The moment the bedside phone rang, just after 6am on July 10 1996, normal life stopped for Daryl Peek, headteacher of Goodnestone Church of England primary school in Kent. The caller was her senior teacher, Jan Callaghan, who lived in the grounds of the small, rural school. The previous evening, a parent, Shaun Russell, had phoned to say that his wife and two daughters had failed to return home and MsCallaghan had just heard something that had alarmed her.

“She told me that a story on the six o’clock news said the body of a woman and two girls had been found in the Dover area and that it might be the Russell family.”

Confronted by that awful possibility, Ms Peek’s mind began to search for reasons why it might not be them. After all, Goodnestone was 10 miles from Dover; for administrative purposes it came under the Canterbury area.

But if it wasn’t the Russells, it would be children at another school in the county. She should let someone know. Realising her emergency numbers were all at school, she called a fellow headteacher and got the numbers from him. She listened to the 6.30am news, phoned a contact from the LEA to see if he could find out the victims’ names and set off for school. “All the time, I was thinking, ‘It’s not going to be us.’” But it was. When Ms Peek arrived, Jan Callaghan told her the school was indeed within the Dover police district. Another parent had been up all night searching with Shaun Russell and had accompanied him to the police station when the bodies had been found. Six months into the job, Daryl Peek was confronted with every head’s nightmare: the murder of a pupil.

The police confirmed that six-year-old Megan and her mother Lin, 45, had been killed. Josie, who was nine, had suffered head injuries so severe that she was unlikely to survive. Until a public announcement was made, Ms Peek could tell only the school’s three teachers and four classroom assistants and no one else.

Still struggling to take in the enormity of it all, Ms Peek went on playground duty, and tried to act as if nothing was wrong. Parents began to arrive, some talking about the previous day’s swimming gala, others commenting on the morning’s terrible news, unaware whom it concerned. “That was difficult,” she says, “because I knew that if I let slip to anybody it would go round like wildfire.”

At assembly, children were picking up on the teachers’ barely concealed distress, and some of the older ones had started asking questions. Ms Peek decided to ignore police advice and tell the children the truth. She chose a story, Phillipa Pearce’s Lion at School, that she hoped might give them courage. When it was finished she said: “I am going to tell you something now that you need to know and you have to be very brave like the lion.”

As she broke the news “the older ones held hands and cried”, she says. “One of the little boys said, ‘She’ll be better tomorrow.’ Some children wanted to make sure their mothers were all right so we phoned home on a pretext, asking if they had left their homework behind.

“I thought, ‘We have done the worst bit. Now we have to help the children get through the grief and anger.’ ” Ms Peek had worked with special needs children and in a young offenders’ institution before becoming a headteacher, so was “used to terrible things happening”. But she was unprepared for the murderous attack on two of her pupils and their mother. “There was nothing in place to help us,” she says. “When the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry went down in 1987, the children who were affected were in a dozen or so schools. We don’t have the experts to deal with major events. What happened last month in the United States brought it home to me. We have nothing in place to help us with the immediate matters, such as: ‘What do we do? How do we tell the children?’ In terms of dealing with trauma in schools, there really isn’t anyone who knows unless they have been through it.”

Now she has remedied that with Dealing with Trauma, a CD-Rom of materials to help schools cope with a death in their community. By coincidence, it was released the week after Michael Stone was convicted for a second time of murdering Lin and Megan, and the attempted murder of Josie, who now lives in north Wales with her father.

One of the things that most shocked Daryl Peek in the aftermath of the murders was the reaction of the media. As the news spread, Goodnestone primary’s only phone line was blocked by calls from reporters. The school, in countryside so remote that it had no mobile phone coverage, was under siege.

“The lane outside was heaving with vehicles and large men with large cameras. It was frightening for the children. Cameramen were climbing over the roof of a mobile classroom trying to take pictures through the windows.

“What made me really angry was that they had no respect for those who had died or the children and adults who had to cope with it. The police were saying, ‘We can keep them off the premises but we can’t keep them off the lane; it’s a public highway.’ The children had to walk the gauntlet, while reporters were shouting at them, ‘Did you know Megan?’ ‘Were you in Megan’s class?’ I thought adults would respect children in their grief, but they didn’t.”

Ms Peek’s immediate priority was to protect the children from the media; she soon discovered that they and their families would be offered money to talk. She staged a “mock” sports day and memorial service to which the media were invited, enabling the school to hold its own genuine commemoration a few days later in peace.

The police began interviewing staff to eliminate them from the inquiry. Relatives of staff and pupils came under suspicion, and the lengthy questioning of two in particular was an uneasy episode for everyone.

But amid the turmoil the children’s education had to go on, so Ms Peek devised activities that allowed children to express their grief and ensured their learning could continue. “If I am angry, I bake bread. It’s wonderful. You can make a face and pull it about. It doesn’t damage anybody and you get an end product. And those are the type of activities children enjoy. When the bread was baked, they took it outside and fed it to the birds. That was their idea.

“They wrote things down and burned them; they wanted the words to go up to heaven. Some of the little ones sent notes up the chimney so Father Christmas would get them. The children also suggested a large M planted in red flowers. I wouldn’t have thought of doing that but it was what the children wanted.” A fragrant garden was planted as a lasting memorial to Megan and Lin.

