FOI 15763-25 - Offensive Weapons in Schools

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

3. A list of the type of weapons involved - i.e – knife, machete, knuckle duster, firearm, hammer etc

4. A breakdown of the ages of pupils involved provided in the following two age categories:

Age 4-11

Age 12-18

5. 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:

Search between 2022 to 2025 (inclusive) for all Occurrences where the crime type was either 'Possession of Other Weapons' or 'Possession of Article with Blade or Point' and where the suspect or offender age at date of offence was less than or equal to 18.

Questions 1 & 2:

Question 3:

“Weapon Used” is not a mandatory field. Only 15 out of 71 records contain a record of Weapon Used. For this reason, we have only been able to disaggregate the data by whether the crime was recorded as “Possession of Articles with Blade or Point” or “Possession of Other Weapons”.

Question 4: 

Question 5:

Youngest pupil: 8 years.

Weapon: article with blade or point.

One offence could have more than one offender, and although the location has been logged as a school, it does not mean that every incident relates to that school. The information provided could include incidents reported by the school/college or near the school/college both during and outside of school/college hours. A suspect may not necessarily be a pupil at the school in question.

Due to the different methods of recording information across forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason, responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom of Information responses.

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 for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article/use the enclosed data, we ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.