To think it's very depressing that school children need to learn this

It is sad that there is a need yes..
I was quite alarmed by it when we were emailed to say this was happening for the time a few years ago.
My DD’s senior school has a weekly ‘lifeskills’ session which each week occurs in their tutor group. In this they discuss things like lockdown drills, contraception, on line safety, mental health, vaping etc….

Ti the people saying lockdown practice takes away from other important drills/safety talks… These drills aren’t a regular occurrence, My daughter comes home and says they’ve done it about once every other year…. While attacks are reasonably rare here these lockdowns are used for various reasons… last year 2 dogs killed a man and were then running around the external school fence, children were called inside, parents were all sent an emergency text telling them not to come to collect their children as their was an incident, the whole school was locked down for several hours while the dogs were captured and PTS & the attacked man dealt with. The children would have been used to having to close all blinds and stay away from the windows due to these practises.
Dog attacks are not rare in the U.K.
Knife crime is not rare in the U.K.. it doesn’t have to be an attacker entering the school, but just a fight or something happening near the school… another local school had a road collision happen near by, it was rather horrific and 2 motorcyclists lost their life’s, The main road was closed and the children were effectively in lockdown until each parent/guardian came via a different entrance to collect their children shortly after drop off…
My DD’s infant school did have a swarm of wasps take over the playground, they didn’t go into lockdown, but all windows had to be closed and we were all informed … they took games etc in as they had playtimes in their classrooms…
Different again but my daughters junior school had one of its pupils that had recently started there, assault the teacher and run into the library screaming and having a tantrum (not sure how else to describe her behaviour)…. The school went into lockdown with all classrooms being locked and the doors all being locked so she couldn’t leave the premises and come to harm….
There are several scenarios where schools lockdown … and as said previously by lots of PP they are often told its for various reasons they’d need to lockdown (and there are lots of reasons).
Children themselves also now take things to school that they shouldn’t, it’s a sad world.
we live in a relatively nice area, but my DD’s school has had 2 occasions where police come in with sniffer dogs to sniff out drugs!
It’s the world we sadly in now.

So bizarre 😫

It may be regional?? I have a daughter in year 9 and she never did this till about 5 years ago… Even then they weren’t told why they were doing it, instead they were told they were practicing encase a horse got out of the field next door, they all had to close blinds and lock doors encase the horse came in the school and was scared… etc…
I did tell my daughter the real reason as I found their explanation very odd and my daughter isn’t silly enough to think horses can open doors.

Ok pick out one line of my post and ignore the rest..... these are the times we (my school community) live in as we have had 3 incidents. Had we done a drill before the first incident we could've prevented some teachers getting injured and some students being traumatised. We do a fire drill twice a year and have never had a fire!

The people who enter schools are looking for a big impact, so surely the normalisation of drills (that's all this really normalises) spreads the word of a school's preparedness and deters people from entering as they know there is much less of a chance they will make their huge impact?

So I take it you would also believe that insisting on helmets for motorbike and bike riders just normalises the notion that drivers can whiz past them?
And making child car seats and seat belts compulsory only normalises the idea that people drive badly?
And xraying baggage in airports only normalises the idea of hijacking planes?
Prisons only serve to normalise the existence of crime?

@Tandora so do you think anyone can walk into schools and nothing should be done?

What do you mean by “intruder”? What do you think the danger is to children in Uk schools? What evidence do you have for this danger? What are the statistics on the number of children who are harmed at school by dangerous intruders?
How do you think this (perceived) danger is proportionally and rationally mitigated? Why? What evidence do you have of this? Do you think there are any other potential consequences of these “harm reduction” measures? How have you weighed these harms?

@Tandora so what do you expect the school to do in these 3 intruder scenarios? What alarm should be sounded (can’t be fire one as everyone would go outside) Do you expect the teachers to scream ‘intruder’ and expect the children to know what to do and calmly.

*but those are the times we live in!

no they aren’t. This is the harm of these drills right here

frightening it may be but sadly it’s how we live today.

no it’s not. This irrational belief is exactly the problem.

fine. I really don’t care what terms we use as long as we all agree what we are talking about.

I don’t have a problem with kids practicing following teacher instructions and filing in and out of classrooms . Apologies if I gave the impression otherwise,

I teach in a school that has had 3 intruders in the space of 7 years. Which is a high statistic. Not all had weapons. Having a drill like this and a plan in place has brought so much reassurance to staff, students, parents and the wider community! Its so sad we have had to do it, and the first time having this procedure in place was mentioned seemed scary, but those are the times we live in!

You've come back again and again to combinations of:

i) "this is daft/stupid/bollocks" (but not why, other than where you have taken the silliest version of what I might be claiming, like that it's locked doors that cause attacks).
ii) "this is insulting" (but not really why teachers should be insulted by me airing a possible concern)
iii) "this is unevidenced" (but I've given significantly more data and rationale in support of my concern than you have in your dismissals, and because it's a concern about how this might evolve in future, it's unsurprising there isn't lots of past data from the UK. But there is from adjacent and relevant things).
iv) "this is unpopular" (basically just a 'you're smelly' argument, repeated twice in case I didn't get it the first time. I'm happy to share a view that might be a minority one on a MN board, and you should be too).
v) "you're bad at your job" (huh?)
vi) "you ran away" (come on... we're discussing schools here, not re-enacting our playground greatest hits).

