Tackling school arsons

A fire at Rawene School in Northland last month was treated as suspicious. Picture / Northern Advocate

Two teenagers have been charged with arson following a fire at a Gisborne school early yesterday.

The charges come as Britain attempts to reduce the number of school fires there - up to 20 of its schools a week are hit by arson attacks.

Yesterday's Gisborne blaze destroyed a library and a resource room in a stand alone building at Kaiti Primary School.

The pair, both males and aged 19 and 15, were arrested after a tip-off from the public and will appear in Gisborne District Court tomorrow.

The fire was lit against against a door and spread into the roof space of the two-room building at the school.

Senior station officer Richard Jefferies from the Gisborne Fire Service said three fire crews were needed to subdue the blaze.

The roof was destroyed and the rest of the building suffered extensive smoke and water damage

The arson is just the latest here and is part of an international problem.

Imaginative attempts to combat the problem are now producing results in the UK.

In many cases, it is the schools' own pupils who light the fires, causing millions of pounds of damage and throwing classes into chaos.

At Penyrheol Comprehensive School, in Wales, six weeks after their school was torched, hundreds of pupils are still studying in temporary buildings.

It was one of the biggest and most catastrophic school fires in the UK. At its height, 14 firecrews and 80 firefighters battled to save the school.

When the flames were brought under control at 6am, 45 classrooms had been destroyed.

South Wales Police are treating the fire as suspicious.

The latest statistics, published by the British Government in February, show that there were 840 deliberate fires in schools in 2004.

Zurich Municipal, the leading schools insurer, puts the cost of school fires last year at £67m ($194m) and says that three-quarters of them were lit deliberately.

Most are started by pupils, former pupils, or someone with a brother or sister at the school.

When Ian Rawlings, of the country's arson task force, produced a booklet called Play It Safe and distributed it to 1,600 schools, arson incidents fell from 48 to 28 in a year.

There are imaginative projects, too: in June, Sparx, the task force's drama for children, with its anti-arson message, begins a six-week tour of the region's theatres.

In London, an independent assessment of the London Fire Brigade's juvenile firesetters' intervention scheme (home visits and a video which deglamorises fire) found 93 per cent of young firestarters had stopped.

- NZPA, INDEPENDENT