The shameful failure to learn the lessons from Ann Maguire's murder

Ann Maguire was a dedicated teacher, utterly devoted to the children in her care. She had worked in the teaching profession for over four decades, had a loving husband, two grown-up daughters and, after the death of her sister 30 years earlier, selflessly raised her two nephews as her own. She was a good person who clearly cared about others. But tragically, back in 2014, she was brutally murdered by a disturbed and deranged pupil. She was attacked and stabbed seven times in her classroom, as she marked another pupil’s work.

Since then, disgracefully, her bereaved husband’s attempts to find out about the circumstances surrounding her death have been met by a wall of silence. A secretive internal report was followed by an inquest in which the coroner refused to interview the killer’s friends and classmates – quite an omission when investigating, among other things, whether the murderer had evinced any signs of what was to come in the weeks and months leading up to the crime, I would suggest.

Needless to say, both concluded that the school was not to blame in any way for Mrs Maguire’s tragic death; it had not failed in its statutory duty to protect her welfare at work; in short, there’s nothing to see here, guv.