“We made puppets and used them for role-plays. That used music, creative writing, design and technology and maths. So we could justify what we were doing within the curriculum.” Her approach was vindicated by an Ofsted inspection in January 1997. “They offered to delay it. But I wanted to tell the world, ‘We have had this horrendous thing happen to us and these children have been devastated, yet we have managed to do our job and done it well.’” But most of all she tried to maintain as normal a routine as possible, defying the terrible actions of the murderer. “It was important the children understood that what he had done was a power thing and that the more they reacted to that, the more he was beating us. I told them we could not let what had destroyed Lin and Megan - and almost destroyed Josie - destroy our school or our lives.”

Daryl Peek’s determination springs in part from her own experiences as a grammar school D-stream pupil who was told to forget her career aspirations. “I was badly taught. I was told, ‘All you are going to be is a wife and mother.’ When I said I wanted to be a teacher my careers teacher said, ‘I don’t think so.’” Ms Peek re-took two O-levels and trained as a nursery teacher, gained a double first at university and is now working towards a doctorate. She has two daughters.

The dreadful events at Goodnestone represented her biggest professional challenge and took a personal toll. She went from a size 16 to a size 10 in the year after the attack - “I look years younger than I did five years ago” - and, incredibly, only now does she feel able to cry about it. “I felt that if I had cried everyone else would have thought, ‘Oh, Daryl can’t cope.’” Other people’s perceptions gave her strength. “In the summer holidays we opened up the village hall for parents and children, and someone brought in a jelly-baby tree. One of them was hanging on to the branch by his fingertips and I said, ‘That’s me.’ But one of the parents said, ‘No, that’s you at the bottom of the tree giving all the others a leg up.’” Ms Peek knows her experience is all too common. Each year, around 7,500 young people die before the age of 19, whether by accident, or through illness or murder. Most are somebody’s pupil. Thousands of schools have to cope with the aftermath, something for which, even if the death was expected, they are largely unprepared.

“I have probably had a call every three or four weeks from headteachers since it happened. Whenever there’s something in the paper, I send a card saying, ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with you.’ Because someone did that for me. The headteacher of a school in Birmingham wrote to tell me one of his pupils had been killed by their father the previous week. We had hundreds of letters and cards but that was the most important. The others felt for us, but he knew what we were going through.”

She now runs courses with a children’s hospice training teachers to cope with trauma. As part of the course she identifies four stages of grieving a child goes through: irreversibility, finality, inevitability and causality. Counsellors have told her that her instinctive reaction to the children’s plight at Goodnestone almost mirrored their suggested practice, but she says: “I wish I had known it at the time.”

She hopes the CD-Rom will sit on a shelf, unused. “I hope no head ever needs it, but if they do it offers some ideas. They will have to adapt it, because every school is unique.”

It advises on coping with grief, reflecting on the life of a child, dealing with the media and supporting staff and parents. It includes lesson plans and resource sheets and suggests writing individual bereavement plans to support children most affected.

“I don’t want someone to have to pluck up the courage to phone me. What they need is something they can pull off the shelf and say, ‘There’s the assembly I have to do.’” Ms Peek had to find her own way of dealing with the situation and finds it difficult to describe how she coped beyond her own matter-of-fact, modest explanation. “As a headteacher we are paid to lead and manage, and if you can’t manage the first bit of crisis that comes your way, you are taking money under false pretences.”

Three years ago she moved to another small rural school in Kent - 40 per cent of the county’s schools have fewer than 100 pupils - at Northbourne, outside Deal.

“I needed to change, otherwise it would always have been the school where Lin and Megan died or the school where Josie went. Every time Josie is in the paper now and they phone up, the head can say, ‘I wasn’t there at the time.’ It was time for me to be in a school where there hadn’t been a trauma.

“My relationship with the children and parents was wonderful, so going somewhere new was difficult. It was a big, big step but I knew it was the right thing to do.”

Even so, she hasn’t broken the powerful bond that exists between those affected. Several families have moved to keep their children with her, and six of her current 17 staff were at Goodnestone. “I meet children who were at Goodnestone who are 15 or 16 now - big, gangly teenagers - and the first thing they do when they see me is give me a big hug. There can’t be many teenagers who want to hug their old headteacher.”

OTHER CONTACTS

* The Child Bereavement Trust runs Inset training for teachers and produces materials including the British Medical Association award-winning video Someone Died - it happened to me. Contact: Aston House, West Wycombe, High Wycombe, Bucks HP14 3AG. Tel: 01494 446648; www.childbereavement.org.ukl ChildLine produces a factsheet and offers telephone counselling for young people. Tel: 0800 1111; www.childline.org.ukl Winston’s Wish is a charity for bereaved children and young people based at the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. Its local rate family line offers guidance and advice. Tel: 0845 2030405; www.winstonswish.org.ukl The Association of Children’s Hospices can put you in touch with the nearest of the 40 hospices nationwide, many of which provide counselling for friends and relatives of terminally ill children. Contact: Kings House, Orchard Street, Bristol BS1 5EH. Tel: 0117 905 5082; www.childhospice.org.uk