Sexual Offences In Schools - 469/21

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked:

1. How many alleged sexual offences at schools, have been recorded by your police force, in each of the following calendar years:
a) 2017
b) 2018
c) 2019
d) 2020

Note, by ‘schools’, ideally, I am referring to primary and secondary schools, and sixth form colleges. Or however your force define ‘schools’.

2. Please can I have a breakdown of the data provided in 1) by:
a) The type of the alleged sex crime, for example: rape, physical sexual assault, other sexual offence (or whatever categories you record the data as)
b) The number of offences which allegedly occurred at a private/independent schools and colleges, if you record this data?
c) Whether the perpetrator was an ADULT or CHILD (If you are able to provide an age range, please could you give me this information too)
d) Whether the VICTIM was an ADULT or a CHILD. (If you are able to provide an age range, please could you give me this information too.)

3. a) How many of the recorded offences in 1a) led to an individual being charged with a sexual offence? (NOTE, If you are not able to answer this for any reason, instead, could you please tell me the total number of charges for sexual offences in UK schools over the last 4 calendar years)
b) How many of those in 3a) led to a conviction?

In Response:

As advised in our acknowledgement email this request has been aggregated with your colleagues request with regards to time constraints under the Act as they are on the same subject area – Sexual Offence.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within both the Corporate Development Department and the Criminal Justice Unit of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.

It should be noted that point 2b would have made this request subject of a Section 12 refusal due to cost/time constraints, however rather than refusing the whole request, we have provided what we have been able to extract within the time allowed.

Additionally, the information provided relates to Northumbria Police information only, and not for all UK schools as per the wording of some of your request.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

1-3.
• Data has been extracted from the central database where either location field contained "school" or "classroom."
• Victim/suspect counts are based on at least one victim or suspect meeting the criteria asked for. One crime may have multiple of either, and as such the counts may not match.
• Note that due to the nature of the location field data, some of these crimes may have been committed at a college or similar. You asked for however we define schools and there is some crossover on this field (notably, "classroom.")

With the above noted please see the attached.

3b.
2017 2 x charged and convicted
2019 2 x charged, 1 convicted and 1 ongoing

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.