Claims about crime and exclusions from London's Violence Reduction Unit. Part 1
Are young people excluded from school twice as likely to carry a knife?
The real connection between knives and exclusions
One of the reasons why children are permanently excluded from school is for: “Use or threat of use of an offensive weapon or prohibited item”. In the autumn term of the 2022/23 academic year, 222 permanent exclusions included this as a reason. This is about 7% of all permanent exclusions for that term. While not every one of those incidents will involve a child carrying a knife in or around school, I suspect that almost all of them do. In my experience, less serious incidents within this category are likely to result in suspension rather than exclusions, and there were 4588 suspensions in that category for the same term.
One might find that second figure quite alarming. The number of suspensions for “Use or threat of use of an offensive weapon or prohibited item” in secondary schools is greater than the number of secondary schools. And remember, this is in a single term. However, for those opposed to discipline in schools, the fact that schools might issue a serious sanction for bringing in a knife is more scandalous than the possibility that knives may be common in schools, or even that stabbings take place in schools. One of the most common tactics used by anti-discipline campaigners is to observe the correlation between criminality and exclusion from school and reverse the causation. While anyone with common sense would realise that carrying a knife makes you more likely to be excluded, the activists insist that being excluded makes you more likely to carry a knife.
London’s VRU makes dubious claims
One group of anti-discipline campaigners is employed by London’s Violence Reduction Unit, an organisation established by the Mayor of London that is committed to blaming schools for crime. Their malice towards schools may be partially explained by the fact that the mayor is responsible for the police in London, and boroughs, run by the mayor’s party, are responsible for youth services in most parts of London. This leaves schools as the one scapegoat those working for the Mayor of London can criticise without political consequences. The VRU has recently published an “Inclusion Charter” which they want London boroughs to sign. Most of the document is made up of vague promises, that appear to be an excuse for making schools worse, rather than anything of substance. However, it insinuates that exclusions should be reduced1, and features the following claims:
An Ofsted report on knife crime showed that children excluded from school are twice as likely to carry a knife, while data also highlights that almost one in two of the prison population were excluded as children.2
For anyone who understands the difference between causation and correlation, these are not good reasons to reduce exclusions.
The statement about excluded pupils’ likelihood of carrying knives is particularly strange. If anything it seems somewhat amazing that a group that includes pupils expelled from schools for carrying knives is only twice as likely to have carried knives. This is a population where 7% have almost certainly been caught bringing weapons to school and been given the most severe sanction for it. Could a population like this only be twice as likely as the average pupil to have carried a knife? Even just knowing that excluded pupils are mostly teenage boys and disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, makes the statistic seem low. If there were a PSHE programme that resulted in disadvantaged teenage boys being only twice as likely to carry a knife as the average pupil, it would be considered a great success. If the statistic is true, we should be celebrating the rehabilitative effects of permanent exclusion, as being permanently excluded has made these pupils remarkably unlikely to carry a knife. But, of course, this kind of statistic is not meant to be thought about; it’s meant to confirm a prior conviction that cruel schools use exclusions to turn innocent children into dangerous criminals.
The statistic showing prisoners are more likely to have been excluded or suspended is also not surprising. Many exclusions are for violent and criminal behaviour, and there are certainly common factors in the backgrounds of excluded pupils and those in custody. It would be amazing if the number of prisoners who had been excluded wasn’t very high, and it would be ridiculous to interpret this as showing exclusion caused them to be imprisoned.
Are the VRU’s claims correct?
However, what irritates me about these claims is not that they are incorrectly used as an argument against exclusions. I am annoyed that they are not, as far as I can tell, accurate. I will look at the claim about prisoners in my next post. In this post, I will discuss whether it is justified to state that excluded pupils are twice as likely to carry a knife. I have written about this before:
Blog post: Exclusion Myths from the Mayor Of London
When I wrote about it in that post, a press release from the Mayor of London’s Office about a summit organised by the VRU had stated:
Ofsted found that children excluded from school were twice as likely to carry a knife.
The source for this claim, in the Inclusion Charter and in that press release, was Ofsted’s 2019 report on knife crime. However, it cannot be found in that report. A 2018 Ofsted blog post written about that report before it was published stated:
Children who are excluded from school are twice as likely to carry a knife.
It does not give a source for this, although the context implies it is from the report. My best guess is that the author of the blog post misread the following misleading section from the report:
A child who is a risk to other children in one school is likely to be a risk to children in others and outside of school. Children who are excluded from school to PRUs have self-reported higher instances of knife-carrying than children who are not excluded. The 2018 MOPAC youth survey found that: ‘When looking at PRU attendees, 47% (92 of 196) say they know someone who has carried a knife with them, compared with 25% of non PRU attendees (1188 of 4673)…’
While it is shocking that the number of children claiming to know somebody who has carried a knife is so high, it is unsurprising that it is much higher in PRUs (Pupil Referral Units). These are specialist schools mainly for those with the most challenging behaviour. Not all pupils in PRUs are excluded pupils; in fact, not all pupils in PRUs are there because of their behaviour. Nevertheless, these are appropriate institutions for meeting the needs of the most violent and criminal young people, so, of course, anyone attending one is much more likely to know somebody who has carried a knife. However, attending a PRU is not the same as being excluded, and knowing somebody who has carried a knife is not the same as carrying one yourself. If this is the source of the statistic, the statistic is bogus. Incidentally, Ofsted’s statistic comes from a survey conducted by the (London) Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime,3 making it even more disappointing, and perhaps even suspicious, that nobody in the VRU or the Mayor’s Office picked up on the apparent mistake.
The best research on knife crime and exclusions can be found in a 2018 Ministry of Justice (MoJ) report. It found that:
Knife possession offences rarely followed exclusions
Only a very small proportion committed the knife possession offence shortly after being excluded from school…. Although it is not possible to identify from this analysis whether there is an association between exclusions and knife possession offending, the low volumes of knife possession offences following exclusions mean any such association could not be a significant driver of youth knife possession offending overall.
In my next post, I will look at the claim about how many prisoners have been excluded.
Having read the Inclusion Charter several times, and seen media coverage of it, I was convinced that it did call for a reduction in exclusions. However, it is not that explicit. It even includes the following text, presumably aimed at critics:
The Charter should not be seen as advocating for a zero-tolerance approach to exclusion or suspension as there will be times when it is necessary for the safety of children and staff. Headteachers and schools must have the right to decide.
There is an asterisk at the end of this text, but it took me days to find the microscopic footnote at the end of the Inclusion Charter with the sources for the Charter’s claims.
As far as I can tell MOPAC doesn’t publish the raw data, but they do publish a report that shares some of the findings, and that statistic can be found in it.