A European office has reissued its school safety report for the fourteenth time, changing only the date on the cover. Officials say the fourteen recommendations still apply, which they consider proof of quality. The fifteenth edition is already printed, with a blank space for the town.
The binder is grey, ninety pages, and the staples have started to rust at the corner. On Monday the European Clearing House for Lessons Learned published its latest report into violence in schools. It is the same report as last time. The only new thing on it is the date.
The office confirmed the reissue in a three-line note. It said the fourteen recommendations remained "fully applicable" and that redrafting them would waste public money.
The reissue follows the attack at a school in Fagersta, in central Sweden, where an 18-year-old man wielding a sword attacked students during classes. A 17-year-old girl was killed. Three other people were wounded, including boys aged 12 and 17 who suffered minor injuries.
The clearing house does not comment on individual cases. It comments on categories. Fagersta has been logged under a category that already existed.
Fourteen recommendations, none of them new
The recommendations are familiar to anyone who has read one of these before. Better information sharing. Earlier intervention. Clearer lines of responsibility. A named person in each building who knows what to do.
Recommendation nine asks governments to stop commissioning reviews that repeat earlier reviews. It has appeared in every edition since the first.
Director Anneli Roos said the office had thought hard about writing something fresh.
"We tried," she said. "We drafted a new opening paragraph, read it back, and found we had written the old one again from memory. At that point you accept what the work is."
"People say nothing has changed. That is unfair. The typeface has changed twice."
Roos said the office had cut its writing team and expanded its print budget. Composition, she said, was never the slow part.
A gap where the country goes
Later editions carry a blank space on the title page for the name of the relevant country. Deputy director Bertrand Kuyt described this as a workflow improvement.
"Before, we had to reset the whole document," he said. "Now a ministry writes its own name in the gap and the report is ready by lunchtime."
He said fourteen governments had requested the blank version this year. Two asked whether the space could be made larger, in case of a longer name.
The first edition was typed on a machine and circulated by post. Nobody at the office can now say which event prompted it. The file note gives a year and no further detail.
Ministries welcome the findings
Reaction across the continent has been warm. Education officials in six countries described the report as timely, which is the word they used the previous time as well.
A senior ministry adviser, Piet Vandermeer, said the document arrived at exactly the right moment.
"It gives us a clear framework," he said. "We will study it carefully, as we did in 2019, and again after that, and I believe once before that."
Asked what came of the earlier studies, Vandermeer said the matter had been referred to a working group. Asked what the working group concluded, he said it had recommended a review.
Two ministries asked for the report in a ring binder rather than a stapled copy. Both said this would make it easier to add pages later.
The reading problem
Internal figures show the report is downloaded heavily in the fortnight after an attack and almost not at all afterwards. Roos calls this the attention window.
"The window is about fourteen days," she said. "On day one, everyone wants the document. By the third week, nobody can find the email. This has been stable for as long as we have measured it."
She said the office had considered releasing the report at random intervals, to catch people when they were calm. The idea was dropped. Nobody opens a report about school violence in a quiet month.
Kuyt said the office had also tested a shorter version. It ran to one page and was ignored more quickly than the long one.
Already at the printer
The fifteenth edition is finished. It is boxed, sealed and waiting in a storeroom in Brussels, with the cover date left blank.
Roos said this was not cynicism. It was procurement.
"We know the text," she said. "We do not know the town. When we know the town, we will print the town, and we will send it out within the day. That is the only part of this we have ever been good at."
She was asked whether she found the arrangement bleak. She said she had stopped asking herself that question around the tenth edition, and recommended the practice to others.
