Using a sledgehammer to find a knife

Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived areas in London, and in the country. Of England and Wales’s 376 local authorities, it’s in the top 20 for overcrowded housing and single-parent households (a good indicator for poverty and poor outcomes for children), and in the top 30 for unemployment. It has among the highest levels of gang activity in the capital. To say it has a bit of a youth crime problem would be a generous understatement.

The council has introduced mandatory electronic weapons screening in 15 of the borough’s 19 secondary schools. (The Times headline is wrong to call the checks ‘random’ - they are to be routine. It also repeats the rather uninformed story about stab vests.) So far no knives have been found, but the council has denied that it is being alarmist.

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Freerunning from the law

This piece from the Independent, about the mooted introduction of parkour lessons in secondary schools, is a textbook example of why you should be careful when using social research data to inform policy. The report says:

According to figures from the Metropolitan Police, when sports projects were run in the borough of Westminster during the 2005 Easter holidays, youth crime dropped by 39 per cent. The following year, the most recent for which figures are available, when parkour was added to the projects, youth crime fell by 69 per cent.

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The story behind the headline (isn’t as good)

Here are three of this week’s more luminous education headlines:

Scared pupils wear stab vests in school (Independent)
School pupils wear stab vests to protect themselves from gangs, report says (Daily Telegraph)
Terrified kids ‘wear stab vests at school’ (Daily Mirror)

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