Police in Corridors
Understanding the role that police currently play in schools and exploring how to robustly evaluate this.
Evaluation type
Funding round
Targeted projectsActivity Type
Setting
Evaluators
Completed
July 2025| Project | Funding | Region |
|---|---|---|
| National Police Chiefs’ Council | £206,948 (evaluation only) | London |
What does this project involve?
Police presence in schools aims to keep children safe through building trust, encouraging children to seek help and deterring violence. Police activities in schools can be roughly grouped into two categories: officers delivering educational instruction to children, on topics including drugs, knives and violence (explored in YEF’s Police in Classrooms project); and the other activities which officers can conduct in schools, which we describe here as Police in Corridors (PiCo) and were the focus of this project.
PiCo activities include police attending staff meetings, engaging in informal interactions with children, leading assemblies, conducting patrols and searches, and sharing intelligence with school staff for safeguarding purposes. Frequency of school visits is variable (with some officers based in school full time whilst other visit once per week), and in some schools work is delivered by a dedicated police officer known as a Safer Schools Officer (SSO) who is assigned to a school via the local Safer Schools Partnership.
Why did YEF fund this project?
Police are present in many schools across England and Wales. Despite the time and resource invested in this approach, and the potential risk to children’s safety, as the YEF Toolkit explains there is very little research on the role police play in schools or the impact on children or violence. Robust evaluation is vital to understand the potential impacts of PiCo activities on children. YEF funded this evaluation to help fill this evidence gap. A Race Equity Associate was involved throughout to ensure the research design, materials and terminology were inclusive, and accounted for racial and ethnic differences in experience with the police.
The evaluation of PiCo was a feasibility and pilot study. The feasibility study aimed to understand how PiCo is implemented across secondary schools in England and Wales, how implementation varies and how the approach is perceived. It explored this through interviews with police decision-makers, a mapping survey completed by 34 police forces and qualitative work in ten areas (involving interviews, focus groups and observations with officers, school staff and children). 41 children from 23 secondary schools took part in the feasibility study, which ran from October 2023 to July 2024.
The pilot study planned to use a two-arm randomised controlled trial with the Metropolitan Police and secondary schools in London, but ended early due to recruitment issues. Mainstream secondary schools with existing SSOs were eligible, with the trial design involving the treatment group receiving PiCo and the control group having SSO presence removed. The pilot aimed to explore how PiCo could be evaluated further, establishing outcome measures, a randomisation protocol, and data collection and analysis methods. Two schools in Hounslow were recruited to the pilot, but no children took part in the study as it ended early, running from September 2023 to May 2024.
Key conclusions
| The feasibility study found high variation in the nature and extent of police activities in schools across England and Wales. PiCo is mainly delivered by trained officers assigned to a school, but activities vary considerably in their range and extent. Common activities include talks and assemblies, sharing information with school staff to assist safeguarding, being a visible presence, and providing children and staff with support and signposting to services. |
| Police and school staff felt that PiCo should prioritise safeguarding and prevention over enforcement and criminalisation. |
| PiCo was generally well-perceived by children, school staff, and police. Some children reflected that PiCo made them feel safer at school and in the community, while others expressed mixed feelings. Concerns were also raised by school staff about the potential impact of having police in school on a school’s reputation. |
| The pilot study faced significant recruitment challenges and ended early. Two of the 10 target schools were recruited. Reluctance to participate was driven by the risk of being randomised to the control group and temporarily losing police presence in school. |
| A randomised controlled trial of PiCo is not currently feasible. Alternative designs (such as a model where randomisation occurs between schools who already share an SSO, or a quasi-experimental design that uses existing variance) may be feasible – further work is needed to explore acceptability and feasibility. |
What will YEF do next?
The YEF is not proceeding to efficacy trial of PiCo due to the issues faced in recruiting schools and police into the trial. This is why YEF use pilot studies: to test the feasibility of a large-scale impact study before expending significant time and resource on delivering one.