Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help educate young people about knife crime.

The Department works across Government to support all young people to lead happy, healthy and safe lives, and to foster respect for others.

The statutory guidance on relationships, sex and health education contains content that can help address the underlying causes of gun and knife crime. This includes references to situations that often lead young people to carry weapons, such as criminal exploitation though involvement in gangs and county lines drugs operations. The guidance is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/relationships-education-relationships-and-sex-education-rse-and-health-education.

Gun and knife crime can also be taught as part of a school’s wider curriculum. Schools can choose to include lessons on weapons awareness and gangs as part of their personal, social, health and economic education or citizenship curriculum.

The Department works across Government on wider initiatives to prevent serious violence. As part of the cross Government Beating Crime Plan, the Department has worked with other government departments to make over £45 million available to fund specialist support in mainstream and alternative provision schools in the areas where serious violence like knife crime most affects young people.

One cross government project that the Department is implementing is the Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforces (APST). This places multidisciplinary taskforces of specialists, including speech and language therapists, youth workers, family support workers, and mental health workers in schools in 22 areas where serious violence is most prevalent. The Department works closely with cross Government partners, including the Youth Justice Board and NHS England to deliver the APST programme, including the placement of their frontline specialists in schools.

The Department continues to work with other departments and stakeholders on curriculum content and will be reviewing the statutory guidance this year, looking at areas of the guidance that need to be strengthened.