IS IT not a sad commentary on our society when our schools, major kingpins in the concept of "community," are now demanding to be literally fenced-off from it?

Today, after one of his pupils was attacked with a knife by a boy from outside, we find a Blackburn head teacher calling for a 6ft-high security fence to be installed around the grounds.

The school is plagued, he says, virtually on a daily basis by teenage troublemakers invading the open-plan site.

Schools across Lancashire are now pleading for protection from vandals and intruders and officials at County Hall drawing up a priority list of those that need security measures to safeguard staff and pupils.

Almost 40 primary and secondary schools in East Lancashire alone have been added to the list.

And after the horror of the Dunblane massacre and incidents in our own region, which have seen teachers and pupils at one school terrorised by a machete-wielding youth and another burned to the ground, it is indisputable that total protection must be the goal. But is it not with sadness that we must accept the validity of the comment of the head whose school was the victim of that arson attack when she says: "In this day and age, we cannot allow members of the public open access to the school."?

For, at the same time, it tells us what a less-threatened, less brutal age we have lost, and with what general menace and unpleasantness it has been superseded, when the icons of our community - schools, hospitals and even churches - have to be physically safeguarded from the public.

Yet, if such extensive and costly steps have to be taken to isolate these places from menace from outside, is it not also the case that extra steps must be taken to reduce the menace itself?

In the case of the junior school at Shadsworth, Blackburn, we find that much of the trouble to which it is exposed is caused by older boys who have been excluded from other schools.

Is there not a case, then, for a thorough examination of the exclusions explosion?

This newspaper has already remarked on the baleful effect of it dumping the troublesome into the community without supervision, when measures to keep disruptive pupils in school under intensive control might prove better.

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