'Dunblane-style attack will happen again and we cannot prevent it'

Published on Friday 16 October 2009 22:15

ANOTHER Dunblane-style massacre is inevitable, according to an emergency planning expert who helped to deal with the aftermath of the tragedy.

Alastair Sinclair, Stirling Council's former emergency planning officer, said the schoolboys cleared last month of plotting a killing spree near Manchester showed someone would think it was a "good idea".

Mr Sinclair urged schools to "think the unthinkable" and plan how they would deal with such catastrophes.

Now an emergency planning consultant in Warwickshire, he stressed that schools could do nothing to prevent such attacks and should focus instead on coping with the aftermath.

The Manchester case involved Ross McKnight, 16, and Matthew Swift, 18, who were cleared of planning to murder staff and pupils at Audenshaw High School in a Columbine-style massacre.

Mr Sinclair said: "The bare fact that youths of that age were fantasising over that degree of violence shows that at some point someone might think, 'What a good idea', and do it.

"It's probably inevitable that somewhere, at some time, it will happen here.

Schools are full of children who are aware of how to get into the papers and who have access to weaponry.

"There is nothing you can do to prevent it, but schools have to be prepared for disasters, whatever the cause.

"If a school suffers a loss of children, such as through a road accident, it is awful. You have to be prepared to mitigate this by thinking the unthinkable," Mr Sinclair went on.

"But in my experience, schools are so overloaded with management duties, this is yet another burden for them."

Mr Sinclair added: "The impact on the children is huge, and the impact on the community is massive and it leaves ripples afterwards. But what about the teachers? They often get forgotten, and there needs to be a process to look after staff."

Mr Sinclair, who has been self-employed since leaving Stirling Council six years ago, was involved in reviewing its emergency planning when he joined two months after the Dunblane massacre in 1996.

Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children aged five and six and their teacher at Dunblane Primary School, then shot himself.

Mr Sinclair said plans to increase school security after the incident had been "completely over the top".

He said: "These sorts of event are so rare that to turn schools into fortresses would deny the community a resource. Locks only keep the honest out."

However, he said that despite the rise in global terrorism, the threat of a repeat of Dunblane had not increased.