Martyn’s Law for Schools: A Practical Checklist

Schools have a considerable head start. Fire drills are routine, registers exist, staff are used to structured emergency procedures, and there is already a culture of practising things rather than only writing them down.

The gap is rarely whether procedures exist. It is that evacuation has been drilled for decades while lockdown has often been discussed rather than practised, so staff confidence between the two is very different.

Working through these questions will tell you fairly quickly where your genuine gaps are, and most of them cost nothing but time to answer.

A school day includes far more than pupils and teaching staff. Visitors, contractors, peripatetic teachers, supply staff, parents at drop-off and pick-up, and sports fixtures all put people on site who have never seen your procedure.

Lettings and community use extend this further. If the hall is used by external groups in the evening, or the site hosts holiday provision, the people present at that moment are not the ones your drills have trained.

Playgrounds, fields and sports pitches are where the largest number of people are furthest from the building and least likely to hear an indoor alert. On many sites this is the single biggest gap in coverage.

It is also the scenario staff find hardest to answer confidently. If the alert sounds while a class is outside, what are they expected to do, where do they go, and how do they know. That is worth resolving explicitly rather than leaving to judgement.

It is worth being specific about the strengths, because they are genuine and they shorten the work considerably. Schools generally have a single point of entry with supervision, a visitor signing process, staff who know their pupils, and an established route for communicating with parents quickly.

They also have governance that is used to reviewing safety matters, and a rhythm of training days that can absorb a briefing without special arrangements. Very few other sectors have all of that already in place.

The practical implication is that this is usually an extension exercise rather than a new programme. The question is which existing habits need widening, not whether the school needs to start thinking about emergencies.

Across the sites we visit, the same handful of gaps appear repeatedly, and none of them are signs of a badly run school. They are simply the parts that fire-focused planning never had reason to cover.

Ownership tends to sit across two roles: the designated safeguarding lead for the procedural and pupil-facing side, and whoever holds estates or site responsibility for the physical side. Problems usually arise when only one of them is involved.

Governor oversight matters for the same reason it does elsewhere in safeguarding. A governing body that has seen the procedure, knows when it was last tested, and knows what changed as a result is in a much stronger position than one that has only seen a policy title on a list.

For trusts, the useful split is a trust-level standard approved centrally and a site-level annexe approved locally. That keeps consistency where it matters while leaving room for genuine differences between schools.

For a multi-academy trust, the value is staff being able to move between sites and understand the response immediately. That argues for the same alert meaning the same thing everywhere, and the same basic expectations of staff.

It does not mean identical plans. A large secondary with detached blocks and a small infant school have genuinely different needs. Consistency of signal and expectation, with site-specific detail underneath, is the arrangement that works.

This is the single most commonly missing element in school plans, and it is worth addressing specifically because the answer is rarely obvious. When the hall is hired to a community group on a Tuesday evening, who is responsible if something happens?

The people on site at that moment are typically a caretaker, a hirer, and a group of adults or children who have never seen your procedure. The usual leadership presence is absent, and the systems people rely on during the day may not be staffed.

The fix is usually straightforward once it is named. Decide who holds responsibility during lettings, make sure they can raise an alert, and give hirers a short written statement of what to do. It is one paragraph in a hire agreement and it closes a genuine gap.

Trying to do all of this at once competes with everything else a school is managing. Spreading it across the year makes it considerably more achievable and tends to produce a better result.

A workable rhythm is to write or review the procedure in the autumn term, brief staff at a training day, run the first drill before Christmas, and use the spring and summer terms for a harder exercise and any equipment work identified along the way.

Schools do not have to work this out alone, and the external support available is often better than people expect. It tends to be under-used simply because nobody thinks to ask.

Many police forces have officers whose role includes advising schools on security and emergency planning, and they will often review a procedure or attend an exercise. Their perspective is genuinely different from a supplier’s, because they are thinking about how an incident unfolds rather than about equipment.

Local authorities frequently have emergency planning teams who can advise, and some maintain template procedures for schools in their area. Where those exist they are a reasonable starting point, though they still need adapting to your specific site.

For trusts, there is also value in comparing notes with other trusts. The problems are common, the solutions are not commercially sensitive, and a conversation with a neighbouring trust that has already been through this is often the fastest route to a workable plan.