Security & SafetyOpen

Design a School Security Audit Tool for Public Secondary Schools in South-West Nigeria

Create a practical audit framework and checklist that a school principal or parent-teacher association can use to assess security risks at their school. Public secondary schools across the South-West face real threats from perimeter breaches, poor emergency planning, and inadequate staff training, but almost no accessible tools exist to help non-experts diagnose the problems.

The brief

Abductions, cult violence, and perimeter breaches have affected secondary schools across Nigeria in recent years. While much attention goes to the North-East, schools in states like Ogun, Osun, and Lagos face ongoing risks from different sources: poorly fenced campuses, absent or untrained security personnel, no emergency communication plans, and students with no understanding of what to do in a crisis. The resources to fix all of this rarely exist, but the knowledge of where to start often does not exist either. School principals and PTA chairs are not security professionals. Most would not know how to conduct a threat assessment or prioritise limited resources. A structured, accessible audit tool built specifically for the Nigerian public school context could help them move from vague worry to concrete action. Your deliverable is a school security audit toolkit. This should include: a one-page introduction for non-expert users, a scored checklist covering physical security, access control, emergency protocols, staff roles, and student awareness, and a short guidance note explaining how to interpret scores and prioritise the most critical findings. The toolkit should be designed to be printed on A4 paper and used without any digital device during the audit itself. The best submissions will have been piloted informally at one school or tested with someone who works in a school. They will be specific to Nigerian public school conditions, not adapted from a Western security framework. Clarity and usability matter more than comprehensiveness. A tool no one can use is not a tool.