I don't know whether you are a teacher or not, but I've never met a teacher so unable to rebut an argument that's made in good faith fairly and persuasively, so I'm guessing not.

I agree no adult is doing it on purpose.

I think parallels can be useful, but we need to consider which ones are likely to be the most instructive.

i) is school attack the type of thing (in principle) that is susceptible to social contagion? I think the answer to this is unarguably yes.

ii) can doing drills lead to normalisation? That's harder to know for certain. But we know that in other cases promoting remedies and awareness can increase the problem. I think anorexia, suicide, cutting are more similar (as responses to extreme distress, especially amongst teens, who are the main risk group for school attacks), which is why I'd suggest they probably tell us more than lollypop ladies. And there is pretty clear evidence that poorly-communicated or poorly-targeted campaigns against those things does in fact often lead to increaded prevalence.

iii) but what if school drills are always well-communicated and well-targeted, so they don't raise awareness of school attacks, then surely it's fine? That seems unlikely, as we've seen on this board lots of talk of them as attack drills, including cases where the school itself has said that. Even if the school does not, students and parents do.

iv) does doing drills prevent attacks even if they are attempted? (Maybe the above is irrelevant, if these drills foil 100% of attempted attacks). Again, I wouldn't like to bet on anything being 100% effective.

I'm not saying that drills definitely will increase attacks. But you do seem to be saying they definitely won't, but without very much reasoning.

I'm also not saying that drills are definitely not justifiable in any case, just that the above is a concern worth taking seriously.

I continued to explain carefully, concede points were I could, go over things again from earlier posts.

Nope, you continued to patronise people who actually work in schools by trying to tell them their job and continued to make unevidenced assertions.

As I said, you'll note that no one agrees with you.

Nobody is normalising attacking schools as a response to distress...

doing invacuation drills will not increase the prevalence of attack.

What drives it, is the attacks themselves, not the response to the attack (or prevention of any attacks)

Otherwise you would say, that... security guards in football grounds increase the amount of people who are causing issues. Or... The more lollipop ladies there are, the more likely someone is going to want to hit pedestrians.

It's a bizarre train of thought.

Nobody is normalising attacking schools as a response to distress...

doing invacuation drills will not increase the prevalence of attack.

What drives it, is the attacks themselves, not the response to the attack (or prevention of any attacks)

Otherwise you would say, that... security guards in football grounds increase the amount of people who are causing issues. Or... The more lollipop ladies there are, the more likely someone is going to want to hit pedestrians.

It's a bizarre train of thought.

Oh mate, calling me stupid, have you not noticed that no one agrees with you that lockdown drills could trigger school attacks?

Nor did anyone agree with your point that lockdown drills divert school time away from road safety.

And yet you persist.

Normalisation the idea of attacking schools as a response to distress.

We know that in the US school attacks have a large social-contagion component. We know (including from the UK) that other responses to mental distress, such as suicide, anorexia and cutting do too.

Of course, the fraction of children who act on this will always be small, but it doesn't take very many to cause real harm.

It's not that it becomes 'normal' to attack a school, it's that it becomes thought of as normal that if you are deeply distressed, you might do that. Because we will always have deeply distressed children, we don't want that idea to be common.

I'm not saying this means we definitely should not do drills, just that we should be concerned if this gets thought of, and talked about, as being about attacks, and especially if it gets talked about as 'of course we need it, because of the risk of attack is so high', which is at least a fairly common view judging from this thread.

My DS is 12 and has done a few of these drills in both primary and now secondary school, he said they were told it's in case someone gets in the school with a weapon. He's not phased by it. Although they are also told it's in case a dangerous animal is on the loose but we live near a wildlife park so not that random.

Normalisation of what?

Normalisation of getting somewhere safe in an orderly manner when there's risk of harm?

I'm really not sure I'm getting your point?

Yes, possibly it would be primarily from parents and amongst children. I still think that creates a risk of normalisation we shouldn't entirely ignore. I also don't think we can say no-one in a school would ever link to attacker risk.

I haven't said the main purpose is to deter shooters (not sure how you read that into my posts), so wouldn't personally be saying that, but I take your broader point that these things will get characterised partly beyond the control of the school.

Nobody I. The school will link it to shooter type attacks.

The children will not have heard that in the school from staff

It would be parents like you going "whyyyyy do we need to protect against shooters???!!".

Sorry, pretending to not reply to your post by.... not replying to your post?

And my apology to crumblingschools was sincere. I really did mistake her for you, and when I realised my mistake wanted to apologise because I don't generally like being rude on here. I find it unproductive.

I'm not at all concerned about being rude to you at this point (directly or indirectly... happy to do direct if you like) because that seems to be your register.

The true reason I didn't reply to your final post was because at that point I judged that you are either genuinely very stupid, or (more likely) pretending to be for the purpose of being argumentative, and in either case I have better things to do than engage.

But it's rich of you to spend an afternoon going round and round mis-characterising my points and calling them stupid, daft, bollocks, etc etc. and then turn around and be hurt about tone. You seem very thin-skinned for someone with such a style of discussion.