One alarm, four different emergencies: why fire alarms alone can’t carry Martyn’s Law

For most schools, colleges and MATs preparing for Martyn’s Law, the fire alarm has been the only emergency signal that exists. One sound, one instruction: get out, go to the assembly point. That’s worked because fire has, until now, been the only building-wide emergency most sites plan for.

Martyn’s Law changes that. The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 requires in-scope premises, including early years, primary, secondary and further education settings, to have workable procedures for four distinct responses to a hostile threat: evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication. All schools and colleges with more than 200 people present onsite at any one time, sit in the standard tier, and this means having these procedures in place and rehearsed, not just written down. With an implementation window expected to close around Spring 2027, this is the year most schools need to move from “we have a fire alarm” to “we have four well-rehearsed and genuinely different responses.”

That’s the gap this post is about: a fire alarm system is built to do one job well. Martyn’s Law asks schools to do three more.

The three other emergency responses Martyn’s Law requires

Evacuation: get everyone out of the building. This is what fire alarms are designed for: fire, gas leaks, structural risk, anything where the danger is inside and safety is outside. But when it comes to bomb threats, gathering in a single assembly point isn’t the answer. How do you communicate evacuation but not in a fire situation?

Invacuation: move everyone to a safer place, usually within the site. Used when the threat is outside (nearby incident or a threat in the local area) where leaving the building would put people closer to danger, not further from it.

Lockdown: secure the premises against an attacker. Doors locked, people away from windows and sightlines, movement stopped. This is the case where the instinct to “get out” is exactly wrong.

Put evacuation and lockdown side by side and the problem is obvious: one tells people to leave, the other tells people to stay and hide. Fire alarms are wired, tested and drilled to produce the first response, automatically and building wide. They were never designed to produce the second.

How each one gets triggered matters too

A fire alarm is triggered automatically, by a smoke or heat detector or a manual call point, and the response is instant and identical every time: alarm sounds, building empties. Lockdown and invacuation don’t work that way. They’re judgement calls, usually made by a member of staff, a site leader, or the police, based on information the fire panel has no way of knowing (a threat outside the gates, an intruder on site, guidance from an emergency service). That means the trigger has to sit outside the fire system entirely, with a route for a person to raise it in seconds from wherever they are, not just from the fire panel in reception.

Why the same sound can’t do both jobs

This isn’t just a Vivi opinion. BS 5839-1:2025, the British Standard for fire detection and alarm systems, is explicit that fire evacuation tones should not be used for anything other than warning of fire, with only narrow exceptions. The Fire Industry Association’s own guidance on using fire alarm systems for lockdown in schools says the same thing directly: the fire evacuation tone is off-limits for lockdown because lockdown needs the opposite behaviour to evacuation.

There’s a sharper, more specific reason to care about this for bomb threats and hostile activity. Students and staff will have heard the fire evacuation tone dozens of times, in drills and in real alarms. That conditioning is the point, for fire. But it also means that if the same tone is ever used, or could be mistaken for, a response to a bomb threat or an attack, people will do the thing they’ve been trained to do: walk outside to the usual assembly point. If a bomb threat or hostile incident is genuine, the assembly point may be exactly where an attacker wants people gathered. Reusing the fire tone doesn’t just risk confusion, it risks marching people towards the danger rather than away from it.

The Fire Industry Association’s guidance sets out what good practice looks like instead: a different tone for lockdown, not the evacuation tone repurposed. Different-coloured, clearly labelled devices, kept away from fire alarm equipment. Its own dedicated trigger and its own cause-and-effect logic in the panel, so a genuine fire during a lockdown, or a lockdown during a fire, can still be handled without the two systems fighting each other.

Where a fire panel runs out of road

Even with a second tone added, a fire alarm system was never built to carry the rest of what lockdown, invacuation and communication need:

• It can tell everyone something is wrong. It can’t tell them what to do about it or tell different parts of the building different things (a classroom near an exit needs different instructions to one at the far end of the site).
• It’s building-wide and loud by design, which is right for evacuation and often wrong for lockdown, where you may need to alert staff first, quietly, before anyone else knows there’s an incident.
• It has no way to confirm who has seen or heard the message, which makes it hard to show, after the fact, that your procedure actually reached people. That kind of evidence is exactly what a documented, tested procedure needs to be able to show.

How Vivi covers all emergencies and site-wide communication

Vivi doesn’t replace the fire alarm system, that stays exactly where it is, doing the job it’s built for. What Vivi adds is the layer a fire panel was never designed to be: visual alerts on every screen in the building, Vivi Device Alerts as a full-screen takeover with mandatory acknowledgment on every staff device, and an audit trail of who saw what, and when.

That structure maps directly onto the four responses Martyn’s Law asks for:

• Evacuation and invacuation get their own clear, on-screen instruction, distinct from a generic alarm tone, so staff and pupils know which one applies without guessing from the sound alone.
• Lockdown can be triggered by any staff member from wherever they are, pushed first and specifically to staff devices if that’s what the situation needs, without waiting on or relying on the fire panel.
• Communication is built in throughout: every alert reaches every display and every staff device, with acknowledgment tracked, giving you the evidence trail a written procedure needs behind it.

Review what your current setup can and can’t do and identify gaps in your existing emergency procedures using our Martyn’s Law checklist.

If you’d like to see Vivi in action, book a demonstration today.