Professor John Robertson OBA

There’s not one reference to Scotland in this 1 500 word report yet the broadcast on BBC Breakfast this morning explicitly includes it in the problem and the call for ‘knife arches’ to be installed in every school:

Incidents of very young children taking knives into primary schools have been revealed by a BBC investigation. Police in Kent recorded an assault involving a four-year-old pupil, while officers in the West Midlands reported that a six-year-old had taken a flick knife into class.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77d06vde4po

I am not aware of directly comparable figures for Scotland and neither are BBC UK‘s researchers, it seems, but there is evidence to point to them being significantly lower.

In Scotland in 2006/2007, there were just over 4 000 recorded crimes of ‘having in a public place and article with a blade or point.’ By 2016/2017, the figure had fallen by half to just over 2 000.¹

By 2019/2020, the figure had climbed to 2 666 before falling again to 2 582 last year.²

In England & Wales, in the same year, there were 50 500 cases, nearly 20 times as many and nearly twice as many per head of population.³

With particular regard to the extremely dangerous ‘Zombie’ knives, there were 15 cases recorded in 2023/2024 in Scotland.⁴ In England & Wales, ‘in 2023, ‘zombie’ knives, swords and machetes were mentioned in more than 14,000 crimes, recorded.’⁵

This 900 to 1 ratio, 90 to 1 per head of population, is shocking and were it reversed Scotland’s media would be feeding on daily.

There has been only one incident involving a 7 year-old in Ayr in 2025 which was ‘resolved without disruption‘a case in 2019 in East Renfrew where a 7 year-old took a knife for cutting cake from the staff room and ‘threatened’ people with it.

From Grok AI:

These incidents highlight rare but concerning occurrences in Scottish primary education, often linked to behavioural or safeguarding issues rather than intent to harm. Broader trends in youth knife possession are addressed through Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit, but such young ages remain exceptional. No reports were found for children strictly under age 6.

Sources:

1. https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-handling-offensive-weapons/pages/3/
2. https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2023-24/pages/1/
3. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04304/
4. https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2023-24/
5. https://geppsolicitors.co.uk/site/blog/criminal-law-news/knife-crime-in-the-uk-can-banning-zombie-knives-curb-the-violence/#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20%E2%80%98zombie%E2%80%99%20knives%2C%20swords%20and%20machetes%20were,of%20these%20involved%20machetes%2C%20swords%20and%20%E2%80%98zombie%E2%80%99%20knives.

Comment:

Alasdair Macdonald – More than 20 years ago, a few years after Strathclyde Police had started the violence reduction unit, I was at a presentation about it given by two officers. A question was asked about why we did not read much about this in the Scottish media. We were told that very senior officers and politicians had made discreet approaches to editors in their gentlemen’s clubs to ask them to keep their slavering newshounds back from reporting on the unit. They feared that the media would as they usually do ‘slam’ the unit as “rewarding thugs who ought to be birched or ‘hung’”. Whether this was true or not I do not know, but it gives an insight into how news is managed.

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