I read an editorial in The Guardian this week by former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

He is now the UN's special envoy on global education and he was in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo when the Taliban attacked the school in Pakistan, killing 141 people.

In the moments that followed that attack while waiting to address a thousand students on the importance of education to Africa, he was handed a piece of paper with details of what had just occurred in Pakistan. He said this attack, the worst school atrocity ever, was not on Pakistan but on boys and girls all over the world.

He was in the Congo, which despite its name is far from democratic. Violence is common, so is death. And Brown writes that increasingly schools are being seen as theatres of war. Afghanistan, Nigeria, Colombia, Pakistan, Somalia Sudan and Syria, and don't forget the school shootings in America.

This is not just an issue for the third world. Brown writes that more than a thousand schools and universities have been attacked in the last five years. And he believes this latest attack should force the world to act. It is inconceivable, he says, that a parent anywhere in the world should send a child off to school and they never come home.

It is inconceivable, he says, that schools have become theatres of war.

So Brown suggests we should define an attack on a school anywhere in the world as a crime against humanity. Countries where there is a terrorist threat, he says schools should be fortified and there should be security guards as well as direct links to police stations. The image of a fortified school is distressing, but if it keeps children safe and learning in a country where there is terrorism then so be it.

But what Brown also suggests is that every school in the world should have the same legal rights in international law as hospitals. In that sense, they can never become instruments of war. He says schools should be as safe as a hospital that displays the red cross or a building or vehicle bearing the UN symbol.

He says, and rightly so, that it won't stop terrorism but it may go some way to defending every children's right to an education and every child's right to life.