Here we go again! Sorry, that’s not a line from a pop song. It is a sad indictment of our time. Knife crime (on the streets), rampant as it is, is one thing. Knives in school is another.
Here we are barely getting our feet under the new year table, and what do we have? Another murder in another school.
In November 2014, 16-year-old schoolboy William Cornick was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his teacher, Ann Maguire in their Leeds Catholic school. He was sentenced to serve a minimum term of 20 years. William Cornick had a grudge against Mrs Maguire, and he had made it known that he was going to kill her, or at least do her significant harm.
On the 28th of April 2014, when he was 15 years old, he turned up at school armed with a knife. He told pupils what he was going to do, and he even showed them the knife. Yet he was not taken seriously by his fellow pupils, nor was he reported to the staff.
The high court judge, Mr Justice Coulson, who presided over the sentencing stage, lifted the reporting restrictions that had banned the identification of William Cornick, which he said would have a ‘clear deterrent effect’. But did it?
Not blooming likely. Nine years later in July 2023, a schoolboy at Tewkesbury Academy stabbed Maths teacher Jamie Samson on the school premises. In the corridor. The pupil, who was 15 at the time, was later convicted of unlawful and malicious wounding with intent to cause serious injury, for which he received fourteen months of youth detention.
Today, on the 3rd of February, we hear of another stabbing, another murder in another school. In Sheffield. And that’s not all. Today we also hear that a 14-year-old girl has been convicted of three counts of attempted murder for stabbing two teachers and a pupil at her school, Ysgol Dyffryn Aman, Carmarthenshire, in April last year. When she was questioned after the attack, she revealed she had been carrying knives to school for months!
I have written about knives in school before. I have even suggested that we need a system whereby pupils are searched for deadly weapons before they cross the threshold of any school.
Has any of this been done? It would appear not. Because if this system was in place we wouldn’t be hearing of further murders and attempted murders on school premises. The government need to act and make schools safe for both pupils and staff. You know what? Something might get done if those in government sent their children to state schools rather than the selective holy sanctuary of private schools.
