There have been several horrific incidents involving knives in my school’s local area. We’ve had a few scares with pupils bringing knives into school and a pupil being cut with what we think was a blade but as we haven’t been able to find the perpetrator I cannot say for sure.
Pilot searches
We’ve bought some hand-held metal detectors, one for each of the senior leadership team and planned a pilot scanning of one class Friday Period 4 the four of us (including Sarah our fantastic bursar, more of her another time) walked into the Year 9 class, scanners akimbo ……. We’ve learnt a few things from the pilot and are ready to extend to carrying out locker searches at the same time.
Pupil perception
I think the kids were mainly delighted that they were getting out of half an hour of Maths (the fact is we’d chosen this lessons because it had a supply teacher in it). Once they’d gotten over their delight they then started talking about what could be next … big arches on the way into school ……. frisking pupils as we went about the corridors (I’m actually going on a ‘how to search’ course next term.) Has anyone else got experiences of this sort of thing? Got any tips on how to handle the parents? I’m sure they will be up in arms about the fact that their dearest son or daughter was scanned in public by male teachers (as Sarah and I were on bag and invigilator duty) and made to empty their bags out in front of the rest of the class.
I know that they’ll have already forgotten the reasons why we’re doing this, the incident with Brian and other incidents happening in and around our local area.
It’s a fine line between scaring pupils and parents and helping them feel safe. Any thoughts greatly appreciated.
