Offensive weapons in schools 22-25

Request

Under the Freedom of Information Act, please provide the following information broken down by the school academic years 2022-2023, 2023-2024 and 2024-2025.
 
1 - The number of pupils aged 18 and under recorded as being in possession of an offensive weapon on a school premises (primary and secondary schools only) during the academic years outlined above.
 
2 – Please provide a breakdown of the number of offences which took place in a primary school setting and the number of offences which took place in a secondary school setting
 
2- A list of the type of weapons involved -  i.e – knife, machete, knuckle duster, firearm, hammer etc
 
3 – A breakdown of the ages of pupils involved provided in the following two age categories:
 
Age 4-11
Age 12-18
 
4 – The age of the youngest pupil recorded as being in possession of an offensive weapon on school premises (primary and secondary schools only) for the academic years outlined above (this does not need to be broken down by academic year) and the type of weapon involved.

Response

I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request. An analyst within this unit has conducted a search of our Crime Management System - Connect which records complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as 'crimes'. All our systems are designed and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with the below in response and the following explanation regarding their search criteria:

Criteria Used - Incident Created Date is between 01/09/2022 and 31/07/2025, SYP & crime only filter, Full Offence Title is equal to Attempted - Having an article with a blade or point on school/further education premises, Attempted - Possession of other offensive weapon on school premises, Having an article with a blade or point on school/further education premises, Possession of other offensive weapon on school premises, Person Role is equal to SUSPECT, SUSPECT (INSUFFICIENT TO PROCEED), SUSPECT (INTERVIEWED), SUSPECT (NO ACTION) EVIDENTIAL DIFF., SUSPECT (NO ACTION) TIME LIMIT EXPIRED, SUSPECT (NOT INTERVIEWED), SUSPECT (PROSECUTION PREVENTED), SUSPECT PRE ATHENA, Age At Incident is less than 18

I have manually reviewed the data and can provide the below:

Question 1

79

Question 2

17 primary, 62 secondary

Question 3

Article with a blade or point (Knife), Wooden Bat, Multitool, Machete

Question 4

Question 5

Youngest age between 2022-2025 is 8, article with a blade or point (Knife)

Please note, every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that data has been extracted from data sources used by this force for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording systems and information assets.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures/data for any requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when those data sets are used.

Police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may receive from other police forces.