SCHOOLS across East Lancashire are to benefit from a £300,000 cash boost in a bid to keep out vandals and arsonists.

The hand-out comes a couple of months after problems with security prompted a class of five-year-olds from a school in Great Harwood to write to Home Secretary David Blunkett and ask him to save their school from neighbourhood troublemakers.

St John's CE Primary School has been the regular target of teenage yobs who party on classroom roofs, drinking, sniffing glue and hurling bottles down to the playground below.

It is just one of many schools across East Lancashire where staff daily have to clear up syringes and broken glass as the most obvious manifestations of vandals at work.

Now, the Government has announced that local authorities across the country are to receive £10million to improve security in schools. Lancashire will get £260,000 and Blackburn with Darwen £35,000.

Education chiefs are being encouraged to come up with innovative solutions as well as traditional measures such as security fencing, CCTV and access control systems to help reduce vandalism, arson - and physical attacks on teachers after hours.

In a recent poll, 12 per cent of teachers said they had been attacked or threatened by an angry parent in school in the last year.

At St John's fences have been smashed, and in a copse next to the school youngsters set up a drinks and drugs den. Recently, staff even found human faeces smeared on classroom windows.

Headteacher David Ratcliffe said: "This is an over-subscribed and successful school and this used to be a decent area where people have lived for many years."

Hyndburn MP Greg Pope added: "This isn't really a schools problem; it's a problem of society today and is happening right across Hyndburn."

The school's old building is already surrounded by heavy-duty spiked security fencing, but at the new block vandals have been creating havoc.

Young People and Learning Minister Ivan Lewis said: "Effective learning can only happen when pupils and staff feel safe and secure in their school environment. This new funding means that local education authorities like Lancashire and Blackburn with Darwen can invest in measures to help achieve this.

"They have already done much good work, but there is still more to do."

Lancashire and Blackburn with Darwen are now being asked to consult diocesan and school governing bodies to identify the most urgent projects for the 2002-2003 hand-outs.