Terrorists who target students must be deterred by better security for schools
Gordon Brown says outrage over the massacre in Kenya and other killings is spurring global action
Why is it that schools and schoolchildren have become such high-profile targets for murderous Islamist militants? The 148 people, most of them students, killed in an attack by the extremist group al-Shabab at a college in Kenya are only the latest victims in a succession of outrages in which educational institutions have been singled out for attack.
In December, in Peshawar, Pakistan, seven Taliban gunmen strode from classroom to classroom in the Army Public School, executing 145 children and teachers.
More recently, as more than 80 pupils in South Sudan were taking their annual exams, fighters invaded their school and kidnapped them at gunpoint. Their fate has been to join the estimated 12,000 students conscripted into children's militias in the country's escalating civil war.
Every day, another once-vibrant Syrian school is bombed or militarised, with two million children now in refugee camps or exiled to makeshift tents or huts.
And next week will mark the first anniversary of the extremist group Boko Haram's night-time abduction of 220 schoolgirls from their dormitories in Chibok, in Nigeria's northern state of Borno. With continued assaults on local schools, Boko Haram has escalated its war against education - making the last two years Nigeria's worst in terms of the violation of children's rights.
In the past five years, there have been nearly 10,000 attacks on schools and educational institutions.