For Don Maguire, the shocking murder of his wife Ann in her classroom at the hands of one her pupils seems as hard to comprehend now as it was when it took place.
But today, on the fourth anniversary of her death, he is determined that will change.
The widower says he needs to understand how and why this happened, and he needs to know that those in authority have learned something from the tragedy.
Ann Maguire was stabbed to death by 15-year-old Will Cornick at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds on 28 April 2014.
It was the first time a teacher had been killed by a pupil in a British classroom.
Cornick was jailed for life with a minimum of 20 years for her murder.
Details emerged that he had threatened to kill Mrs Maguire, his Spanish teacher, in social media posts and told peers he was going to do it on the day and also planned to murder his head of year and another teacher and her unborn baby.
Unprecedented events
Mr Maguire describes hearing of his wife’s murder as “devastatingly unbelievable.”
“I am still saying exactly the same words that I used then.
“For it to happen to Ann while she was teaching. You couldn’t make up anything as improbable. How did it happen to her in a classroom? How did it happen?”
They are totally unprecedented events that for many teachers are too horrific to contemplate. But Mr Maguire, a former teacher himself, believes they need to be better understood.
“On a personal level, anybody who has lost anybody in those circumstances is going to want to know the full truth. I think it’s definite that we don’t.
“Ann was a very talented teacher and there were many differences between us, but we had certain characteristics in common and perhaps one of them would be getting to the bottom of things.”
Sitting in the front room of their family home of more than 25 years in North Leeds, he is surrounded by documents relating to his wife’s murder, as he prepares for another anniversary of her death.
For him, the anniversaries are not what it is most important - “all days are sad days,” he reflects.
But this year, he and family members decided to mark it by visiting the school where she was murdered. They had not been back to the secondary since it happened. Mr Maguire acknowledged that it would be difficult but said he wanted to see the scene for himself.
Looking for answers
The building has been remodelled since Mrs Maguire was killed so they will not be walking around the classroom as it was on the fateful day.
“But we will be able to see where she actually died” Mr Maguire added. “We have sat in courts all year and listened to room numbers and positions, and you can imagine we don’t really know what they are talking about. We are going to put some physical context to it.”
Mr Maguire is still looking for answers and he wants more people to do the same.
While his wife’s murder was unprecedented, there is now a real debate about the dangers of knife crime in schools and in wider society.
Tes revealed earlier this month that in London, more than one-in-four secondary schools have taken up an offer of free knife detecting “wands”.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has warned of an “epidemic” of knife crime and last June offered free metal detecting “wands” to all 498 secondary school and 63 FE colleges in London. Latest figures show that, so far, 150 schools and colleges have taken up the offer. But the issue of knives in schools extends beyond the capital.
An investigation by a team of local newspapers earlier this year found that over the past five years, more than 2,000 pupils across the UK have been caught carrying knives in school, with a 42 per cent increase in the number of cases reported to police in the last full school year.
Learning lessons
A little more than a year after Mrs Maguire was killed, another teacher was stabbed by a pupil at Dixons Kings Academy in the neighbouring city of Bradford. Teacher Vincent Uzomah survived the attack.
The 14-year-old who stabbed him with a kitchen knife was sentenced him to an 11-year extended sentence with six in custody. The question in 2014 - “Could it happen again?” - has already been answered.
Now Mr Maguire is urging people to learn from the events that led to his wife’s murder four years ago.
“Mental health, knife crime and violent deaths are top of the social issue agenda and in the aftermath of this devastating tragedy was a huge opportunity to better understand a raft of behaviours and learn lessons,” he says.
He said he was concerned that those who commit knife crime are unhelpfully stereotyped. They are either labelled as being a lone wolf who nobody knew about or as a product of gang culture, “as though they are the only influences on people who commit these crimes,” he adds.
In 2015, he called for an independent inquiry into his wife’s murder. He is clear that a crime of this significance needed a national response.
Since then, there has been a Learning Lessons Review carried out by Leeds Safeguarding Children Board in 2016 and an inquest last year.
Missed opportunities
Mr Maguire’s voice breaks occasionally as he recounts his family’s experience since his wife’s murder. But more than anything he sounds exasperated.
He is highly critical of the Learning Lessons Review. Its central conclusion was that the Ann Maguire’s murder was not predictable. It made a series of “learning points” but stressed that it was not suggesting these would have prevented the murder either. For Mr Maguire, this conclusion means the review has not identified what went wrong.
Mark Peel, independent chair of the Leeds Safeguarding Children Partnership told Tes that he wanted to personally reassure the Maguire family that they had “taken their responsibilities very seriously to ensure that the Learning Lessons Review we instructed was independent, thorough and robust”.
He added: “Ann’s death was an absolute tragedy and we are aware that the anniversary will be an especially hard time for all her family and friends. Our thoughts are with her family, her colleagues at Corpus Christi Catholic College and all the young people she taught and inspired, who continue to feel her loss.”
Mr Maguire says the verdict of the inquest jury has given him some hope that shortcomings in the way the case was handled will be recognised.
It found that there were missed opportunities in the events leading up to his wife’s death. It returned a conclusion of unlawful killing and noted as a contributory factor that none of the students who Cornick told what he was going to do informed an adult before the tragedy.
Full picture
Mr Maguire’s family wanted pupils to be able to give evidence during the inquest hearing, and went to the High Court over the issue, but had their appeal rejected. He stressed that young people were not responsible for the conditions of a school or for assessing danger.
In his words, “they did not want to force anyone to do anything” - they simply wanted all the evidence to be heard so they had as full a picture as possible of the day.
“What drives us is that we don’t know,” he says.
“And what I’m doing now is nothing compared to what Ann would have done for me should the situation have been reversed.”
The couple had been together since the early 1970s having met on teaching practice. They married in 1977 and were colleagues as teachers at Corpus Christi for many years.
When Mr Maguire talks about his wife as a teacher the whole mood in the room changes. It is clear that she inspired everyone around her - including her husband.
“Ann was the most fantastic teacher,” he says. “She was one of those teachers that had that touch of teaching magic. I used to teach in the same school as Ann and I was quite ordinary as a teacher.
“I remember in my early days having a little bit of trouble with the odd pupil and I have gone to her on occasion and I’ve asked her to have a word with this fella. She would simply come in and say to the pupil ‘Now what is this about?’ and they would melt before her.
“It was as though even just in those words that she was able to convey to them that ‘I’m going to sort your life out.’ She was very special and special to everybody.”
