Make knife crime prevention a compulsory requirement for all school curriculum
10,236 people signed this petition to the UK Parliament after it opened on 17 March 2023; it closed on 17 September 2023. The Government responded on 5 October 2023.
The petition
The petition's creator is not named in the Petitions site's published record. Quoted in full from the UK Parliament petitions site.
Make knife crime prevention a compulsory requirement for all school curriculum
The James Brindley Foundation wants to see schools educate children in a program of consequential thinking, that speaks openly in the use of knife crime.
The Dept for Education is reviewing the RSHE curriculum; our petition asks the DfE to introduce knife crime prevention to this curriculum.
Deaths, serious injuries occurring amongst young people has become a pandemic on our streets. The ONS states recorded knife crime offences increased 10% to 49,027 year to March 2022 in England and Wales. This is a 34% increase since 2010/11 yet there is no national program of education for children and young people, and no targeted guidelines in the curriculum for such behaviours or prevention.
After meeting with MPs, local government and other agencies, the JB Foundation is calling for ACTION.
The Government's response
The Government published its response on 5 October 2023; the petitions site lists the Department for Education as responsible. Its summary:
DfE will shortly consult publicly on draft amendments to the RSHE statutory guidance before a new version is finalised and published in 2024. DfE will also consider this petition as wider evidence.
The opening 375 words of the 496-word response:
The national curriculum is DfE’s responsibility. DfE has made a commitment not to make any changes to the National Curriculum for the remainder of this Parliament, which was reiterated in the Schools White Paper last year. This was to embed the major 2014 curriculum reforms and to provide stability for schools and pupils following the pandemic. It also is an important commitment for teacher workload, given the workforce burden associated with curriculum change(s).
However, RSHE, which sits within the basic school curriculum has, since 2020, included content on the situations that often lead young people to carry weapons such as knives, including criminal exploitation though involvement in gangs and county lines drugs operations and in particular the grooming relationships that often accompany this. The RSHE curriculum does not reference knife crime explicitly, but schools have discretion to tailor the content of the curriculum to address the threats that face their pupils specifically.
Issues around gun and knife crime can also still be taught as part of a school’s wider curriculum. For example, schools can choose to include lessons on weapons awareness and gangs as part of their Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE) or Citizenship curriculum.
More generally, through RSHE, pupils are taught how to build positive and respectful relationships and appropriate ways of resolving conflict, including a clear message that resorting to violence is never acceptable. Pupils need to know how to be safe and healthy, and how to manage their academic, personal, and social lives in a positive way.
It is important that teachers have the confidence to teach RSHE effectively, and to help schools with this we have already published a range of online Teacher Training Modules- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-relationships-sex-and-health - covering each of the key subject areas, including Respectful Relationships, Being Safe and Internet Safety and Harms. We have also delivered training for schools, webinars and conferences.
DfE is undertaking a review of the statutory guidance on RSHE, which sets out the curriculum, and will be consulting publicly on draft amendments this autumn, so interested parties will be able to contribute comments and suggestions on knife crime prevention. We will take responses into account in finalising content before publishing final guidance next year. We will also consider this petition as wider evidence.
Read the full response on the petitions site.
Source and receipt
- https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions.json?state=with_response&page=41UK Parliament Petitions API · read 2026-10-15 · SHA-256
948f1987db066ee3… - The petition on petition.parliament.uk
The petition's words are its creator's and the response is the Government's; this site quotes both and gives no view on either. Signature counts can still change while a petition is open. To report an error, send a correction request.