The Tories will have a ‘one strike and you’re out’ policy for pupils who carry knives in schools, the shadow education secretary said yesterday.
Laura Trott said the party would take a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to anyone caught with a blade in lessons to ensure other children who don’t carry them.
Giving her Conservative Party conference speech, Ms Trott said she would ensure any child who carries a knife is expelled from mainstream education and sent to ‘alternative provision’ schools.
She told the party faithful: ‘Under the Conservatives, our policy is simple: one knife and you are out. If you assault a teacher then you are out. If you sexually assault someone then you are out.
‘If you’ve been expelled from not just one but two mainstream schools, then it’s clear, mainstream classrooms aren’t for you.
‘If children bring knives into the classroom, then they shouldn’t be there. If they are violent, then they shouldn’t be there. And under the Conservatives, they won’t be there.’
Make our schools safe: Tories will have ‘zero tolerance’ one strike policy on knife crime
Speaking to the Daily Mail before her speech, the shadow cabinet member highlighted areas including London, Manchester and Scotland where policies are in place to prevent children being permanently excluded for carrying knives.
She singled out London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s ‘inclusion charter’ to discourage schools from excluding children, including those who bring knives into classrooms.
Following a meeting with children who had been mentored to help keep them away from knife crime she said they had told her that the ‘normal thing was to carry a knife to be safe’.
‘And that just breaks my heart, and we need to break that cycle,’ she said. ‘And part of breaking that cycle is about being really, really strict about knives in schools and just to have very clear boundaries, because [London Mayor] Sadiq Khan thinks it’s compassionate to try and keep a child in school with a knife, but when you talk to head teachers, what they will always say to you is, if one knife comes into school one day, there’ll be five the next.
‘So actually, what is compassionate is setting very strict boundaries, because that is how the world works.’
Under her plans to restore discipline in school, she called for a presumption against readmitting to school a pupil who carried a knife, assaulted a teacher or sexually abused someone.
She added that tackling knives would help with the issue of teacher retention because many leave their posts due to the bad behaviour of pupils.
A recent survey by a teaching union found that two in five teachers had been physically assaulted by pupils in the last year, including attacks with weapons.
‘We need to make sure that pupils and teachers feel safe when they go to school, and that’s been one of the driving forces behind the changes that I’m proposing,’ she said.
While any child caught with a knife would be excluded from mainstream education, Ms Trott said she would ensure that she would improve the ‘alternative provision’ for those pupils.
She said: ‘[We will make] sure that where that child is excluded, they have somewhere to go, which is really high quality, which is their version of intensive care, which will really help them and give them the support that they need.’
Meeting children from difficult backgrounds who have been mentored under a scheme run by Manchester United, she said she hoped to roll out partnerships with football grounds across the country if elected.
There are around 70,000 pupils who are permanently excluded around the country out of a total number of around nine million schoolchildren.
The Tories will table the proposals on knife crime as amendments to the Schools Bill, as well as one against readmitting pupils to mainstream education after they have been expelled twice.
She also warned of the dangers of social media after hearing from the children that they regularly saw posts which ‘normalise’ carrying knives.
‘I have been very strong on getting smartphones out of schools and getting young people off social media,’ she said.
‘It is extraordinary to me that we abandon the precautionary principle where it comes to smartphones and social media.
‘Normally, we check whether something is safe for young people before we allow them to use it. We have never done that with smartphones.
‘We have given children smartphones and access to social media with all that’s on there, right? You heard the young people today they talk about the prevalence of seeing knives and violence on social media. How is that appropriate that we give that to all? It has got to stop. We’ve got to change this. I’m determined that we change course.’
ENDS
