I Survey Findings
In Spring Term 2020 (shortly before the lockdown), The Times carried out a survey of nearly 1,300 mainly secondary schools and academies covering 500,000 (circa) pupils in England and discovered that staff believed that many of them were being “groomed by gangs and exploited by drug dealers”. They added that a number of these young people were bringing zombie knives, hammers and knuckle-dusters into the classrooms.
About three in five secondaries searched the children at least once weekly with “metal wands and sniffer dogs”. Altogether, 52% of these searches resulted in staff finding pupils carrying weapons. In an academy in Middleborough, teachers searched pupils 60 times in 2018/19 and found six weapons. About 24% of these institutions referred pupils to the police and/or social services in the 2018/19 academic year and 33% believed that the pupils were involved with gangs.