School gate: should schools be fingerprinting our children?

Every pupil will be screened for weapons as part of a scheme to eradicate knife crime in one London borough.

Police will use metal detector arches at every secondary school in Waltham Forest, making it the first council to introduce the random checks throughout the authority area.

Chris Robbins, councillor for children and young people, said the scheme was to reassure youngsters who said they did not feel safe at school. “There’s no doubt that there is an issue of knife and weapon crime in London and it would be foolish to ignore that,” he said.

The initiative is part of a larger educational programme which involves the police talking to students in schools, Mr Robbins added.

Shona Ramsay, headteacher at Lammas School in Waltham Forest, said that she thought the programme was a good idea.

“It’s a preventative measure to deter our young people from carrying knives,” she said.

“We don’t have a problem here and I want to keep it that way. We’re really pressing home the message that schools are safe.”

From today, the arches will be used about once a term in each of the borough’s 22 secondary schools. Some schools in Britain are hiring bouncers in order to improve discipline, teachers' unions said earlier this month.

Mike Hamer, head of the borough’s safer schools programme, said that about 12,000 pupils had been screened so far and no weapons had been found.

“We think that’s a success. What it means is that there have been no knives in schools and the students should feel safe.”

He said there had been an “overwhelmingly positive” response and denied that the arches would criminalise all young people.

Mischa Haynes, 12, said: “It makes you feel safe in school and it’s a place where you should feel safe.”

Some children go as far as wearing stab-vests to school for security, research by teachers' unions has found.

The Government launched its "Tackling Knives" action programme last summer, which targeted ten knife-crime hotspots with searches, knife arches and increases in police patrols.

At the time, Frances Lawrence, widow of headteacher Philip Lawrence who was stabbed outside St George’s School in Maida Vale, North London, in 1995, called for more action to prevent stabbings but said knife arches amounted to “criminalisation of all young people”.

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