Release date: Thursday, 24thApril, 2014
PRESS RELEASE FROMXLP Urban Youth Charity
Surviving School: Fear & Knives in our Classrooms
· Urban Youth Charity XLP responds to the latest knife crime findings
· Young people carry weapons to feel ‘safer’ at school
· Enforcement alone won’t solve the problem. We need to be more proactive than reactive in dealing with the root causes of knife crime.
· XLP says that long term, relational intervention is the only effective strategy & solution to sustainable change.
A recent Sky News investigation found that 981 children have had weapons confiscated on school premises since 2011, including at least 80 primary school children. The report went on to say that 1 in 8 violent crimes involved school aged children. Fear is a driving factor behind school children feeling they need to attend school armed. Actress and anti-knife campaigner Brooke Kinsella outlined the issue by saying:"To bring it home to all of us, every week in England the equivalent of a whole school class, more than 20 children, turn up in hospital with stab wounds”
At XLP we work with many young people for whom the threat of violence is a daily occurance. One young person used to attend school wearing a bullet-proof vest. In spite of this, He was later stabbed in the neck at 3.30pm just outside his school.
But fear is not the only driver to young people carrying weapons into school.
Many young people are dealing with a complex range of issues including poverty, family breakdown, gang involvement and educational failure which in turn create an environment where they face inevitable violence and the need to protect oneself seems, and often is necessary.
A recent response to this issue from the Department for Education, states that teachers ‘can now search pupils without consent, confiscate prohibited items and use force to remove disruptive pupils from the classroom when necessary’, but fails to recognise the need to address the reasons behind students carrying weapons.
XLP Founder and CEO, Patrick Regan states: “We are sticking plasters over cracks if we think enforcement alone will solve the complex issues to way a young person may feel the need to carry a knife into a school, we need to look seriously and honestly at the context these young people are growing up in.We need to be proactive rather than reactive in dealing with the issues that are causing youth and school based violence in the first place”.In reality we need to recognise that there is no quick fix solution to these issues and ensure that our teachers have sufficient multi-agency support. Long-term, relational support for young people through initiatives like mentoring is an effective strategy and solution for sustainable change.
NOTES TO THE EDITOR
In 1996, in response to a stabbing in a school playground, the school’s headmaster asked Patrick Regan, a local church based youth worker, to come into the school and work with their students and teachers to help with difficult behavioural issues, this was the beginning of XLP, a Christian charity that has an emphasis on being faith-based, but not faith-biased.
Over the past 15 years XLP has grown from working in a single school to operating in over 70 schools and communities across Southwark, Lewisham, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Islington and Camden. In the early days, Patrick began by hosting a lunch-time club on school premises that taught the kids more about their own heroes, and in particular how those heroes behaved. Today, on a day-to-day basis, XLP has projects working with over 1800 young people 1-2-1 and in small groups each week.
CEO Patrick Regan has travelled to over thirty countries working with and on behalf of some of the poorest communities. His passion is to see children and young people, from the most deprived and challenging backgrounds, succeed in life - helping them to avoid making wrong choices and to overcome the challenges they face - to realise their amazing potential. To do this he has engaged with politicians and gang members, victims and perpetrators, police, councils and housing associations, and most particularly with the young people themselves and their families. Patrick founded the charity, XLP that today is committed to fighting poverty, supporting education and serving hundreds of young people and their families weekly in inner London. He is also the author of three books includingFighting Chance: Tackling Britain's Gang Culture. He lives with his wife and four children in South-east London.
Patrick, who won the Mayor of London Peace Award for Outstanding Contribution to Peace in the Community in 2010, is also on the advisory board of the Centre for Social Justice. In 2012 Patrick received an OBE in the Jubilee Queens Birthday honours list.
To find out more about XLP, please visitwww.xlp.org.uk
For media inquiries, please contact Jude Trenier ator on 07841 337 974or call the XLP office on 0207 256 6240.