Educational Institutions

Summary

If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, it could have been lost there as well. What that premier English public school did was to instil in its students those attitudes of mind, particularly leadership, which enabled the forces opposed to Napoleon to prevail over his army. Without, of course, equating today's terrorists with the French then, it can be said that every school must act like Eton now if society is to be protected from the aftermath of a terror attack. Children must learn to fight with their minds. Losing a new Waterloo is not an option.

The problem, though, is this. Teachers, who are a natural target of CEP messages, can be attracted to the programme through exposure to the shocking consequences of a terrorist attack. Students, however, are naturally not similarly mature; their young minds cannot easily deal with the terrible wickedness of the adult world. Hence, the challenge is to tailor the same programme to the differing needs of teachers and students.

This is the work of the Ministry of Education's Security and Emergency Planning Office (SEMPO) and its National Education Branch. They have identified initiatives that support CEP goals and have positioned these initiatives within two main strands: peacetime education; and incident handling/security measures that are more operational in nature. The target audience for the initiatives is the school at large, but special emphasis is placed on school CEP teams. Training workshops seek to equip these teams with the knowledge and skills to sense, identify and manage racial and religious issues at the school level. Feedback from participants who attended twenty-eight CEP training workshops suggests that they gained insights into aspects of CEP management, such as sensing what is occurring on the ground and developing mediation skills.

There are also scenario-based table-top exercises — Exercise Octopus — for newly appointed principals and vice-principals in which they finesse the skills required to handle the racial and religious aftermath of a terrorist incident. The number of principals, vice-principals and school staff who have undergone Exercise Octopus and CEP training workshops is 1,804 and 1,962, respectively.