23158-25 Assaults on U18 by School Staff
Request to Northamptonshire Police
I would like to know how many reports to the police have parents made regarding assault and or excessive force on their child by school staff.
How many of those were NFA and how many were investigated and led to further action.
Clarified 26/11/2025
Please provide anonymised statistical data for the number of reports made to Northamptonshire Police by parents or guardians alleging:
Assault Excessive force
Unlawful restraint
Physical intervention
by school staff against children under the age of 18.
Please provide this information broken down by calendar year for the period 1 January 2022 to the present, and include (if held):
Number of reports received
- Number of cases recorded as crimes
- Number of cases investigated
- Number of cases resulting in no further action
- Number of cases resulting in charges or other outcomes
I am not requesting any personal information or details that would identify any child or staff member.
Response
After conducting reasonable searches, I can confirm that Northamptonshire Police holds the information requested.
However, we are not able to provide you with the data because it is not held in an easily retrievable format.
When searching for all incidents whereby the location included one of the following: ‘school, primary, secondary, academy, college, or university’, our analysts identified 10,875 incidents. These would then require a manual review of each incident to establish if it meets the criteria of your request. For context, many incidents which occur on educational premises are not recorded as crimes, but Crime Related Incidents (CRIs).
We then tried to apply filters to our recording system which identified cases of Violence against the Person (VAPs) and CRIs, however, this did not narrow the dataset enough to be manually reviewed as 1,469 incidents were identified.
Even at a conservative minute per record to manually review 1,469 incidents to establish for example, who made the report and age of victims, this would exceed the appropriate cost limit of £450. This engages an exemption under s12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act).
Accordingly, please accept this as a Refusal Notice as required under s17(1) of the Act.
Our s16(1) duty under the Act states we must offer advice and assistance in relation to how you may refine your request to comply with the cost parameters. With this in mind, we may be able to provide data pertinent to your request which spans a period of 12 months (subject to further exemptions).
If you feel this would be beneficial, please submit a new request.
Please also accept our most sincere apologies for the delay in getting this document to you. Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete.
However, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from multiple sources, developed for specific policing purposes, for which data extraction methods have not been specifically designed to directly correlate with the terminology of this request. There the data presented is subject to the inaccuracies and idiosyncrasies inherent in any large-scale recording system.