While not inevitable, it is highly likely that, at some point in their career, senior school leaders and headteachers will have to deal with a critical incident in their school.

The exact nature of such an incident can take many forms: a gas explosion in a science lab; a pupil bringing a knife into school; a crash involving a coach transporting pupils on a school trip; or the death of a senior pupil in a crashed car driven by a classmate.

The severity of - and consequences resulting from - these incidents will differ, but the initial response and the aftermath will often call for similar actions.

In most instances, there will be a great deal of concern from pupils, staff and parents. The latter may inundate the school with requests for children to be sent home or, depending on their age and stage, form long queues at the school gate to come and remove them.

They may end up meeting with members of the local (or even national) press. There may be journalists and television crews standing outside school, hoping to talk to whomever they can find and take location pictures and close-ups of willing participants. The long-term effects, if not properly managed, can be hugely damaging for relationships within the school and across the community.

For critical incidents, schools will have carefully devised plans and policies to follow - often formulated in the wake of a previous incident. Following the fatal stabbing of a teenager at a school in Aberdeen in 2015, for instance, many authorities considered what could be done in the event of a similar occurrence in their own area.

Councils will also have established their own general policies for how headteachers should react in the event of a such an incident. Such policies will provide contact details for senior council education officials, details for how to get in touch with parents and, perhaps, information on the blanket removal of mobile phones from those pupils involved to ensure that panic cannot be spread through social media. Much of the advice in these policy documents will have resulted from meetings with high-level council officials, the police and other emergency services and corporate communications.

While undoubtedly useful, the local authority advice will be procedural and will probably not take account of the fallout coming your way as soon you arrive at school. However, there are a number of principles you can work with to achieve the best outcome in the circumstances and limit the damage that may be caused.

Talk to your staff

No matter how much explaining and reassuring you are going to have to do to pupils and parents, the bulk of the on-the-ground questioning is going to come from your teachers and support staff. Make sure they have all the details at the earliest available opportunity.

Call a staff meeting as soon as you can and make sure everyone attends. Outline what has happened and how it is being dealt with. If there are restrictions on what staff can tell pupils (as there may be in the event of a criminal investigation), then make sure they are aware of exactly how much they can disclose. Depending on what the incident is, there could be anger: for instance, in the case of a pupil bringing a knife into school, there may well be questions about how you let this happen and comments about how you have let standards decline. If the worst happens and a pupil dies, there is likely to be extreme distress and a need to offer counselling.

Do not rush the staff meeting. Remember that your colleagues will have concerns: some will need to voice them in a public forum; others may wish to do so quietly at a later date. In either case, always be prepared to answer criticisms and concerns as honestly as you are able: that includes admitting that you don’t know what the outcomes will be. Any flak that you take in the immediate aftermath will be preferable to a loss of credibility in the future if, for example, you withhold information that comes to light later on.

Talk to your pupils

Depending on the nature of the incident, you may well want to inform pupils. In these days of social media, it is unlikely that anything major happening in the school will remain a secret for long anyway.

Again, with criminal investigations for drugs or offensive weapons, it may be that you engage with pupils only on a one-to-one basis when they ask questions and, even then, don’t really tell them very much. If the incident involves injury to fellow pupils, however, it would be best to call an assembly - at least for the year group involved - to fully explain the circumstances.

Perhaps the worst thing a school can go through is coping with the death of a pupil. At an affluent rural school where I worked, pupils were in constant danger of being involved in car accidents as they turned 17 and passed their driving tests. One such case, resulting in the death of a popular pupil, brought widespread grief to the school.

If something similar happens at your school, be prepared for much distress and lots of crying. At these points, you will need to remain calm and compassionate. Also, make sure to look beyond the loudest expressions of grief: sometimes the most emotional pupils will be those with little connection to the deceased but who want attention themselves, while some of the most sincerely distressed pupils will be dealing with their sorrow more quietly and internally.

Pupils will be leaning heavily on your guidance and counselling teams at precisely the moment when staff will need their own space to grieve. In a school with strong relationships, there will be a period of mourning (and mass absence on the day of the funeral) but you will all get through it in time. Ultimately, some sort of memorial might be a good idea.

Talk to the parents

As with pupils, parents may be aware of the incident, through word of mouth and social media, well before you can get any details out to them. You do need to make some contact with parents as soon as possible, however, to show you have nothing to hide and that everything is under control (even if it doesn’t really feel that way in reality).

If, for legal reasons, there is little information that you can give, then you just need to put out a short letter confirming that an incident has been dealt with and reassuring parents about pupils’ safety. Following one knife incident at my school, the letter I sent home was initially misinterpreted by pupils and parents as being in regard to a spate of hoax fire alarms due to the fact that minimal detail had been included. By the time the truth was out in the press, however, everything was well and truly taken care of. Parents had recovered from the initial shock, and could look more rationally at the way in which the incident had been handled.

It is important that you make sure you keep parents’ representatives, such as your parent council, more fully in the loop. What information you give to them will depend on how well-established your relationships are and how much trust you have in them to pass on sensitive matters with discretion. As long as you have reacted well to whatever the situation is, most parents will be supportive of you and will want to do whatever they can to maintain the good reputation of the school.

Don’t talk (much) to the press

Most school policies, especially those related to the local authority, will have strict rules on dealing with the press in the event of a critical incident. Invariably, they will state that all requests for comment or information should be directed to corporate communications or, sometimes, the police press office.

If you have good contacts with the local newspapers - as many headteachers do, through publicity for school events - then you may find them on the phone to you looking for on- or off-the-record comments. Be polite but say little and refer them onwards to the relevant authority.

More difficult to control are journalists or camera crews hanging around the school gates looking for vox pops from concerned parents and local people. There is very little you can do about this and you may just have to live with the photo and words of “parent with concerned face and baby in pram”. Most likely, these words will soon be forgotten.

The long-term effects of any critical incident cannot be known. The collective memory of a school can be a remarkably long one; ultimately, some incidents will become part of its history, referred to and remembered on a periodic basis.

As a senior leader, the best way to prepare for a critical incident, and limit any reputational damage in its aftermath, is to establish robust relationships across the school and community with your pupils, staff, parents and the press. They will then understand the reasons why you took the action you did and followed the policies available to you - and will be reassured that you did the best you could possibly do in a difficult situation.

John Rutter is headteacher at Inverness High School

This article originally appeared in the 8 February 2019 issue under the headline “What to do when the worst happens”