Teachers can’t be expected to fight knife crime, too
Picture this. It’s registration at East London Academy of Drive-by Shootings, and Mrs Smith is checking that 5C are all present and correct.
Mrs S: Lejon, what is that object you have down your trousers? LEJ: Pleased to see you, miss. Class explodes in laughter.
Mrs S: I’m going to have to ask you to show me.
LEJ: You wish.
Mrs S: I didn’t mean that… I’m required by law to ask you… Lejon and two of his mates stand up and advance on Mrs S’s desk. Mrs S: Boys, can you please return to your seats?
Lejon produces a blade from his trousers. It’s more like a cutlass, a foot long with a serrated edge. LEJ: Nuffink. I ain’t got nuffink. What I got, miss?
Mrs S: I’m sorry, I…
LEJ: Thass right. We know your car, Miss. White Nissan. You wanna be careful. Roads can be dangerous, know what I mean? Mrs S: Yes, thank you, Lejon. Right, class, let’s press on with Macbeth. Act 2. “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”
You don’t need experience of certain inner-city schools to grasp the implications of the Government’s announcement that teachers (nurses and police) will be required by law to report children feared to have been caught up in knife crime and they will, if you please, be “held accountable” if they don’t.
The consequences if a gang discovers a teacher has grassed up one of its members don’t bear thinking about. But, then, I suspect the Government is not thinking about overworked teachers. More concerned with covering their own backsides as the knife epidemic spirals.
Poor teachers are already de facto social workers. Now, thanks to failures of law and order, they must be police too.
Only this week, I heard about one teacher who noticed that a girl came in on Monday in the clothes she wore on Friday. She was never given clean clothes. The teacher found her new ones and now does her washing.
A friend who works in a tough London school reports that staff often buy toiletries. “There are a lot of utterly s--- parents and there are too many apologists,” he says. “Meanwhile, children live horrible, fearful lives.”
Schools are already under attack for excluding pupils, who are then recruited by gangs and become statistics in knife crime. What critics fail to point out is that head teachers exclude as a last resort. Why should the children who want to learn have their lessons wrecked so that potentially dangerous kids can
be kept out of exclusion units and the authorities can tell themselves they’re doing something? Cabinet ministers would refuse to work with a colleague off their head on drugs who threw a chair at them. Why should teachers?
As Geoff Barton, of the Association of School and College Leaders, says: “It is hard to see how it would be either workable or reasonable to make teachers accountable for preventing knife crime. What sort of behaviour would they be expected to report and who would they report to? How would they be held accountable, for what, and what would the consequences be?”
If a boy ends up as a murder victim or a murderer, are his teachers really supposed to have predicted that?
“We cannot simply arrest our way out of this,” Theresa May told a youth violence summit. You can see why calling knife crime “a disease” and scapegoating teachers might be more comfortable for a former home secretary who curtailed police stop and search powers back in 2014. Mrs May caved into politically correct bleatings that they “unfairly targeted” people who were black or from ethnic minority groups.
If you look at the hundreds of tragic faces of the youthful dead over the past two years, you can see what an appalling decision that was. In London in 2017-18, 73 per cent of offenders and 53 per cent of victims of knife crime were of black or ethnic minority origin. Stopping and searching the kids most likely to be carrying a blade makes sense. Only not in a warped universe where white kids must be presumed to be equally guilty.
This week, Sajid Javid said that he will give police “hugely effective” stop and search powers.
The Prime Minister may claim that we can’t arrest our way out of this crisis, but I bet confiscating knives will be a damn sight more effective than making teachers clairvoyants.