Digital Content Editor, Eve Goode speaks exclusively with Kumar Sokka, CEO of Acre Security about the changing threat landscape in school environments.
Research shows only 56% of secondary students feel safe during the school day. Despite schools investing and deploying security systems, why are students still feeling unsafe?
There is a real disconnect between what schools have invested in and what students experience.
The data is striking: only 56% of secondary students feel safe during the school day, with just 25% feeling secure on buses and 50% in restrooms.
Meanwhile, staff feel confident in the emergency drills and procedures they have rehearsed.
That gap is not because the technology isn’t there.
Schools have spent significantly on cameras, controlled entry and safety personnel over the last decade.
The gap exists because students intuit, often before adults can, when those investments are not actually working as a system.
A camera that does not speak to a door is just a recording device after the fact, an entry system that fails to trigger lockdown leaves a corridor open, and a visitor checkpoint that lives on a clipboard at reception is barely a deterrent and students walk past these things every day.
They notice when the radio in the office is not connected to the alert system or when the side door does not lock at the same time as the main one.
The perception gap is not a communication problem, it’s a coherence problem.
Schools have bought a lot of security, but in many cases they have not built a security system.
What are the biggest risks that schools face when relying on fragmented legacy security systems?
The single biggest risk is that any one component can fail in isolation and the failure will not trigger a coordinated response.
That is the structural weakness of estates that have been built up incrementally: every component was bought separately, often years apart with no shared protocol for talking to each other.
In practice this looks like a few specific scenarios:
An intruder propping open a side door does not trigger an alarm because the access control system was bolted on a decade later than the alarm panel.
A camera captures the incident, but no one is watching it in real time.
A visitor checkpoint, still often managed on paper, has no way to flag someone who should not be on the premises.
We have run gap assessments for schools that, on paper, have more security technology than a small enterprise.
In practice their incident-response time is longer than a school down the road with half the kit, because the cheaper estate is integrated and theirs is not.
The other risk is invisibility.
Administrators often do not know what their security posture actually is until something happens.
They do not have a single dashboard showing access events, camera feeds, alarms and visitor logs in one place.
That makes incident response reactive rather than preventive.
Although the investment has been made, the architecture is the problem.
How important is real-time communication in helping students to feel safer during emergencies and why?
We’ve seen instances where the system managing the threat and the system warning students were completely disconnected, so the all-clear on one side had no way to reach the other.
Even a short delay is an eternity in a fast-moving incident, and the student experience of those minutes is what shapes whether the institution rebuilds trust afterwards.
What schools should look for is a unified platform where access control, cameras, alarms and communication systems can all be triggered from a single point.
The alerts should reach students, staff and first responders simultaneously.
The technology to do this exists and is no longer expensive. This technology doesn’t require ripping out the existing infrastructure.
Retrofit solutions such as our own Acre Bridge connect legacy controllers directly to a cloud-native platform, so a school can layer real-time response on top of equipment it already owns.
The bigger shift is cultural.
Schools that treat security as a set of discrete tools end up with discrete failures. Schools that treat it as a communications system end up with coherent responses.
How can schools balance strong physical security whilst maintaining open learning environments?
This is the question I am asked most by school administrators and the honest answer is that the choice is mostly a false one.
Strong security does not force schools to feel like fortresses. Ad-hoc security does — without actually being secure.
A well-designed physical security architecture should be invisible to students going about their day and only become visible at the points where it needs to.
Modern access control can manage entry without queue-forming or visible turnstiles.
Visitor management can be a one-tap process at reception. Cameras can be integrated rather than draped across every hallway.
The aesthetic question is mostly a design question, not a security question.
The deeper point is that openness and security are interdependent rather than opposed.
A school that is genuinely safe can be genuinely open.
A school that has had a serious incident ends up with reactive over-fortification: bag checks, locked corridors, double-fenced perimeters.
The way to avoid that is to build the underlying coherence properly from the start, so that strong security becomes structural and invisible rather than imposed and visible.
As security systems continue to advance and the threat landscape within schools continues to change, what role will integrated security technology play in the future of education safety?
Integrated security technology will be the foundation that everything else sits on.
What we’re building toward, and what we’re already deploying across universities and corporate campuses is a single platform that connects every component, with cloud-native infrastructure and AI-driven analytics layered on top.
The bolt-on model, a camera here, an access controller there, a visitor log on a clipboard, is giving way to something more coherent because customers are demanding it.
Anomally detection across video feeds, lockdowns triggered by sensor patterns rather than by a person noticing, predictive maintenance on the systems themselves: none of this is futuristic.
We’re already deploying it with universities and corporate campuses, and the schools we’re in conversation with are asking the same questions, which tells us the demand is moving in that direction faster than most people expect.
The other shift integration unlocks is the convergence of cyber and physical security into a single discipline.
The physical side has historically been treated as a facilities problem and the cyber-side as an IT problem.
That separation no longer holds.
A compromised access control system can be exploited by someone on the network; a phishing attack on a staff account can disable a door.
The schools that get ahead of this are the ones that treat the two as one platform, with shared identity, shared monitoring and shared response procedures.
What does not change is the fundamentals.
Strong physical security remains the first line of defence, including against cyber-threats.
Schools that build coherently rather than incrementally will be the ones where students actually feel safe and where that 56% figure starts to move in the right direction.
