EAST Lancashire's new secondary schools are some of the first in the country to have pioneering security systems installed.

Teachers can use the state-of-the-art system to manipulate live feed from CCTV cameras to check whether the route to their car is safe late at night.

The three schools currently being built in Burnley and Pendle under the county council's £250million Building Schools for the Future (BSF) scheme - Shuttleworth College in Padiham, Burnley Campus, and Pendle Vale College in Nelson - are all being kitted out with the system, by security specialists TAC.

The Hampshire-based firm has a contract with Lancashire County Council to install the system in the other five BSF schools planned in Burnley and Pendle.

And it is likely that it will be rolled out across the majority of future BSF schools across the country, including three planned for Blackburn, amid increasing fears about staff safety.

The system gives teachers working late exclusive intranet access to check the area where their car is parked for suspicious characters via security cameras on site.

Live feed from the pan tilt zoom (PTZ) cameras in staff car parks is streamed to a password protected area of the schools intranet.

Staff can then manoeuvre the camera to identify their own car, the routes to it, and check the car park generally for intruders.

The cameras also have integrated environmental correction technology, such as built in fan and heater to neutralize temperature changes, so they can record images in any weather conditions.

"Once they have finished using this function and logged out, the camera returns to its original function," said Simon Clement, project manager at TAC.

"As an external camera, the PTZ technology acts as a day-night camera, recording in colour during the day and then changing to black and white when it's dark to capture activity and detect the changing of light levels, for example reacting to the flood lighting around the building to provide a clear picture."

As well as the live feed cameras, the security system includes energy monitoring, access control, intruder detection, integration to the fire alarm, CCTV, door entry intercom and disabled assistance alarms.

Matt Coulson, education security specialist at TAC, added: "Security should be at the top of the school agenda."