Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the number of children found in possession of a knife at school in (a) Coventry, (b) the West Midlands and (c) England in each of the last five years.

Statistics on exclusions are available in the National Statistics release on permanent and fixed period exclusions in England, which can be found here:
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/permanent-and-fixed-period-exclusions-in-england.

Data at national, regional and local authority level by year are available in the ‘Download associated files’ section, in the file ‘Permanent and fixed period exclusions - by geography’. The same data can also be obtained with the ‘create your own tables’ function. This data is available at:
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/4ee34700-daa5-4fb6-acc9-7d99f1d9ff0e.

The Department does not hold data on the number of children found in possession of a knife at school. When a pupil is excluded, the category of the reason for exclusion is recorded, but possession of a knife is not a specific category. The categories used are available in Annex B of the exclusion statistics methodology document which can be viewed at:
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/methodology/pupil-exclusion-statistics-methodology.