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

Lockdown drills are absolutely essential although I agree it’s sad. My children had one in their primary school, it was real. A pupil had brought a knife to school and was chasing their sibling around the playground with it following an argument.

A lot of parents removed their children from the school afterwards. Although they managed the drill perfectly well and all of our children were safe. This child was back in class the next morning, parents weren’t notified of the incident at all. It wasn’t until our children came home absolutely terrified after witnessing it that parents knew something had happened. The school refused to acknowledge that parents should have been made aware and called the children lists in regards to the knife. Police got involved with a statement and sure as anything, the children weren’t lying.

If that’s a response to me, why do you think it’s stupid?

We should focus our safety efforts on the biggest risks (or rather, on the risks where our efforts can have the greatest good).

We should remember all choices involve trade-offs.

We can’t allocate all of the school day to safety training, so we should pick wisely.

We should do that based on evidence, because what better approach is there?

I'm in my 40s and we had these drills when I was at school. For younger age groups, the teachers used to say it was because there was a dog in the playground 🤔not sure how that was supposed to help with the stay away from the window bit though!

That logic is stupid.

I think if the drill is just practicing lining up and being quick, with no association made with an attack (even by the children), that is probably not doing much direct harm.

There’s still counterfactual harm though from getting priorities wrong. If any significant time is spent on this, rather than, say road safety or drowning, then there are almost certainly many children dead now who would have been alive because of that choice. 50-60 children a year die on roads, 10-20 by drowning, 10 or so by accidental poisoning, 10 or so by other accidents. I can barely find any UK deaths by in-school attacks. ChatGPT says 1-2 per decade.

So you really have to think you’ve reached as close to perfection as you can get in road, water, accident awareness training before you should divert time to school attacks.

There's no lockdown that does this.
They aren't all hiding in terror under their desks.

It's all about, get inside and away from the danger, be still and silent (just like a fire drill).
Teacher's may lock them in the room, that's the only difference.

But these drills aren’t just about potential shooters coming into the school, many of us have given examples where they might/have been used.

Many incidences where an invacuation has had to be performed won’t involve hiding under desks. Many of them will be just to get children into class quickly and calmly with no dawdling, running back to get a jumper, stopping in the cloakroom to go through a bag, getting your water bottle, and any other distraction a child can think of. If children are out at break and an invacuation was required, so break had to end early it would be quite hard to get children in quickly without some of them (and possibly some staff) stopping to ask why. If they have practised an invacuation drill it will be much easier

These parallels don’t hold. You don’t increase the chance of a fire by holding a standard fire drill. I bet if you started holding ‘arson drills’ in schools you would increase arson, via normalisation.

And as for drowning, it’s a good question. The answer is that children are far more likely to die of drowning than in a school attack (about 20-40 child drowning deaths a year), so ifs perfectly consistent to support teaching about drowning but not teaching about school attacks, even if you ignore the worry about normalisation.

Yes, I also wonder if they really are beneficial.

Firstly, the chance of a dangerous intrusion is low (someone here said once a month in the UK, so that’s a tiny chance for any given school, then you need to further reduce to get to situations for which the drill does any good).

But more worryingly, if the children are calling this shooter drills, we are normalizing the idea of attacking schools as a response to upset.

Given how much we know social contagion affects suicide (another response to mental distress), especially amongst teens, we may well even be increasing the likelihood of attacks directly.

And because the base rate is so low, if that’s true then we are almost certainly hurting (increasing attack likelihood) more than helping (reducing risk of harm, if there is an attack).

Surely arguing against lockdown drills is equivalent to arguing against fire drills in the workplace. A fire at work is fairly unlikely for most, but it is vital that people know what to do. Likewise, the safety briefing on an aircraft.

Then you don't have a problem with lockdown drills, you have a problem with children sitting under desks.

And yet look at the proportion of pp’s on this thread who say their schools have never had one, and yet they seem to have escaped schools unscathed…🤔

I think part of the issue here is we are somewhat talking past each other. People seem to be using “lockdown drills” as a very broad umbrella term- sometimes referring to practical, harmless practices and sometimes referring to potentially alarming and completely irrational practices.

Obviously im not against children practicing listening to the teacher’s instructions and lining up/ filing in and out of the classroom in a quick and orderly manner (including in the context of fire drills). if thats what people are calling “lockdown” and saying is fine and necessary of course I have no objection- and I don’t think these are scary for children.

As I have repeatedly said the issue I have is with the lockdown drills that involve children hiding under desks to escape from a murderous intruder. These are starting to take place in schools and its just irrational, generates fear and completely unnecessary .

Indeed. As i said upthread my children's' small, rural independent of only 600 children in one of the safest places in the UK statistically has used it 3 times in the past 10 years.

@Tandora do you think schools shouldn’t have any safeguarding measures like lockable gates, intercom system to get into office, no adults without relevant DBS to be able to walk round school on their own, no DBS checks etc.

It is not only children’s behaviour that has ramped up over the last few years so has parents behaviour. The angry parent on site is a reason to have procedures in place to maintain child safety, invacuation is one of those procedures. Knife crime is on the increase. If there was an altercation outside the school or nearby then again invacuation might be a good idea.

A dysregulating child in the playground might result in an invacuation, wouldn’t involve hiding under desks but just removing other children from the area (in same way children leave a classroom if another child is dysregulating). Getting more common as many children’s needs can’t be met in mainstream school but no places in special schools.

You seem to think that these lockdown drills are superfluous because they are never used.

They are used, more than you'd think.

This precisely!

Yep- no fire drills then. They hardly ever happen so why scare the kids by practicing?. No teaching swimming students how to float on their back and raise a hand for the RNLI or lifeguards. How often do people drown after all?

It is of no benefit to anyone to put your head in the sand and pretend that life means skipping through a field of flowers every day.

Ok. So we shouldn't drill for fires? When the last time a school had a fire??

Let's imagine , there was an aggressive dog on school grounds, it had got in and was in the playground. Or a horse. It...a cow. It happens. And is potentially dangerous.

You'd be fine with the school having no procedures in place to get the kids inside and safe? You'd be thinking "well there's nothing the school could have or should have done to prevent this? They definitely didn't need to drill for a invacuation"???

It's not just about a madman with a knife.

It’s sad that we have to teach our children lots of things, from knife crime, internet predators etc but best to prepare them that life isn’t all a bed of roses in an age appropriate way.

It’s fascinating that almost everyone on this thread believes we “have” to do these things “nowadays” because there is a serious threat to children in schools.
This is one of the reason that these drills are not harmless/ neutral activities imv- because they reinforce these beliefs/ exaggerated perceptions of serious threats. It’s fear mongering, it’s totally disproportionate and it’s not rational. This is not healthy in any society.

All true @Amberlynnswashcloth . But practicing cements muscle memory and makes things automatic, IMO.

It's a shame we even have to think of such things nowadays.

I think a better place to start would be to improve the general behaviour in schools. So many children are used to running riot and disrespecting teachers, it makes me wonder how effective are these measures would be when needed. Children should be expected to always listen to the teacher, follow instruction with immediate effect, know how to walk in single file, sit in silence etc. If they are used to doing these things then an emergency situation will be easier to manage.

DD and DS never had to do this, on the other hand they did have to learn to hide under tables as part of the earthquake drill.

I had to do a lockdown practice when teaching early years, that was about 8 years ago. It's not the easiest thing to explain to children that young and it's very sad we even have to do it.

The issue with intruders or events that spill off the street onto school property has been around a long time; it's one of the reasons why all schools have high fences around them now - and that started in the mid to late 90's!