So how to you fancy having a policeman based in your school?

It is mid afternoon at Westfield Primary School. Children are chattering happily in classrooms. In one corridor, displays of paper trees and hand-made daffodils sway in the warm spring breeze, alongside a huge tissue-paper sports mascot.

The last person you would expect to see wandering around this friendly Acomb school is a police officer But in a few months' time, York Police could be regular faces in schools such as this around York.

As The Press revealed yesterday, police are looking at plans to put teams of officers, including inspectors, sergeants, constables and community support officers, in primary and secondary schools.

The idea would be for them to use the school as a base for policing the local community.

They would have a daily briefing at the school each morning, instead of at Fulford Road police station, before hitting the streets. Some might even have lunch in the school canteen.

So what do the children at Westfield think of the idea?

"I would feel good about it because people will be scared to do bad things because they'll know they're being watched," says ten-year-old Alex Allison.

Lucy Simpson, also ten, agrees.

"I think it's a good idea because there will be a lot of people in the neighbourhood that will feel safer because the police community are going to be nearer to them," she says.

"It would be different for us because you don't normally see police officers in your school, but I just think if they were here for a long time then people will get used to it."

Nine-year-old Jordan Sampson says it might help people feel safer. "The bad people will know that somebody is watching them so they won't do bad things," he says.

Classmate Ben Hall, ten, agrees.

"People won't have as much wrong as they did before," he says.

"Police officers are friendly. They know what they're doing and they stop crime happening and they make it better."

The thumbs-up from the children, then. And Mark Barnett, Westfield's head teacher, is just as keen as his young charges.

If the opportunity arose, he would be delighted to have police based in his school, he says, although he would like to see them in libraries and supermarkets too.

Westfield School already welcomes some community services, points out Mr Barnett, with health representatives, a private nursery and a council street cleaner all based on site.

This would be the next logical step.

One of the biggest advantages, he believes, would be encouraging young children to respect the police and to see them not as objects of suspicion, but as people who are there to help.

It would also be a great way of getting the police where they need to be, in the heart of the community, he says.

The community teams wouldn't be there to tackle major crime, but they would be on hand to tackle minor neighbourhood nuisance and petty crime.

"I think the thing to emphasise is that it would be a community police station," he says. "It's not taking the place of the traditional police stations such as the one we have in Fulford, it's a place where community support officers could be based within the community and go out into it.

"It would not be here for the Saturday night Micklegate run, it would be community-type incidents.

"The whole idea of these officers would be that they're on the beat in the community so they need to have an office based in the middle of their area. They would be able to respond quicker to nuisance, low-level crime."

The only ones likely to object to that are the criminals themselves.

What York head teachers think...

HEAD TEACHERS in York are broadly supportive of the plans, although most say they would like to see more details first.

Joseph Rowntree School is to get an entirely new school building, hopefully by September 2009. Head teacher Hugh Porter said there had been discussions about the possibility of the new school acting as a base for a school team.

Child protection would be a key issue, he said. It wouldn't do to have strange adults wandering around the school, claiming they were looking for the police.

But provided that problem could be overcome, in principle it was a good idea.

"We work closely with the police service in York already. But there absolutely could be benefits to something like this. We are all members of the community together, and it is important for young people to see police as part of their community."

Christine Holbrey, head teacher of Lowfield School, said police offices might not work in schools at the moment, but they would certainly fit into the "extended school" model that was coming in, in which schools were seen not just as places of education, but places where local people could access a range of services.

Sally Taylor, head teacher of Burton Green Primary school in Clifton, agreed. Having police interacting more with children on a daily basis would break down barriers, she said.

Schools were more and more going to become community bases that acted as a one-stop shop for local people to access everything from health to community advice, she said. "So why not the police?"

Tony Gavin, head of Burnholme Community College, said he would welcome anything which built on the positive relationship York schools enjoyed with the police.

But he did have reservations. Any move to base police offices in schools must not be seen as the result of schools needing to call in police help. It must be clear that it was not about policing schools, but about providing officers with a base to police the local community, he said.

Schools must also beware of going down the US route.

He had recently returned from a visit to Houston in Texas, he said. "Every school in Houston had two armed police patrolling on the premises. I just didn't like that."

Playground police have gone down well in Sunderland

TO the children of Redby Primary School in Sunderland, police are just a regular part of their everyday life.

Not because the children are constantly in trouble. Nothing of the sort. It is just that the local police operate out of an office in the school itself.

The five officers and one sergeant are not there to keep an eye on the children, says head teacher Val Shield. They simply use the school as a base for patrolling the local community.

But the knock-on effect is that they have a much better relationship with the children than they might do otherwise.

Officers have lunch with children in the school hall, play football with them, and even read to them for one event to mark World Book Day. The upshot is that the children learn to see the police in a different light.

"They see the human face of the police, that the police are there to help and they are people just like them," Mrs Shield said.

That was true even at her previous primary school, Witherwack, also in Sunderland, where a similar system operated. Witherwack, Mrs Shield admitted, was in "bandit country". "It is quite a tough area, and we had some really tough guys in Year 6. But even they responded really well," she said.

It must be a good thing, especially in the social climate we have today, Mrs Shield says, that from a young age children get to grow up with a more positive, friendly impression of the police, instead of seeing them as people you can't talk to or trust.

Much as the children benefit, however, the real aim of the Sunderland system, Mrs Shield said, is to give police a base in the heart of their local community.

When she was at Witherwack, there were eight officers based at the school, including one sergeant. At Redby she has five, including a sergeant.

The police are not there around the clock. They work in shifts, and have to go to the nearest police station to log on and pick up their police radios.

But they do have an office in the school, and use it as a base for patrols during the day. And local people can drop in to see them if they want, Mrs Shield said.

So how does that work? Isn't there a problem with strangers wandering around the school grounds?

Of course, that doesn't happen, Mrs Shield says.

Anybody who wants to speak to the police can telephone them directly.

Or if they do come to the school, they have to come to the main entrance and ring for attention. All the doors are security locked: but once someone at reception has spoken to them, a police officer will come to meet them and escort them in.

That has only happened on a couple of occasions in the six months that Mrs Shield has been at the school. But the point is that locals know they are there, right in the heart of the community.

Chief Insp Paul Orchard, of Sunderland Police, says the system started in 2000 with offices in a few primary schools. Some secondary schools in Sunderland also now house police offices, he says. It helps to combat the negative stereotypes of the police that some children might have, and is also a great way of increasing police visibility in the community.

He visited one of the schools that house a police team recently. "And when you walk through the school with officers, the children come up to you and talk to you. They know the police officers by their first names."

The scheme is now being extended, with negotiations on-going to get teams of officers working out of city centre shops and council buildings, wherever a police presence is needed.

Public reaction seems generally to be good, Chief Insp Orchard said.

"Certainly, the neighbouring policing team inspectors I have spoken to say the feedback they get from the community is very positive."

Familiarity can be both good and bad

CHRIS Kyriacou, a reader in educational psychology at the University of York, said he could see real benefits to having police based in local schools.

"If they were seen as part of children's everyday community, then either as a child or later as an adult they might feel more comfortable about approaching the police for help," he said.

But he could see disadvantages, too, he said. That same familiarity with police officers might make them seem more commonplace and ordinary in the children's eyes, and so undermine their authority.