Incidents of very young children taking knives into primary schools have been revealed by a BBC investigation.
Police in Kent recorded an assault involving a four-year-old pupil, while officers in the West Midlands reported that a six-year-old had taken a flick knife into class.
The mother of Harvey Willgoose, a teenager murdered by another pupil in Sheffield, says the data is shocking and is calling on the government to fund metal detectors, or “knife arches”, for all UK schools and colleges.
One teenage boy from Sheffield, who says he has taken knives to school, told us: “I just felt like I need to protect myself.”
There were 1,304 offences involving knives or sharp objects in 2024 at schools and sixth form colleges in England and Wales, a Freedom of Information request by the BBC has found.
At least 10% were committed by primary-school-aged children, police data suggests.
One educational trust in the West Midlands told us it was installing permanent metal-detecting “knife arches” in all four of its secondary schools because the rate of knife crime in its police force area was so high.
Nearly every force – 41 out of 43 across England and Wales – responded to our request for information about knife incidents in schools.
Two thirds of them also gave us data on the ages and genders of children involved – and those figures revealed that almost 80% of offences were carried out by boys, the vast majority teenagers.
We were also given details of incidents involving primary-age children, some of them very young: