Excluded children 'sucked into criminality'
Police commissioners have warned that a "broken" system of support for children who have been excluded from school is fuelling the country's knife crime epidemic.
West Midlands PCC David Jamieson is among eight commissioners and London's mayor Sadiq Khan to write to Theresa May, warning that excluded youngsters are at much greater risk of becoming "either perpetrators or victims of serious youth violence".
The letter said that young people who had been excluded were being "sucked into criminality", and that cuts to school funds and youth services mean "interventions" for needy youngsters were not happening.
It also called for an end to the system of 'off-rolling', which sees pupils taken off school registers without having been formally excluded.
The Government said that permanent exclusions should be a "last resort".
The letter said tackling knife crime was a top priority for police forces, but added there were limits to what they could do.
"There is growing evidence to show that our vulnerable children are more likely to be excluded or off-rolled from school," it said.
"And additionally that excluded children are at much greater risk of becoming either perpetrators or victims of serious youth violence."
It added: "We firmly believe it is unacceptable that young people can be ejected from the formal education process in this way when we know how vulnerable they become to being sucked into criminality as a result.
"Our schools are facing significant funding pressures and many interventions for our most vulnerable children are being cut.
"This cannot be right and schools must have the necessary resources to deliver good interventions and support to those at risk of exclusion."
The letter highlighted the West Midlands as a knife crime hotspot, saying that permanent exclusions across the region had risen by 40 per cent since 2013-14.
"Clearly, the way the education system deals with excluded young people is broken," it added.
"It cannot be right that so many of those who have committed offences have been excluded from school or were outside of mainstream education."
Meanwhile Chancellor Philip Hammond said the knife crime epidemic "isn't just about money".
"I'm not saying that resources don't have anything to do with this challenge, but what we need to see now is a surging of resources from other areas of policing activity into dealing with this spike in knife crime," he told the BBC.
"That's what you do in any organisation when you get a specific problem occurring in one area of the operation, you move resources to deal with that."
