Public sector spending has reached new heights. In this year’s budget, Gordon Brown announced GB pound 74 billion would be pumped into education, and much of this will go towards improving existing educational facilities or constructing new ones. For example, Teeside has announced an investment of GB pound 90 million to transform its secondary schools, while Telford & Wrekin have gone even further, promising local residents a massive GB pound 200 million investment.
The opportunities this creates for security solutions providers such as TAC are considerable. However, education is not like other sectors. Threats to security are complex and wide reaching and can come in the form of everything from theft to trespassing and even intimidation or assault. It is the complex nature of these threats that make the traditional ‘box shifting’ approach of the security industry inappropriate. To provide solutions that will actually work and go some way to providing protection for teachers and pupils, the security industry must take a step back and take the time to fully understand exactly what the security challenges are that face people in education every day.
Education inquiry
Despite the fact that school safety and security is a major concern to the public, there is relatively little independent information on the range of problems that exist and the types of solutions that best counter them. Earlier this year, TAC took the step of commissioning Perpetuity Research & Consultancy to conduct an independent study into the education sector with a view to finding out a bit more about the real security needs of teachers and pupils.
Until now, the general approach by the security industry has been to provide schools with the basic technology to enable them to monitor for intruders in and out of school hours. However, our research has shown that one of the biggest threats to school security is actually the pupils themselves, and less is understood about the role that pupils play in compromising an otherwise safe environment. In the last year six per cent of the teachers we questioned had fallen victim to an intruder in the school. This could be considered a high number until you compare it with the number of teachers victimised by their pupils.
Two thirds of teachers reported having been physically or verbally assaulted in the past year, and shockingly one in six had been threatened in incidents involving weapons. Of those teachers that had been assaulted in some way, 99 per cent said they had been verbally abused by their pupils and 74 per cent claimed that the abuse occurred regularly, at least once every two or three weeks.
Incredibly, 18 per cent of the teachers who had been victimised had been threatened with a weapon by a pupil on at least one occasion, and 3 per cent claimed the threat had been followed through with the use of a knife or a gun.
This evidence of an increase in violent behaviour is substantiated by changes in legislation that give teachers the power to search pupils for knives and weapons without consent.
However, crimes against teachers are not restricted to violence. More than three in ten teachers said that they had had property stolen from them at school during the last year. Clearly they will not always know who the offenders were, but according to Perpetuity Research some at least suspected pupils on some occasions and sometimes ex-pupils were perceived as the cause of the problem.
The research also shows that it is not just pupils that are becoming an increasing threat to school security. More than 20 per cent of the teachers had been verbally or physically assaulted by a parent or guardian.
Tragically, the majority of teachers were sure that poor pupil behaviour interfered with their ability to teach and that the levels of crime and indiscipline that they were facing interfered with their pupils’ ability to learn. Long term, the impact of this lack of respect towards teacher authority could be far reaching. One third of teachers said they would change school because of violence and many claimed they would even consider leaving the profession.
Sector challenges
So where does this leave the security industry? The ‘box shifting’ approach will clearly not help combat the challenges currently being faced in many schools. Yes, some external CCTV may deter burglars or help ward off intruders, but that is not where the real problem lies. The security challenge for schools goes well beyond reassuring parents that their children will not come to harm from strangers. School security provision must help ensure that pupils are also protected from each other and that teachers are free to teach without fear.
I am not for one moment suggesting that schools do not already take this responsibility seriously – on the contrary, most schools are now more aware than ever of the need to make their premises a safe and comfortable environment for employees and pupils alike. But schools do not have the expertise to know how to make their ideal become a reality.
Most teachers in our study said their schools subscribed to anti-bullying programmes, carried out staff surveillance at break and lunch times, or carried out other strategies to address child indiscipline. More than half of the schools also had isolation or exclusion units. Nevertheless, less than half of teachers said their schools recorded incidents of crime and disorder, thereby making it more difficult to create a meaningful and bespoke anti-bullying strategy.
Furthermore, while more than two thirds of teachers reported that their schools had some form of security in place to monitor for intruders such as security cameras (65 per cent) or controlled access to school buildings (66 per cent), there was no mention of internal security systems despite internal security being a far greater problem.
Security solutions do exist for schools, and while the combination of school based initiatives, external security solutions and internal technology will inevitably vary from one school to another; there is sufficient choice for all schools to find the solution that best fits its needs. The only limiting factor is how we behave as an industry – whether we continue to be tactically focused or whether we act like the strategic consultants we should be.
Key systems
Technology, in the hands of competent and capable individuals, can reduce crime, cut material losses and keep people safe. The key systems of security remain intrusion detection, access control and video surveillance.
Simple intrusion detection is probably the most familiar concept of security to most schools, but intrusion detection does little to deter people from committing a crime in the first place. Prosecution is dependent on far more than capturing someone’s face on a camera.
By integrating door and window contacts, motion sensors and other devices, schools – and other organisations and business – can raise their chances of gathering details of a situation that could lead to a better response and identification of perpetrators. The use of DVRs and NVRs over older analogue technology has additional advantages. Streaming video can be continuously recorded and discarded in cycles of days, weeks or months. If an incident does occur, disk indexing and time-stamping make it simple to find video from a given date and time. It can be exported and distributed via email or backed up on CD, DVD or other digital media.
Access control is becoming increasingly popular with commercial sectors but the benefits to the public sector have yet to be realised. There are many advantages. Pupils and students can be coded with access to specific areas depending on their seniority, team participation or any number of factors. For example, access to sixth form common rooms can be restricted to sixth form pupils or pupils given access only to those classrooms relevant to them.
Individual privileges can expire on a given date if desired and access can be granted or denied at any time based on the student’s status. For example, access to school property can be denied to pupils that are suspended or that have left the school but retained their access card.
Integration advantage
Each of these systems purchased separately will certainly enhance a school’s security but they will not deliver the scope and power of a flexible, integrated solution. Furthermore, bought separately, each of these solutions will place an unnecessary burden on a school’s resources in terms of administration and training.
However, by integrating these separate security systems under a flexible building automation system head teachers can get better value for money while at the same time better protecting both teachers and pupils. Component devices can be used in multiple ways to trigger lighting, video capture, pan-tilt-zoom, higher video resolution or frame rate, door locks and other aspects of building control.
Integrated with access control, video verification, for example, allows a user to see live video as well as the cardholder’s picture when a given access card is presented at the reader – enabling security staff or teachers to verify that the person presenting the badge is the actual card holder.
Access to the school can also be linked to registration, enabling teaching staff to know at all times which pupils are in the school – and to some extent where they are. Video verification can also help identify ‘tailgating’ where an individual follows a pupil into school without presenting a badge. The integration of systems rather than the purchase of standalone solutions also have the potential to save schools money.
I am not naive enough to think that all security installers will turn their focus from simply selling product to looking at a more solutions based approach.
However, in the long run institutions like schools will demand more from their security providers, so the old ‘box shifting’ way of doing things will simply become obsolete or confined to much smaller contracts.
Only those security specialists that invest the time and effort into offering their clients sound advice and a holistic solution to their needs will truly last the distance.