Blogs

Knife crime duty ‘ill-thought-out’

The government’s rush to appear tough on knife crime has led to a flawed proposal that will heap yet more responsibility onto schools, says Deborah Lawson

If the headlines generated by the recent consultation on preventing and tackling serious violence (Home Office, 2019) are to be believed, teachers could soon be held accountable for failing to know that a pupil in their class was involved in violent crime.

School leaders, teachers and the whole education workforce are, like the rest of society, rightly concerned about the rise in violent crime (SecEd, 2019). However, it seems that in the government’s rush to appear tough on knife crime, its consultation, while advocating a multi-agency approach, appears to suggest this can only be achieved by imposing new duties – despite evidence to the contrary from Scotland.

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