Many newspapers including The Sun have covered a Press Association (PA) report showing that 1383 UK children were found carrying weapons in school between April 2018 and August 2019.
Among them was a four-year-old, and a teenager armed with a samurai sword. Although most of these incidents involved knives, other weapons included knuckledusters, a hammer and a taser.
Of the 311 incidents recorded between April and August this year, 49 were carried out by children below the age of 10 – which is the age of criminal responsibility.
And these figures are likely to be well short of the real ones – because not all the police forces that were approached answered the PA’s freedom of information request.
To try and get some idea of what this makes it like to work in a school, I managed to talk to an east London teacher who preferred to remain anonymous.
First I asked him if the figures made him nervous. “Yes I do feel apprehensive,” he said, “but I tend not to think of it most of the time as I’m consumed with (lesson) planning”.
Asked whether he thought his school was a safe place to learn, he replied: “Not as safe as it could be, especially when other members of staff are not present at their duty point or turn a blind eye”.
Finally I asked him whether extra-curricular interventions might help, and he agreed, though he thought it might be more helpful for them to be targeted at more “high-risk children.”
Of the answers he gave me the one that worried me most was the one about teachers sometimes not doing their jobs properly. This is very concerning as staff have a duty of care to make sure their students are as safe as possible.