Alex Steer

282 words | ~1 min

Here are three of this week's more luminous education headlines:

Scared pupils wear stab vests in school (Independent)
School pupils wear stab vests to protect themselves from gangs, report says (Daily Telegraph)
Terrified kids 'wear stab vests at school' (Daily Mirror)

Obviously not good if true. Delving into the Telegraph article, though, we find this:

The report said teachers at one inner city comprehensive were "aware of young people wearing bullet-proof/stab-proof vests in school". One pupil told researchers he wore body armour because he "needed to".

One confirmation, and one school where teachers are 'aware of young people' doing it. This leaves us with the strong possibility that there are fewer kids wearing stab vests in schools than there are headlines about kids wearing stab vests in schools.

Sadly the report (written by Perpetuity Consulting for the NASUWT) doesn't seem to be available online, so we can't evaluate the data to see if there really is an epidemic of ironclad yoof or whether the authors are reaching a bit too far to get their hard work into the papers.