ARE classrooms any longer the safe havens they were once thought to be?
The issue of violence in and around the school building hit the headlines in March 1994, when 12 year old Nikki Conroy was a stabbed to death by a masked man who burst into her maths lesson at Hall Garth School in Acklam, near Middlesbrough, in Cleveland.
Stephen Wilkinson, a paranoid schizophrenic, walked into the school carrying a holdall with several knives, a small axe and a replica gun. He ordered the children to kneel, close their eyes and put their hands behind their backs.
Nikki Conroy died instantly when Wilkinson lashed out because the girls cowering in a corner could not stop screaming. Michelle Reeve (13) received 15 knife wounds and Emma Winter (12) suffered lesser injuries.
Wilkinson (31) was sent to a hospital for the criminally insane last December, after pleading guilty to manslaughter.
The Hall Garth horror highlighted the vulnerability of school premises, with their multiple entrances and lack of security.
After this tragedy many schools introduced extra security measures, including visitor passes, exterior fencing and cameras.
Last December's murder of Philip Lawrence, the north west London headmaster, brought home to many how dangerous school life has become. The Secondary Heads Association hired the former Northamptonshire assistant chief constable, Mr Ken Cooper, to assess arrangements to protect staff and pupils at 4,000 secondary schools.
Mr Cooper, a security consultant, said: "Every school has got to have a security policy, but it is not just a matter of putting up iron bars.
"The school is affected by the community, and schools should have a database of information with a security threat assessment.
"By working with the police, schools should be able to identify these potential threats."
He added: "Everyone shortcuts security because it is the easiest burden to reduce at the time, but unfortunately that can have serious repercussions.
Mr John Dunford, president of the Secondary Heads Association, said a thorough security audit and adequate resources would enable schools to combat almost all intruders, but no school wanted to resemble a fortress. "They must strike a balance between the two."
The association supplies a video called What Price Security?, which has just become available at a discount to schools.
It looks at the problems of open access sites with playing fields and footpaths, and asks whether schools should be designed like stockades when they belong to the community.
Last week the British government announced proposals for legislation which would redefine schools as public places which the police could raid to stop and search for weapons, but not drugs.
Britain is beginning to conform to many of the social patterns which became apparent in the United States a decade or so ago.
In Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, children must pass through the sort of security cheeks undergone by air passengers between London and Belfast. Coats, satchels and lunch boxes are placed in plastic bins to pass through the X ray machine. Children go through a metal detector.
A murderous attack by an intruder such as yesterday's in Dunblane is condemned as an evil act, but it is still a rare event.
A truancy specialist, Ms Patricia Stall, said there were many other pressures on schools and classrooms that threatened to undermine the safety of the occupants. Bullying, teasing, violence from other pupils, sarcasm on the part of the teacher, all these can make a child feel alienated and unsafe in the very place where he or she should feel at ease.