Lockdown alert system

There are many benefits to having audio and alert systems in nursing or care facilities. You can use them to improve residents’ daily lives, make your staff’s work easier, or boost safety across the facility.

Martyn’s Law – the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill – received Royal Assent in April 2025 and passed into law. There will be a grace period before full implementation, providing an opportunity to begin preparations.

To help you navigate the law confidently, we outline its main points and provide some tips on how to get started.

There are more than 1.3m* school pupils in the UK with identified SEN (special educational needs). More than four in five* pupils with SEN are educated in mainstream schools.

Communicating with these pupils – in emergency and non-emergency situations – presents unique challenges. We suggest three areas to consider when choosing a class change and lockdown alert solution.

As we await the introduction of Martyn’s Law, we examine a key part of the Bill and what educational settings can do to comply.

We are all used to the MP3 format, mostly for playing music on mobile devices. Did you know it can be used for other types of audio message, such as intrusion alerts?

It goes without saying that schools have a duty to both pupils and staff to provide the best security possible.

Part of this duty is to have an effective lockdown system in place. Because emergency events are random, schools can do little to prevent them – but they can control how they respond.

Is it time to update your emergency alerts with distinguished sounds to ensure maximum safety for your pupils? Does your lockdown system take time to communicate across the school?

Many educational settings are currently using the same systems when it comes to communicating vitally important alerts such as a fire, lockdown or evacuation. Have you recently assessed how efficient your systems are? Are pupils clear on which emergency is being communicated with your alerts?

In anticipation of Martyn’s Law, which we expect to be effective later this year, we want to ensure that your educational setting is ready and prepared to protect your staff and pupils against terrorism.

As we are now mid-way through the academic year, it is a great time to reassess class management, challenges and the running of the school day.

There are many concerns facing the education sector, with staff recruitment and retention being one of the biggest challenges for 2024. According to Reed, 40,000 teachers left the profession in 2022, while 13% of newly qualified teachers left after qualifying and an additional 19% left after two years of teaching.