Review to be launched after increase of violence in schools

Elgan Hearn, local democracy reporter

A senior council official says an urgent review is needed to find out why violent and aggressive incidents in schools shot up last year.

The figures for incidents in Blaenau Gwent schools, were part of an annual report on Health and Safety for 2023/2024 which came in front of Blaenau Gwent County Borough councillors at a meeting of the Corporate and Performance scrutiny committee on Thursday, November 7.

Urgent analysis

Head of organisational development Andrea Prosser said: “We’ve had an increase of violence and aggression at schools, this is mainly at Pen y Cwm special school.

“An urgent analysis needs to take place to understand why the number of incidents of violence and aggression has increased substantially with emphasis and focus on the schools.”

The report shows that the number of incidents has gone up from 98 in 2022/2023 to 218 in 2023/2024 with 200 of these incidents in schools.

A further breakdown of the data in the report explains that 70 per cent or 140 of the 200 incidents are in the county borough’s two special schools and 38 incidents took place in a special educational needs (SEN) setting in mainstream schools.

Labour’s Cllr Keith Chaplin said: “Is this a one off thing that we are going to see, what measures have we got to reduce these numbers or is it we can’t really control it.

Special schools

Ms Prosser said: “The director of education (Luisa Munro-Morris) and health and safety advisors are going to look into the reasons for these incidents and what we can do to prevent them, the majority of these are in our special schools.

Labour’s Cllr Tommy Smith asked whether all the data on incidents in schools including accidents was being received by the authority and wanted a further breakdown of the information.

Ms Prosser said that the results of the review would be brought back to the committee.

“We do need to understand what’s going on there,” said Ms Prosser.

The report said that overall: the number of employee accidents/incidents in 2023/2024 has gone up to 304 which is an increase from 162 in 2022/2023.

The number of non-employee accidents last year was 299 which is a fall from, 325 in 2022/2023 .

The council’s Health and Safety advisor’s investigated 57 accidents/incidents.
and there was one “intervention” by the Health and Safety Executive

Councillors accepted the report which will go on to be discussed by the Cabinet at a meeting in December.