With new requirements under Martyn’s Law fast approaching, education settings have less than a year to put the right procedures, training and communication systems in place to respond to serious threats. Alex Jay, CEO of Little Green Button, looks at who is ready and why early action matters.
The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 – better known as Martyn’s Law – was passed in April last year, extending responsibility for counter-terrorism preparedness to a wide range of public places.
Alongside perhaps more obvious places – such as entertainment and leisure venues or sports grounds – the Act also applies to early years, schools and further education settings where 200 or more people are reasonably expected to be on site at any one time. In other words, the vast majority of UK schools fall within scope.
As of now, the new duties it requires – covering lockdowns, evacuation, invacuation and wider preparedness – are not yet in force. The government has allowed a two-year implementation period, pushing enforcement into early to mid-2027.
Now mid-2026, that leaves us with less than a year left before expectations begin to kick in and the assumption most will have already begun testing plans, tech and staff to work out what lockdown readiness actually looks like in practice.
A huge gap remains
However, research conducted earlier this year by Little Green Button suggests this is far from the case. Despite the ticking clock, and the fact the Government recently published new statutory guidance on the Act, data based on responses from more than 1,200 education professionals across the UK reveals a significant gap, both in preparedness and awareness.
One of the most worrying findings was that 44% of surveyed UK schoolworkers reported being completely “unfamiliar” with the legislation, while an additional one-third (31%) said they were unaware of any preparations for it.
Low awareness of the legal changes was also accompanied by growing concern over school safety, with more than one-third (36%) of education staff saying that schools have become more dangerous places to work, and high levels of aggression reported towards staff from pupils and their parents.
How schools should get prepared
While these statistics may be cause for concern, the hope is that drawing attention to them now will help raise awareness of the current gap that exists and encourage the remaining implementation period to be used as effectively as possible.
With less than 12 months left, those that have yet to prepare should consider the following steps now:
- Ringfence time to properly assess vulnerability and space: The biggest challenge for schools is to move from reactive to proactive, ringfencing time to properly assess their safety risk, technology and current policies to build an embedded safety culture. Identifying the specific risks your school faces – such as intruders, aggressive individuals or incidents in the local area – and how these risks change at different points in the day, is an essential place to start. Using a plan of the site, walk the perimeter and internal spaces with a critical eye, considering the weakest points and how an attacker might gain access.
- Create a solid lockdown plan: Consider time, control and simplicity, including designated roles, communication protocols and predetermined safe zones. Your procedure should be simple enough to follow under stress and flexible enough to work during different parts of the school day.
- Challenge your process and put your plan to the test: Schools are stretched by competing priorities and tight budgets, so safety measures or emergency plans are often assessed against whether existing arrangements feel ‘adequate’. Unfortunately, it’s only post-incident that people tend to question and challenge their security process, at which point the opportunity to prevent harm has already passed. This is why it’s so important to run practice drills at least annually, and especially after any significant change to your policy or procedures. Also, remember to train any new staff in your lockdown procedures as part of their induction.
- Review your school’s technology and security tools: Part of the assessment should be set aside for technology, looking at what you currently have in place and what you might benefit from adding. Many schools, for example, still rely on fire alarms to cover a wide range of emergencies, often using different durations or patterns as distinct signals. In a real emergency, however, this can create confusion, remove context and add a layer of unnecessary risk. This is why I always advise education settings to either put a lockdown alarm system in place to protect students and staff, or ensure emergency alerts can be clearly distinguished between different types of incidents. That way, staff and students know how to respond. The added benefit of a lockdown alarm is that while extremely useful in lockdown scenarios, the same technology can support a wide range of safeguarding applications, from medical emergencies and behavioural incidents, to safeguarding concerns, as well as site-wide communication during unexpected events. These systems are there to complement other security measures – such as fire alarms and CCTV – rather than replace them, as each have their own application and benefit.
For me, the earlier the preparation, the better; both in the context of existing incident rates and demonstrating commitment to safety and compliance. Implementing these steps now doesn’t just reduce risk in the lead up to the law change, ensuring students, staff, and parents remain as safe as possible when an incident does occur, it also avoids last-minute pressure as we edge ever closer to what will be an entirely new regulatory environment.
