Get children involved and EDUCATED in drills!

[Justin Sharpe]

So what's the point of talking about education, drills, planning in schools etc if the students don't know what is expected of them. In most drills that I have see students are relatively passive participants. I have also been running training as part of INSET to teachers and leaders at my school which included table top exercises. I had teachers take on different roles for a variety of likely situations: Lockdown, Bomb Threat and a road traffic accident outside of school. As there is a high volume of traffic down a narrow road and as students feel relatively safe and take unnecessary risks, this was the scenario that teachers could identify with easily. What came out of this was that students would probably hang around trying to get a look at the injured child, make unhelpful comments e.g. 'Did you SEE that? OMG there's so much blood? Is he/she dying?' etc alongside shouting/screaming/crying. This will NOT be helpful to the first adult on the scene as he/she tries to talk to injured student and appraise the situation (especially important for ambulance crew).

I talked to four classes about this today and they ALL suggested themselves that they would try and get a view, or want to help etc. I explained that although they may not have bad intentions, they will not be helping the child on the ground. When we talked it through they had a much better idea of what was expected of them and agreed that it was better to know WHY they should behave in a certain way and that being educated about this was very important. So when we talk about DRILLS, planning in schools, teacher training and other disaster preparedness in schools make sure that the students are NOT LEFT OUT!