What's the script with schools looking like maximum security prisons?

[Pyew]

Is there some well-connected fence contractor who's hobbled Ofsted into telling schools they must spend money on Alcatraz makeovers while they can't afford pens or textbooks? It's all a bit OTT isn't it?

Walking through the gym hall with a lesson going on isn't "physically risky" - it happens countless times a day in schools everywhere. That's just nonsense

Ate the children allowed in this "no go" corridor? Just wondering if its actually out of bounds due to fir example awaiting building work, not for security. Because it does sound very random.

Staff are allowed in it and so are children if they are with the staff. Visitors are not allowed to go directly between the different KS areas for security reasons. The ones who do have to go between the KS areas can do so, but indirectly. It's actual madness.

Not just this but there’s been several cases local to me where some special needs children have eloped from school, also an incident where one toddler got out of the playground during school and crossed a road. A stranger stopped their car and took her back to school.

the high fences are needed for many reasons. I’d rather money was spent on making my child safe than buying them a poxy notebook tbh.

It can be a serious Safeguarding issue. Not only to help control adults who are on site but to prevent students from disappearing from the school site without the schools knowledge.

A local school to us managed to fail their Ofsted when police picked up some students who where marked as being in school. They didn't have any fencing at the time, that soon changed.

Let's face it is really more about keeping the children in rather than keeping problem adults out. If a knife welding murderer really wanted to get in, they would just hid the knife and buzz reception....

There's a lot of internal reasons to ensure good security and that the pupils are where you expect them to be and limited options for them to abscond (be it for mental health, additional needs or old-fashioned "bunking off"

Externally the higher risk is keeping out people with grudges or family members who would abduct children. Terrorist levels of risk are very low, but potentially serious.

My secondary tightened up security very rapidly after Dunblane. Prior to that there were several open entrances and reception was easy to by-pass. The perimeter fence was highly gappy to a public footpath and it was common for older students to register, bunk-off and return with no record that they were off-site. The quality of identifying staff, signing in, DBS checks and supervising visitors have all increased over the last 30 years with guidence updates and technology.

The safer we become, the more people fixate on tiny risks around them. And the more we look for something, the more we find it.

Most people have never faced any adversity in their lives. Yet they need safe-spaces like never before.

You're more likely to be killed by the car you choose to drive, or the food, drink and lifestyle you choose than by a marauding knife-wielding murderer. But you use an availability bias (ie the news) and judge the risk of those events as being much greater than they really are. It's not just a mistake of personal reasoning. Governments and, yes, schools, misallocate resources in order to minimise tiny risks when the budget would be much better spent on actually educating kids rather than shielding them from non-existent risks.

Yes! And on, for example, giving them books. And pens!

These big fences went up while my DS was in primary school. It was shortly after a spate of terrorist threats against primary schools.

There were a lot of letters delivered to the primaries one morning saying that a random assortment of them would be attacked. It was at the same time as we were having a lot of extremist attacks with suicide vests so the teachers were very nervous about it indeed.

I remember our lovely headmistress standing outside the front door with her umbrella, trying to look fierce. That was all she could do really.

The kids had to have lockdown practices where they all got under their desks to avoid gunmen. That was before "lockdown" became the thing where we all stayed at home for covid.

Shortly after that we have an ofsted report that said the school were having continual problems with vagrants just wandering into the school building and them not being able to stop it.

Another time a man with a gun was spotted in the bushes just out side the fence. We never found out if that was a real thing.

A few months later, the massive fences went up.

Hilariously, then school then got a bad ofsted report because they had a firebell during the inspection, and the kids and adults had forgotten how to do fire evacuation or turn off the fire bell. Poor souls. They must have been knackered from dealing with so many different kinds of possible emergency.

You live in a very different world to a lot of us, then.

In various schools I've worked in, they've had 'boyfriends' try to get in because their victim has decided she doesn't want to help him out by performing sexual services for others or providing contact details for the 11 year old friend that he liked the look of, permanently excluded students return with 15 of their closest gang members to try and exact punishment upon the head for not just excluding them but notifying the Police of their current trade network and connections, others who wanted to punish a kid for smacking the little brother of a gang member back, children who were in real danger of their fathers paying their mothers back for leaving them, adopted or looked after children where a relative has found out where they are, generalised attempts to get in/commit arson/have a laugh terrifying people, a local person who has severe mental illness taking against the noise the children made and mixing it with some religiously themed delusions, flashers and suchlike accosting children as they were waiting to be picked up (the children ran inside the building and the gate kept one out), parents wanting to have it out with a 12 year old why they hadn't invited their kid to a party, dads wanting to smack the teacher who gave a detention in the face, sacked members of staff wanting to have it out with whoever they think got them fired, exes of staff wanting to attack colleagues they believe are flirting, exes unable to find a home address but have found a workplace - the list could go on for pages and pages of reasons why it's essential to keep secure premises during the day - even before you get to batshit paedophiles sacked as scout leaders, teenagers with fixations about violence/school shootings or somebody with an ideological motivation for causing a massacre with explosives or knives, the fact is that schools need to be visibly and practically safer.

