Make knife crime prevention a compulsory requirement for all school curriculum

The James Brindley Foundation wants to see schools educate children in a program of consequential thinking, that speaks openly in the use of knife crime. The Dept for Education is reviewing the RSHE curriculum; our petition asks the DfE to introduce knife crime prevention to this curriculum.

Deaths, serious injuries occurring amongst young people has become a pandemic on our streets. The ONS states recorded knife crime offences increased 10% to 49,027 year to March 2022 in England and Wales. This is a 34% increase since 2010/11 yet there is no national program of education for children and young people, and no targeted guidelines in the curriculum for such behaviours or prevention.

After meeting with MPs, local government and other agencies, the JB Foundation is calling for ACTION.

The national curriculum is DfE’s responsibility. DfE has made a commitment not to make any changes to the National Curriculum for the remainder of this Parliament, which was reiterated in the Schools White Paper last year. This was to embed the major 2014 curriculum reforms and to provide stability for schools and pupils following the pandemic. It also is an important commitment for teacher workload, given the workforce burden associated with curriculum change(s).

However, RSHE, which sits within the basic school curriculum has, since 2020, included content on the situations that often lead young people to carry weapons such as knives, including criminal exploitation though involvement in gangs and county lines drugs operations and in particular the grooming relationships that often accompany this. The RSHE curriculum does not reference knife crime explicitly, but schools have discretion to tailor the content of the curriculum to address the threats that face their pupils specifically.

Issues around gun and knife crime can also still be taught as part of a school’s wider curriculum. For example, schools can choose to include lessons on weapons awareness and gangs as part of their Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE) or Citizenship curriculum.

More generally, through RSHE, pupils are taught how to build positive and respectful relationships and appropriate ways of resolving conflict, including a clear message that resorting to violence is never acceptable. Pupils need to know how to be safe and healthy, and how to manage their academic, personal, and social lives in a positive way.