The author is a teacher. Joe Baron is a pseudonym.
On the morning of 3rd February this year, Harvey Willgoose, a 15-year-old schoolboy, left home anticipating a normal day at All Saints High School in Sheffield. It wasn’t to be. Instead he was stabbed and killed in the school courtyard by another teenager, Mohammed Umah Khan, also aged 15. The jury at Sheffield Crown Court found Khan guilty of murder and, on 22 October, he was sentenced to life with a minimum of 15 years behind bars. Harvey is the latest victim of the endemic violence that plagues so many of our schools.
Also this year, a teenage girl was found guilty of attempted murder after attacking a pupil and two members of staff with a knife at a school in Carmarthenshire. Back in 2018 I wrote about the murder of Ann Maguire, a 61-year-old languages teacher, who, in April 2014, was stabbed seven times by Will Cornick during a Spanish lesson at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds. I went on to highlight the stabbing of another teacher, Vincent Uzomah, by a pupil at Dixons Academy in Bradford, a year after Mrs Maguire’s death.
In February, a Channel 4 News report on violence in our schools revealed that there were 150 stabbings and other injurious knife crime incidents across England and Wales last year. That’s almost four per school week. Furthermore, there were 20,000 violent crimes recorded in schools by police forces in 2024 – and nearly half of forces did not respond to the data request, meaning the true number is likely to be significantly higher.
Between 2013 and 2023, moreover, 5,000 violent injuries were inflicted upon teachers by their pupils. 1011 suffered fractures, 126 lost consciousness, 16 entirely or partially lost their sight, and four suffered amputations. This is worth repeating: four teachers were forced to have limbs surgically removed after being assaulted by one or more of their charges.
According to the most recent Behaviour in Schools survey of 5,800 teachers, conducted by the NASUWT teachers’ union, in the last year, 20 per cent of teachers have been hit or punched by their pupils, 38 per cent have been shoved or barged, 25 per cent have experienced pupil violence at least once each term, and 81 per cent of teachers say that pupil behaviour has deteriorated.
Dr Patrick Roach, the NASUWT General Secretary, lamented: “Recent years have seen an unprecedented surge in levels of violence and abuse in the classroom. Based on our latest data, we estimate as many as 30,000 violent incidents against teachers involving pupils with a weapon in the last 12 months.”
It is a national emergency, but no one seems to care, least of all the current education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, who seems more concerned with closing down private schools and forcing their former pupils into the state sector.
But why is violence so alarmingly commonplace in our schools? Well, it’s because violent pupils are largely allowed to abuse and attack their peers and teachers with impunity. And they are allowed to attack them with impunity because they are seen as blameless victims rather than violent thugs.
As an example of this pervasive thinking, let’s consider Mohammed Umah Khan’s excuses after he stabbed Harvey Willgoose. “I’m not right in the head,” he told Sean Pender, the Headteacher. “My Mum doesn’t look after me right. I’ve stabbed him.” He used a set of ready excuses no doubt learned from a variety of mental health professionals and teachers to divest himself of responsibility for an unspeakable act of savagery.
Clearly, such excuses had previously worked. According to Assistant Headteacher Morgan Davis, Khan had a history of violent conduct at the school. This begs the question: why was he still there? The brutal truth is that the school leadership viewed such conduct as beyond his control. That’s why, after stabbing Harvey, Khan said to Mr Davis: “You know I can’t control it!” A serial offender was treated as a victim and, consequently, went on to commit murder.
As a teacher of almost 22 years, I’ve worked in schools where such perverse, naive thinking is widespread. Armed with pre-learned excuses, the children and teenagers mete out threats and violence with impunity, and the innocent struggle to survive. Teachers are abused and the vulnerable are mercilessly bullied. Such schools are jungles. Rules are discarded and, when things go wrong, as in the albeit extreme case of Harvey Willgoose, the school is forced to close ranks and cover up their neglect of the real victims and their appeasement, even encouragement, of the perpetrators.
Back in 2018, Don Maguire – bereaved husband of Ann Maguire who, as mentioned above, was murdered in 2014 by a deranged pupil – was confronted by a wall of silence when he asked the authorities, including the school, questions about the circumstances surrounding her death. He said: “The impression was that there was more attention and care going to the killer’s family.”
The killer, according to Don, was not being treated as a cold-blooded murderer but someone to be protected and helped. There was talk of rehabilitation and his best interests, even though he’s never shown a shred of remorse. The school concealed the details surrounding Ann Maguire’s death from her bereaved husband, I suspect because her killer previously displayed a propensity towards violent psychopathy, a propensity that was appeased and ignored at every turn by the school’s leadership. And even now, to add cruel insult to wilful injury, Will Cornick, her frenzied and remorseless attacker, is being treated as a victim to be helped rather than punished. The very approach that led to Mrs Maguire’s tragic death is being repeated, only this time by the criminal justice system.
Indeed, this thinking pervades wider society. Paedophiles and murderers receive paltry sentences, shoplifting goes unpunished, illegal migrants are rewarded with mobile phones, and the mass rape, burning and murder of Jews is excused as a justified act of resistance. These are perverse outcomes brought about by the decline of traditional morality and its replacement by an amoral relativism that refuses to judge people, even murderers.
Our schools reflect this destructive orthodoxy. Perpetrators are treated as victims and, consequently, face little to no sanctions for their actions. The result: the proliferation of violence and the degeneration of our schools into dystopian cesspits.
