"Safety procedure" at school..anyone heard of it

[josiewosiee]

A friend mentioned today that her dd school had practiced a safety procedure at school, where shutters come down, doors are locked and children go under the desks. I have never heard of it, but apparently it is happening in all schools. To be honest, it frightened me a little. First I have heard of it though, anyone else heard of it

I manage a public building and we have invacuation procedures as well as evacuation.

Not just for intruders but in case there is an incident outside.

Remember the shouts of 'dog on the field' and everyone was herded indoors. It's that.

My Dcs' secondary school (Yorkshire) did their first lock down practice last year. They were told it was in case a dangerous dog got in the school or similar, not sure why as I'm sure most secondary school aged kids know the more likely reasons. My youngest Dc's primary hasn't done it.

NW secondary teacher here, we've done lockdown practice. My son's school had to put it into practice when a body was found (suicide) in woods behind the school.

DD's secondary have a lockdown procedure and did it once last year (practice run). DD wasn't really aware what was happening as the teacher she had calmly locked the door of the classroon and continued the lesson without a pause or any fuss.

Yes my children’s school does this: “Dog loose on the field”. But it’s lockdown.

We do lockdown drills at the school where I teach. Started about 4 years ago I think. Secondary in the South East, not a big city.

We have 2 types of lockdown. One is door and windows locked, carry on teaching as normal. We've had to do this 'for real' once - when a vulnerable student went missing and needed to be tracked down quickly.

The other is locks, blinds down, screens/lights off, students under desks. I think it's very unlikely we'd need a full lockdown in real life, but it's also unlikely we'd have a fire and we have regular fire drills.

We do lockdown practice as frequently as we do fire drills. It is standard practice in all primary and secondary schools in our borough.

We don't tell parents about them in advance, in the same way that we never tell them about fire drills.

We have had one incident where the lockdown was genuine. Thankfully the children weren't phased by it as they were so well practised.

Sign of the times. Very sad this is a necessity in today’s world.

Ours have lock down
We had protect and survive (old) not that hiding under a desk would have actually protected us from ☢️ I think I was 4 or 5 for the first

It's not standard. No school In my area does it

London school here and lockdown drill is practised at least annually. The school had to go into partial lockdown last year when there was a gunman on the loose near school so am very pleased that they have practised procedures.

When I worked in a school, we once had a man come in and claim he had explosives strapped to him. Thankfully he didn’t, but we had lockdown drills after that. This is in the south east.

My daughters school do lockdown drill, I remember approx 12/13 years ago when my older children attended the same school the police chased a man who ran into the school grounds and though an open window with the police in hot pursuit.
Thankfully he ran through an empty class then was collared in the corridors.

Since then they have put up a 6ft fence and have an intercom to enetr the school within teaching hours.

posted too soon, that chap was being chased for attempted burglary.

The playgrounds at my youngest child's primary school are like fort Knox to get into at 9:05am, let alone the school itself.

The lockdown drill we haven't quite mastered yet is when 500 primary children are outside at lunch and they need to come in. Huge playgrounds and only 2 doors to file through. Have had tweaks but still working on it!

Yes, we've got one. My heart rate actually went through the roof last time - it was quite scary!

I work in a school, we have a lock down procedure and a lock down alarm. The buttons are under my desk, they might have been set off by mistake before 😬

Several schools and nursery’s around here had to go into lockdown when a guy with a knife was on the loose. DN was completely unaware of what was going on he just enjoyed sitting singing songs.

Primary teacher here in the north west in a state school.
Lockdown procedure is practised routinely just as a fire drill would be.
All age appropriate (we look for the cosiest place to read a book) and we keep the children occupied until we receive a phone call into class to say it’s safe to carry on as normal.
We close the blinds on our classroom, lock the door and put chairs against the doors.
It helps us to plan for occurrences such as a child being out of class at the toilet or those outside doing PE etc to make sure everyone is accounted for.
Standard practise in our area of north Manchester.

I'm in the south east and we have them an alarm goes off saying this is a full lockdown and we have to lock the doors and hide. My children's school do them too.

It's been DfE guidance since 2015

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachmentdata/file/478003/NaCTSOOGuidanceNotee1--2015--DynamicLockdownnv10.pdf

We have a lockdown procedure yes. No hiding under tables, just windows and doors shut, blinds closed and sitting silently while we read a story.
Different from the fire drill obviously but both are well rehearsed. We had to use our lockdown procedure last year when gunshots were heard from a house a couple of doors down and the gunman couldn’t be located. Was a bit hairy but the children were none the wiser about why they were there. They did find out when they went home and the next day we had an assembly about it.
We also had to use it when 2 deers appeared on the school field recently during lunchtime! Children came in while appropriate people were called to deal with the deer - couldn’t work out how they had gotten in and they couldn’t get themselves back out.

Lockdown procedure totally normal and all schools should do it