School began as usual at 9am but it was for half a day only, with no assembly, no playtime breaks, and ending at noon. The gym where the massacre happened was sealed and its windows boarded up.As the children began to gather inside the building one of their injured classmates, Matthew Birnie, aged 5, was allowed home from hospital. And the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey speaking in London warned there were limits to forgiveness as he accused the Dunblane killer, Thomas Hamilton, of committing a “heinous” crime. As they left, some of the adults had tears in their eyes when they emerged from the school after taking in their children.
Educational psychologists and counsellors were on hand to support the 700 children on their first faltering steps to normality. Many parents paused at the school gates to hug their children and speak some private words of encouragement. Some ran and skipped through the main gates, some greeted friends, but there were others who kept close to their anxious parents.

It was no ordinary day for the children of Dunblane as they returned yesterday to their primary school for the first time since the massacre nine days ago which left 16 children, their teacher and their killer dead. Anyone who thinks that this relationship is valuable and should be retained should ask the question: who changed the regulations in slaughterhouses which meant that the remains of BSE-infected cattle could be fed back to cows, thus prolonging the agony we all now face?. “I look at the paper and think, My God, we’ve killed off a pounds 500m export industry You can’t imagine what it’s like. But we have to make these decisions, and we will.”Another said “The Government is in very deep water over this and they are only too glad to pass the responsibility for making decisions over to us.

And then they simultaneously want the answer, and only the right answer.”It is understandable that the Government does not want to scaremonger. But equally it owes us an explanation after protecting the interests of the meat industry for so long.First, it must lay bare everything it knows – particularly evaluations of all the risks posed by eating beef and its products. Not just those we face now but those it kept to itself in the past.Secondly, it must divest itself of its overly cosy relationship with the meat industry. We are the experiment.”The meeting of the 13 scientists, at the Civil Service College, in Sunningdale, Berkshire, is expected to go on today and tomorrow.Members who have spoken to the Independent are almost fearful of the responsibility before them.”I almost just want to crawl into a hole,” one said this week. Why was an experiment not begun immediately to see whether BSE could be passed orally to primates such as chimpanzees – an experiment which would have told us the level of risk we would now be facing?Dr Anne Maddocks, a member of the independent pressure group the Spongiform Encephalopathy Research Committee, says that the second question is now moot: “There’s no point doing the primate experiment now,” she said yesterday “It’s us.

But what should we have done? Ordered the culling of all the cattle in Britain? The fact is that the regulations that were brought in to stop cattle remains being fed back to cattle would have been effective. But of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing.”Yet the Government could have taken urgent action at that time which could have eased the problems we are now experiencing Experts in the field point to two key questions:1. Why did the Government not begin a crash programme to develop a test which would diagnose BSE in live cattle before they showed symptoms of the disease?2. But some farmers, as we now know, held on to their old, contaminated feeds for at least a year.”It’s not just us Society as a whole has to take responsibility for this. But we did say that it would be a decade or so before we saw anything that would tell us whether the disease had passed to humans.”We were wrong in thinking it wouldn’t get across the species boundary. When will we know if the danger of an epidemic is over?There are questions, too, about the actions – or lack of them – that the Government took in the 1980s.When BSE was first identified in 1986, a committee led by Professor Sir Richard Southwood was set up to consider the risks posed by the disease and what measures should be taken to stop it.Professor Southwood told the Independent yesterday, “In defence of our committee, we met on 20 June 1988 and I wrote the next day that certain steps should be carried out right away.

Can the disease be passed to chickens? If not, why did SEAC this week ban the use of all mammalian meat for feed for all farm animals?6. As experiments have shown that BSE can be passed to pigs, are vets and farmers being told to monitor pigs on farms for any signs of the disease?5. If they are not on Professor Pattison’s agenda this morning, they should be.1. Is a single bite of a BSE-infected meat enough to pass on the disease, or does it require repeated exposure over a longer period?2. Are calf and beef liver and kidney – which are not removed from carcasses – absolutely safe to eat?3.Why should beef be dangerous now, given the safety measures that have been taken in the past six years? If it is safe, why does the Government keep tightening its measures?4. If Radio 3 really considers this a “flagship” programme – as it certainly should after last week’s superb series on Guillaume de Machaut – then it ought to be going out in prime time. Not at midday, when most of the working population is unable to hear it, or at 11.30pm, when many of the same listeners will be too tired to take it in, but surely in a slot such as 6.30 to 7.30pm in place of the utterly dispensable In Tune..