Policing the Playground: Liberty launches a new report on schools policing

When we think of schools, we think of kids running around the playground, chatting in the corridors between classes, and getting stuck into difficult maths lessons. But for some children, being at school also means seeing a uniformed police officer patrolling the hallways, listening to police give a lesson about sexting, or being told off by an officer instead of a teacher for cheeky behaviour.

What is schools policing?

Since 2002, some schools have partnered with their local police force by agreeing to a ‘Safer Schools Partnership’. When a school’s headteacher agrees to a formal partnership, a police officer (typically called a Safer Schools Officer) begins working with that school – sometimes as closely as having their own office within the school, sitting with students at lunch times, or being involved in disciplinary proceedings.

On 2 May 2025, the Met Police moved all 371 Safer Schools Officers in London into Neighbourhood Policing Teams. Now as ‘Dedicated Ward Officers’ with a children and young people specialism, they no longer have a regular presence within schools. Their exact relationship and officers’ activities within schools is borough-specific (and sometimes school-specific).

What are we concerned about?

Organisations and bodies like the Youth Endowment Fund and the London Policing Ethics Panel have found that there is no reliable, publicly-available evidence that having police in schools reduces crime or violence, or otherwise makes schools safer.

However, there is evidence of disproportionality and harm to young people – especially those in over-policed communities. For instance, research carried out by the Met Police in 2022 found that Black children were overrepresented in crime and safeguarding reports produced by schools officers, which their report states, “could be interpreted as [schools police] disproportionately investigating Black children as suspects”.

Because officers are mandated to report crimes, having police in schools also means that officers are forced to report some things such as cannabis possession, even if they don’t believe a policing response is an appropriate way of addressing the behaviour. This is more likely to affect children from low-income backgrounds, given officers are more likely to be in schools with a high proportion of children entitled to free school meals.

There have also been individual instances of extreme harm carried out by police officers against young, often Black, children in schools, such as the strip search of Child Q. These cases show how practices like adultification (where racism leads adults to perceive children as older than they are) play into the policing of young people. They’re also part of a wider pattern of harm to racialised young people.

This change to how schools and police interact in London is therefore hugely significant for young people. We carried out research to better understand what the impacts might be, and how schools policing policy could be improved.

What did our report find?

Police and local authority officials in Hackney piloted a new way to operationalise the London-wide change to schools policing. We analysed this pilot model and the London-wide change via Freedom of Information requests, speaking with professionals in safeguarding, education, policing, and violence reduction, and carrying out interviews with six youth practitioners in Hackney. Three key findings are:

1. A chronic lack of funding for certain services like mental health provision and youth work means that police step into roles that are unrelated to policing, and other professionals like teachers sometimes do ‘police’ work.
2. Removing a regular police presence from schools is a step in the right direction for reducing racial disproportionality, but some activities that still bring police into schools are evidenced as harmful or ineffective, like when police deliver Personal, Social, Health, and Economics (PSHE) lessons which concern topics like drugs or sexting.
3. Police activities in schools could be more effective if police take a supportive rather than leading role, such as if they feed into PSHE lesson design but don’t deliver it themselves.

What should happen now?

Police should not come into contact with young people unnecessarily: there’s too much evidence of harm and disproportionality, and not enough evidence that schools policing makes young people safe. In addition to the removal of a regular police presence in schools, we’re calling for the removal of police from non-policing roles in schools (such as teaching lessons or sitting with young people at lunch), equitable partnership working with non-statutory and statutory services, and an evidence-based approach that prioritises the wellbeing of all young people. See our report for how this can be done.