Designing a School Safety and Violence Prevention Programme for Senior Secondary Schools in Kano State

School violence, gang recruitment, and extremism proximity represent serious safety challenges in Kano State secondary schools, and professionally designed school safety programmes integrating security management with social crime prevention offer a comprehensive response framework. This study designed a school safety and violence prevention programme for Senior Secondary Schools in Kano Municipal, Fagge, and Dala Local Government Areas, Kano State. A professional programme design methodology was employed, drawing on safety assessments of 15 secondary schools, structured interviews with 20 school principals, 10 security officials, and 8 educational welfare officers, and benchmarking against WHO School Safety Programme guidelines and UNICEF Safe School frameworks. School safety assessments identified gang and cult proximity (73.3 percent of schools), drug availability within school environments (66.7 percent), physical infrastructure safety failures (60 percent), bullying as routine (80 percent), and absent teacher training for conflict de-escalation (93.3 percent) as primary safety challenges. The programme designed encompasses physical security audit and improvement components, teacher and counsellor safety response training, student peer mediation programme, anti-gang and anti-drug awareness curriculum, parent engagement protocols, and a school-police liaison model. Expert review by eight school safety and crime prevention specialists confirmed the programme's operational viability and cultural sensitivity. The study recommends adoption by the Kano State Ministry of Education as a mandatory safety programme for all government senior secondary schools.

Keywords: school safety, violence prevention, secondary school, Kano State, youth crime prevention