Handbook for School Safety and Security

Based on Dutch figures on social safety it is demonstrated that a sense of security is not the same as being a low risk crime victim. The figures show that the risk of becoming a crime victim is higher for young people (between the age of 15 and 25) and even higher for pupils in high schools.

But pupils feel very safe in and around school. When looking at crime in schools it is better therefore to focus on the risk of becoming a crime victim rather than to ask pupils about how safe they feel.

Prevention of crime in and around High Schools (Chapter 25)

This chapter tells the story of the introduction of a city-wide approach to safety in Amsterdam high schools. An approach which slowly matured (maturity grid) but then partly bogged down in ‘every school for itself’. Again: it took all participants about 5 years to come from the stage of denying crime and insecurity problems in and around schools to the stage of a more integrated approach.

Unfortunately, in Amsterdam, this whole machinery still proved to be considerably weak. In 2009, the city of Amsterdam decided to stop funding this policy, so schools had to take care of their own security and safety, including the exchanges between schools as well as between schools and the local authorities. Schools were assumed to have reached the final stage in the security/maturity matrix by that time: integration. Within a few years, it showed that schools were not willing to pay for the integrative machinery by themselves. The term multiagency approach is easily tossed around, but the implementation of a sophisticated multiagency approach is not light a task. What did blossom most of all was the digital registration, review, and the survey tool IRIS. This tool started out in Amsterdam, but was used all over the Netherlands within a couple of years and not just in high schools but in all types of schools in the country.

Handbook

The Handbook for school safety and security is published by Elsevier Inc, ISBN:978-0-12-800568-2.