Exclusive:School violence Scotland: True scale of pupil violence crisis hidden as some schools never report attacks

Emails obtained by The Scotsman show how only one out of the seven high schools in the Stirling Council area regularly report incidents to local education chiefs, with some not revealing any at all.

Officials privately admitted that low reporting levels undermined the “validity” of their statistics, which showed there were 11 incidents involving an injury to staff in Stirling Council’s secondary schools last year, compared to 192 in primaries and 66 in nurseries.

Opposition MSP Liam Kerr said parents would be “deeply alarmed” by the “false picture” created as a result of such under-reporting.

Education secretary Jenny Gilruth has previously highlighted there are “lots of disparate approaches” to recording violent incidents across Scotland’s 32 councils, which she said was “problematic” when trying to judge the scale of any increase in the wake of the pandemic.

The issue was discussed at the first Scottish Government summit on school violence in September, where a poll of participants found a majority felt there “lacked a consistent approach across school and local authority levels”, and everyone agreed there “lacked consistency at a national level”.

Teaching unions have also warned that staff in parts of Scotland often feel “dissuaded” from reporting violent incidents because of a “culture of fear” about the impact it will have on a school’s reputation.

Emails released under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws show how Stirling Council officials discussed a draft of a briefing to councillors on the level of violence in schools in September last year.

The briefing said that in 2022/23, there had been 785 incident reports submitted, of which 486 related to staff injury. Officials said 217 of the incidents involving staff injury were in additional support needs (ASN) settings, 192 were in primaries, 66 in nurseries and just 11 were in secondary schools.

Chief education pfficer Bryony Monaghan responded to the draft by writing the document was “looking good”, but questioned whether they needed to add anything to raise the awareness of the need to complete corporate incident forms, “particularly with such low reporting in secondaries”.

In response, an unnamed official said: "The issue of low secondary reporting is interesting. Clearly the inconsistency of reporting impacts on the validity of our data. Only one secondary school reports regularly and most of their incidents tend to be low level. Some secondary schools don't report at all."

The author of the email said they did not know if these schools were keeping records in another way, and that it “may be time to think about the advice we are giving to schools in how and what they report”.

The emails also show how a teaching union official disputed the briefing’s claim that all schools had “received” additional training on incident reporting at the start of the school session, leading to a correction being made to the document, so that it said staff were “receiving” additional training.

Mr Kerr, Scottish Conservative education spokesman, said: “Parents will be deeply alarmed that the true scale of violence in schools is being under-reported. That is setting a dangerous precedent and presents a false picture of the situation in our schools.

“Schools across Scotland are facing an epidemic of violence under this SNP Government, with teachers and students experiencing unacceptable abuse in what should be a safe space for learning.

“Ministers must ensure our cash-strapped councils have the resources to fully report any violent incidents, so that any strategies to tackle school violence are being implemented in an accurate way. If the Scottish Government is serious about tackling violence in schools, it must do more to ensure the data is comprehensive and up to date.”

Mike Corbett, national official for Scotland at the NASUWT teaching union, said the email exchange at Stirling Council “summed up the problem” of under-reporting.

"When I was teaching, I was teaching mainly in the leafy suburbs, but we still had incidents,” he said. “Not as many as other schools, but we still had incidents we had to report.

“The idea that there are schools, plural, in Stirling that have had literally no incidents worthy of reporting just smacks to me of fantasy.”

Mr Corbett said there were “pockets” of good practice around the country, including in Fife. But he said he believed some authorities were “worried” about the increase in the number of incidents in the statistics when they were all properly recorded.

"It is something that we’ve said for a while,” he said. “It’s something that was then recognised by everyone who attended the first national summit, I think in September. But we are still waiting for some kind of national response from the Government and others.”

A Stirling Council spokesperson said: “We take violence in our schools extremely seriously and wellbeing support is available for those who are subject to any such incidents. Robust reporting procedures are in place for serious incidents in our schools, working alongside health and safety and trade union colleagues.

“Training materials on completing corporate incident forms (CIFs) for serious incidents were circulated early in the academic session to schools and ASN provisions. We continue to liaise with secondary schools to stress the importance of staff completing CIFs when incidents occur.”

The Scotsman has previously reported data issues at other local authorities in relation to school violence. FOI responses showed how one official at Highland Council told colleagues: “If an FOI comes in, it will be difficult to extract the data needed. The old system had its problems, but we could extract relevant data with ease.”

At another council, officials appeared to have provided the wrong information in response to an FOI request on classroom violence.

"The 960 reported [incidents] was incorrect,” they said. “The correct total should have been 643. The reason for the error was that the data involving some individual incidents was recorded over several rows.”

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Scotland’s schools should be safe learning environments for all – violence and abusive behaviour towards pupils or staff is completely unacceptable.

“The Scottish Government has taken a range of actions, including commissioning the national research on behaviour in Scottish schools, the establishment of the headteachers’ taskforce and the behaviour summits, which were undertaken last year to better understand these issues.

"Whilst Government can set out national parameters in relation to guidance for councils like Stirling, arrangements for reporting are ultimately a matter for local authorities as the statutory responsibility for the delivery of education rests with them.

"That is why the Government is working with local authorities to bring forward a joint National Action Plan to set out the range of actions needed at both local and national level.”