An additional 30 police personnel called school resource officers (SROs) are to be trained and dispatched to schools in September, bringing to 144 the total number of SROs in public educational institutions.

Chairman of the Safe Schools, Secretariat, Lieutenant Colonel Oral Khan, said the police will be trained in school safety planning. This latest thrust, he said, would add to the existing pool of police officers that were already involved in the programme and ensure that there is adequate personnel to serve in the case of promotions or transfers.

New officers

"We are seeking to identify new officers to complement the existing number of SROs. If we find that there is anyone employed, who did not complete the training, then we may include one or more of those persons, but the aim is to train new persons," he explained.

According to Lt. Col. Khan, the school safety planning component was a follow-up to the initial training of officers in mediation and conflict resolution techniques.

He explained that safety planning would make SROs more aware of the peculiarities of working within the school environment. "The first aspect of the training to be done would focus on those skills that SROs would need to be able to operate within school," he pointed out.

Additional roles

Additionally, he said, the SROs would be able to help schools prepare plans for enhancing safety and security as well as plan responses to incidents, boost security of the school in terms of student behaviour and conduct and decide on action to be taken if problems occur.

Lt. Col. Khan said the Ministry of Education and Youth has mandated schools to include a safety plan in their development strategy, but because the skill was not readily available to the schools, the ideas of using this design had been neglected. However, this will be changed when the training programme is completed.

The Safe Schools Programme was implemented in schools, November 2004 as part of the Government's initative to address the problem of violence in schools.