Almost one in five (18%) secondary school teachers in England have seen pupils with knives in school, according to a special survey commissioned by Sky News.
More than 4,000 teachers responded to our questions, asked via the survey tool Teacher Tapp, which asked about their first-hand experiences of pupils with weapons.
This academic year, 6% of teachers said they had personally seen a child with a knife or blade article in school. Some told us they had witnessed at least five separate incidents with pupils and weapons in that same time.
“We ignore these results at our peril,” Pepe Di’lasio, from the Association of School and College Leaders, said in response to our findings.
He added there was “no doubt” the survey was evidence of “a growing trend” of the presence of knives in school.
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Strikingly, despite recent high-profile knife attacks in UK secondary schools, only 15% of the teachers we surveyed said they had received any formal training or guidance on how to deal with pupils with knives.
And in more deprived socio-economic areas, double the number of teachers said they had seen pupils with knives than teachers in more affluent areas, according to our findings.
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One former school teacher, who was stabbed by a pupil in 2015, told Sky News he thought that classroom safety has “got worse” since his attack.
Vincent Uzomah, now a university lecturer, was teaching at a secondary school in Bradford when a male student stabbed him in the stomach.
“Even if [your survey] showed only 1% of teachers had seen a knife – the consequence of that 1% can be huge,” Dr Uzomah said.
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Dr Uzomah’s attacker, who was then just 14 years old, received an 11-year custodial sentence.
“The boy that stabbed me told his friends that he was going to stab me that day,” Dr Uzomah said, “But no one reported it.
“I thought I was dying. It was an awful feeling and I’d never want anyone to experience that.”
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Dr Uzomah received treatment in hospital for eight days after the attack, which led him to leaving his job in the secondary school sector.
He said: “I didn’t go to school that day thinking I’d be attacked, no teacher does. The education system needs reform, something has to be done.
“It cannot continue like this forever.”
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In response to our findings, a Department for Education government spokesperson said that violent incidents in schools “are rare”, but that “all schools should be places of safety and learning”.
“Schools are responsible for setting their own security measures,” the spokesperson said, “and we support them to develop safeguarding frameworks to respond to incidents – including use of metal detectors if appropriate.”
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Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, in an interview with broadcaster LBC last week, said she would support schools that wished to use walk-through metal detectors, also known as knife arches.
But these cost thousands of pounds, at a time when the Association of School and College Leaders told us school budgets are “absolutely strung to the very end”.
