When tragedy becomes history

Twenty years after the Lockerbie bombing, how does the local school teach pupils about its painful past?

Lockerbie academy had already broken up for the Christmas holidays on Wednesday 21 December 1988 when Pan Am Flight 103 from London Heathrow to New York's JFK airport exploded over the town, an hour into the flight, killing all 259 people on board and 11 local people.

Because the school was empty and had the space and catering facilities, it became a centre of activity for rescue workers and the troops brought in to help find the dead, gather their belongings and piece together the remains of the plane.

For many people worldwide, the name of the town became synonymous with the disaster. But for students attending the school now, the explosion on board Pan Am 103 is something that happened before they were born. So how does a school at the centre of a tragedy like this ensure students learn about events in recent history that happened to their community?

At Lockerbie academy, a secondary school with 800 students aged 12-18, students are taught about the tragedy in a one-off slot within personal and social education in their second year, when they are 13 or 14. Taught by the senior management team, the class gives a brief history of what happened in the disaster and then focuses on a scholarship scheme set up between Lockerbie academy and Syracuse University in New York state.

Syracuse students

Thirty-five students from Syracuse University were on Pan Am 103, returning home for Christmas after a semester in Europe. Following the tragedy, many of the families of these students and staff from the university visited Lockerbie, and the university wanted to formalise a way of maintaining these links. Two scholarship funds were founded, one for students at Syracuse University to take part in remembrance activities on campus, and one that allowed for two students each year from Lockerbie academy to study at the university as Syracuse scholars (known in the US as Lockerbie scholars) for a year after leaving school.

It is these scholarships that Graham Herbert, the rector of Lockerbie academy, and his team focus on in their lesson. Its the right time for us to say, this could be you in four years time, Herbert says. We're trying to motivate them and say if you work hard, this could be your reward.

For some students, this is the first they have heard of the disaster. They haven't heard about it for three reasons, says Herbert, who was teaching in another school at the time, because they weren't born; because only a third of the population of the school actually lives in Lockerbie; and because its still a bit of a taboo subject and families don't want to talk about it.

The class leads to a lively dialogue. They ask lots of questions. They're not being gruesome, but the kids want to know the main areas where the plane came down, where bodies were found and what happened in the aftermath. The school was used as a base for troops, so they are always quite interested in that and the fact that my deputy's office was the US ambassadors office, he says.

The schools thought for the week board displays the Syracuse University crest for a week each December, with its motto: Knowledge crowns those who seeks her. We add a note saying In remembrance of Pan Am 103, but its meant to be short and snappy, says Herbert. There is also an exhibition in the school featuring information on the scholarship and photos of the scholars and the remembrance ceremony held at Syracuse each October. You're drip-feeding it to students without being in their face, he says.

Dr Lynette Rentoul is the former director of children's services in New York who was brought in to deal with the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. She is an expert in helping children deal with disasters. If children ask questions, it is very important to be honest, not to say we don't talk about that, she says. But for younger children you need to tell that story in a way that doesn't make them think that aeroplanes just fall out of the sky or that it is likely to happen again. But answering questions does help children make sense of the memorials around them.

This rings true for Lauren Flynn, 18, a former student at Lockerbie academy and now a Syracuse scholar on her year in America: "We were walking down Rosebank Terrace, where there's a memorial plaque because some of the plane landed there, and I said to my granny, 'What's that?' and she told me about the disaster."

Researching the disaster

But it wasn't until the application process for the scholarship that Flynn started to build a full picture of the events that night. To apply for the Syracuse scholarship, you have to answer questions about the disaster and do research, she says. It was quite interesting because no one really speaks about it.

Waiting until children are at secondary school before there is any formal teaching about this kind of thing is right, says Rentoul. With the older ones, you can talk about it as history. They have a much more sophisticated sense of time, and you can talk about probabilities with a teenager and that this isn't going to happen again. They are much more resilient and able to hear the story and keep it in proportion.

For Adam Brooks, 20, a Syracuse scholar in 2006-07 and now in his second year studying law at university in Aberdeen, the disaster had been something he had grown up knowing about. "My mum's lived in Lockerbie almost all her life and we were all there that night, though I was only a baby, so I learned of it primarily from them," he explains.

Brooks has been back to the school to tell students about his time at Syracuse. But he is adamant that residents should not define themselves by the events of 20 years ago. I think it is important that kids learn about it, but I don't think it defines Lockerbie, he says. The town moves forward and has lots of other things that it concentrates on. It'll never be forgotten, but a lot of the emphasis now is on the scholarship and the good that comes out of the links between the two places.

For Herbert, too, the emphasis is on the scholarship and the future, and on seeing the disaster as something to be remembered in terms of the past. We teach the first world war and do battlefield trips in third year, and we tie in the whole message of remembrance and include Pan Am 103 as another act of remembrance. But its very much tied up with the scholarship and our links to Syracuse University, he says. My way of looking at it is that time should not diminish what brought our two communities together in the first place.