My kids primary didn’t have a fence on one side until a couple of years ago. It did have a hedge and a parent complained that a child could be snatched in winter when hedge was pretty bare. Cue 6 foot fence. We’re allowed / encouraged (it keeps the teenagers under control if parents are there) to use playground after hours, there was quite a bit of community funding for equipment so it’s supposed to be used out of hours by community.

Well, this might sound plausible, but in reality a lot of what we do to protect against risks is geared towards the unlikely yet serious or potentially catastrophic risk. You’re not that likely to be in a car accident either, or to be murdered by a random burglar, but I bet you wear your seatbelt and lock your front door at night. We know that intruders into schools does happen rarely, but with potentially very serious outcomes.

But the security is not only to protect against that, but to allow the school to control access to children in general and therefore also mitigate lots of other more likely yet less catastrophic risks as well. It’s far more likely that a kid might wander out into the road, or a drunk dad who’s angry about a no-contact order gets in than a knife maniac; but you still don’t want those things happening either.

we had all that in 1987. I think because we were on a main road, but in a village so not a high crime area - they just didn’t want kids getting out and ending up in the road.

While I agree with you that people probably worry about minute risks more than they used to, school security is completely justified.

I can see that in some areas with very low crime rates and very ‘easy’ cohorts, the sort of risk that schools are really worried about occurs very rarely. I used to teach in inner city primary schools in a challenging area. I’d say that we’d have (often very young) children with traumatic backgrounds or SEN struggle to cope and just abscond from the classroom on a practically daily basis, and quite often they’d attempt to leave school. We were by a busy road. And while, ideally, you’d never be in a position where you didn’t know where a child was in the building, in a rabbit warreny old Victorian school, a distressed child can be out of the classroom and out of sight in a heartbeat and, without security, even outside school trying to cross a busy road in a distressed state.

We’d also have parents or other family members who were not allowed contact because they posed a risk turning up quite regularly trying to access children. Some of them posed a risk to any staff dealing with them. Our security set-up meant that, outside of drop-off/pick-up times when there would be multiple staff watching who came in and out, there was no way for them to even get through the main door.

These security measures, of course, also protected the school against intruders with violent intent, but day-to-day we were just bloody thankful that they were in place to prevent the happening-right-now risks from becoming preventable tragedies.

Just checked my old secondary school on streetview and it looks much the same as it did 50/60 years ago. Totally open. The iron railings were taken down during WW2 and never replaced.

My old primary school on the other hand was a bit of a shock. It looks like a high security prison. That must have happened in the last year or so.

Having taught in a variety of Secondary schools over the years, I can say from experience that the better behaviour on average in a school, and the higher the grades means the school looks less prison-like.

In some schools I taught in, the battle to keep students on site and safe was constant and would continue throughout the day and internal truancy was instead high as they were contained within the high scale fencing or walls - but some did still manage to escape somehow.

I work in a role now in which I visit a plethora of different schools across the country and I have to be well versed on their data - and the same as above is certainly true. Grammar schools for instance always look the least prison-like, followed by many Catholic Schools who tend to have high grades, or comprehensives in more affluent areas with good exam results.

And say what? “Can I come in please?” 🤣

Our secondary school has these but they are just a (very expensive) box-ticking exercise as the gates are open all the time as there are a couple of businesses on the school grounds that have customers coming and going, and a bridleway across the playing fields. The infants and juniors don’t have them though.

Im sure the fencing was brought in after Dunblane.

I actually think it may be easier to get into a prison that my child’s jnr school to say get her for the dentist. First I have to buzz the main gate, then I walk the fenced in either side path way around the car park then I get buzzed into a holding cell. Then buzzed though into reception. Where my child is a further four staff tag locked doors away.

Both fields are individually fenced off, all three car parks fenced off. Two fenced off entrances once buzzed in.

More fencing seems to be up every time we go back after a half term.

Secondary school just has a fence around its fields and rear building, you walk straight into reception.

It is to keep the many deranged parents out 😂

A couple of years ago, 2 Reception children burrowed under the fence and escaped m, quickly spotted,but th school had to report itself for the "safeguarding failure".

I was just thinking of the rural secondary school I went to that had no high fences and opened directly onto woodland and fields. Just checked google street view assuming it must have changed in the 35 years since I was there and it looks exactly the same down the same dainty little 3 foot fence at the entrance and scrappy hedge around the sports field.

Yep - same here for our infants and junior. In fact at the infants the playing field is actually the village green and cricket pitch so is open to the public anyway.

The secondary has a fence and gates but they are open all the time as there are businesses on the premises and a bridleway through the playing fields.

There is one school close by which has buildings scattered up and down the high street so pupils have to walk on the street between lessons - they are not accompanied by teachers after the first couple of weeks of year 7 but expected to get themselves between lessons on their own.