce risk to everyone inside a nearby school. In October, Chichester High School went into lockdown when a youth who was being pursued by police entered its grounds. In Ruthin in north Wales, reports of an armed man in the locality resulted in four schools locking down while police carried out a search of the area.
None of these incidents resulted in injuries. But on rare occasions, it can happen. In April last year, a school in Ammanford in South Wales went into immediate lockdown when a pupil attacked and injured two teachers and another student.
How quickly could your school go into lockdown?
Currently, there isn’t a specific legal requirement to have a school lockdown procedure. But over the past few years, it’s become an increasingly high priority for local councils and schools as part of their duty of care and to meet health and safety and safeguarding obligations.
There’s extensive government and council guidance available about creating lockdown procedures and completing risk assessments that identify the actions and measures needed to protect a school building. Many schools will already have physical measures in place to ensure a good level of security like lockable external gates, perimeter fencing and procedures that limit access to parts of the school building beyond the visitor reception area. And actions like regular lockdown drills and training are important elements of being prepared if faced with a threat.
The role of lockdown systems
But the requirement to respond at speed to a threat means additional measures may be needed. Ideally a lockdown should ensure a high level of security within moments as sadly in some situations even a few seconds could have a significant impact on the outcome.
This is where lockdown systems have a vital role to play. They combine several different measures such as a lockdown-specific alarm (to avoid being mistaken for the fire alarm which could accidentally trigger an evacuation and end up moving people to a more dangerous location). They could include communication systems for rapid notification and liaison both internally and externally. And access control can be set up to secure areas within moments. Different levels of functionality can be set, restricting or enabling access as required in your lockdown planning and procedures. Lockdown systems can be integrated with existing security infrastructure too, like CCTV cameras, to enable immediate monitoring of the situation.
There’s extensive variation in terms of both the layouts of schools and types of security systems already in place. That’s why every lockdown system is designed to meet an individual school’s requirements, providing a rapid response to potential threats with literally a touch of a button. No one starts the school day expecting to be faced with a threat. But having a lockdown system in place provides reassurance that you’ll be in a position to respond to that threat within moments, reducing its impact and providing time for emergency services to arrive and take control of the situation.
Please get in touch if you’d like to know more about school lockdown systems
The chances of an incident occurring are still comparatively low. But if a situation did suddenly arise, the consequences of not being prepared could be serious.
Having a lockdown system in place helps your school be as prepared as possible for any eventuality. We can design a bespoke lockdown system designed according to the layout and existing security infrastructure of your school premises. If you’d like to have an initial chat with us to find out more, please do get in contact.