PROTECTIVE SITE SECURITY AUDIT

Ensure your site is suitably secure and compliant with our in-depth school security audit conducted by security professionals with a former police background and extensive experience in schools. 

Our full site security audit includes:

• Pre-visit security policy review and security threat assessment
• At least a full day onsite to conduct the site survey.  Our assessors will ask key staff structured questions, make observations on a full site tour and take photographs to support their RAG-rated assessments.  This is all captured in a bespoke application developed by Pharos, updated to be compliant with current protective security & preparedness guidance for education settings. 

Key areas the site survey will cover include:

• Security threat & risk assessment
• Hard security features and deterrents
• Security policy & procedures
• People & culture

• Comprehensive RAG-rated report with prioritised (proportionate) recommendations.

PROTECTIVE SITE SECURITY TRAINING

Securing an international school campus is a delicate balancing act. Operations and estates teams are tasked with implementing robust
protective measures while ensuring the school remains a welcoming, friendly environment for students, parents, and staff.

This training course for senior leaders and/or senior operations and estates staff provides the practical strategies needed to enhance site security without compromising accessibility and the school’s community atmosphere.

DEALING WITH ANGER & AGGRESSION TRAINING

GAP YEAR SAFETY TRAINING FOR FINAL YEAR STUDENTS

A highly practical training session for students embarking on independent travel for the first time after school, either as part of an independent gap year or summer holidays with friends. This session helps ensure you’re still keeping your pupils safe, even when they are no longer in your care.

Delivered by travel safety experts who regularly advise gap year students with live incidents, this session not only provides valuable life skills and helps protect the safety of students but also helps protect the school from the negative impact of a serious incident involving current or former pupils outside of school.

SCHOOL LOCKDOWN PROCEDURE DRAFTING

Ensure your school is prepared for a security situation requiring you to put the school into lockdown with suitable procedures specific to your school site.

Our security advisers (former senior police officers and security specialists) can visit your school to assess the site specific lockdown challenges you face, identify the options available and agree with you the best lockdown procedures to suit your site. They will then use this information to draft your site specific lockdown procedures and supply the copy in editable format so you can update it as necessary.

SCHOOL LOCKDOWN REVIEW AND REHEARSAL

Ensure your staff team are suitably briefed about and trained in the school’s lockdown procedures. Facilitated by a Pharos security adviser, they will provide an initial site security briefing before launching a practical lockdown drill based around a site-specific scenario to make it feel realistic. The group-wide session concludes with a facilitated feedback/Q&A session before a 1:1 procedure review and wash-up session with a school senior leader. 

The school’s lockdown procedure will then be updated based upon the rehearsal insights.

CRITICAL INCIDENT MANAGEMENT TRAINING WITH DESKTOP SIMULATION EXERCISE

The highly popular crisis management desktop exercises are available as either a full or half-day session and all scenarios are based around real incidents Pharos has supported. Typically, these facilitated training sessions would be for the team mentioned in your emergency plan (your emergency response team) and their stand-ins made up from a selection of the SLT, usually between 8-18 people.

With a full-day session there is time to cover helpful training in critical incident management principles that teams find beneficial before getting launching into the desktop simulation exercise. The half-day session is more focused on the exercise itself.

When working through the simulation exercise that we tailor for your school and present to your team through innovative and engaging ways using voicemail recordings, mock up press articles and live phone calls with actors, you are able to put your incident response procedures into practice.   Your team responds to the scenario by discussing the tasks they would perform if it were real. These sessions do feel surprisingly real for a desktop scenario and the feedback from schools is always excellent.

FULL CRISIS SIMULATION EXERCISE

For school senior teams that are confident in their critical incident readiness, we can provide a full simulation exercise, facilitated by a Pharos crisis management expert.  We identify a wide range of information inputs across your team to provide incident updates in real time using our actors to make phone calls, send emails and share mock-up social media posts or other visual or audio aids to make the flow of information feel as real as possible.  Our onsite facilitators will trigger all the inputs as the appropriate, realistic time to keep the incident flowing naturally.

From your perspective, the incident unfolds through the normal communications channels, all feeling very real yet always within a highly secure, safe environment.

This exercise provides a rare opportunity to practise responding to a major incident without the jeopardy of any mistakes being made. We can conduct journalist interviews and build the scenario up as much as you wish to stress-test your school’s emergency response.

CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS TRAINING

This interactive training session equips school marketing/communications colleagues and/or senior leaders with the skills to manage high-stakes post incident stakeholder communications (including the media) with confidence.

The session covers how to build a proactive, robust crisis communications plan, provides best practices for managing and messaging stakeholders during an active incident and allows delegates to apply the learning by responding to a desktop simulation exercise allowing you to formulate your communications response as if for real, but in a safe environment. This exercise can include members of the group handling phone or video calls from journalists played by Pharos actors.

CRISIS SPOKESPERSON TRAINING 

This crisis spokesperson course provides a very rare opportunity to practice speaking to journalists following a major incident but without any jeopardy!

Whether your role is to be the school spokesperson or to support the spokesperson through such interviews, it is valuable to have practiced this role before needing to perform it for real.  We will provide training on the right ‘approach’ to take as a spokesperson, review case studies and provide top tips for success. You will then be given an incident scenario brief to prepare your response to before conducting interviews with journalists either to-camera, via video call or over the telephone, all as if it were for real.

VISIT EMERGENCY TRAINING 

Managing an emergency while away from the school campus presents a unique set of challenges. This targeted online training session equips Educational Visit Coordinators (EVCs) and Visit Leaders at international schools with the practical skills to respond effectively to off-site incidents.

The course focuses on proactive preparation, managing the immediate crisis on the ground, and seamlessly coordinating with the
school’s base support team to help ensure student and staff safety.  Course content covers essential actions, risk assessments and protocols to consider before the trip departs; strategies for maintaining clear communications ad sharing responsibilities with leadership back at school; and collaborative group discussions working through a range of realistic school trip incident scenarios of differing levels of severity.

CRISIS PLAN DRAFTING

Allow our school crisis management experts to write a new and comprehensive crisis or emergency plan on your behalf, based on our tried and tested formula for what we know works in practice during an incident.

We start by reviewing your existing documents and arrange a call with you to understand more about your preferred approach, specific procedures, resources, people and culture before drafting your comprehensive plan. This can include escalation procedures, incident categorisation (if required), immediate actions, the emergency response team and role descriptions, specific incident considerations, crisis communications considerations, and links to other important information such as stakeholder lists, key contacts, instructions and further guidance.

The completed version will be sent to you in your chosen format (Word or GoogleDoc) so you can edit over time but it will be 95% complete, just requiring you to insert key information we will not have access to, such as document links and contact names/details.

24/7 INCIDENT RESPONSE SERVICE 

Benefit from emergency 24/7 access to crisis management and communications support covering a wide range of specialist areas to suit the situation you are facing by subscribing to the unique Pharos emergency response service.

Our team of highly experienced Incident Advisers (usually former senior police, Army, RAF) are always on call to provide initial incident containment advice before escalating to subject specialists as required. The wider team includes experts in crisis management, crisis communications, PR and stakeholder communications, social media, trauma aftercare, health and safety, travel and adventure activity risk specialists, members of the Outdoor Education Advisers’ Panel, former police and doctors for second opinions. All are overseen and managed by one central team to ensure a fully integrated, well considered emergency response.