Understanding County Lines: A Guide for Schools

First, the Basics

County lines refers to a model of drug distribution. In this model, criminal networks use a dedicated mobile phone line (the "line") to move drugs from urban hubs into smaller towns, coastal areas, and rural communities. Young people are recruited, groomed, and exploited to carry out the physical work of transportation and delivery.

This issue is not just confined to inner cities. If your school assumes it is insulated by geography, the evidence suggests otherwise. Most police forces across England and Wales have reported county lines activity in their area. The reach extends into market towns, seaside resorts, and commuter belt suburbs.

What Schools Often Miss

1. The Age Range is Wider Than Most People Think

Awareness training typically focuses on teenagers — Year 9 upwards. However, the Children's Commissioner estimates that at least 27,000 children are involved in county lines in England. Additionally, around 120,000 young people, roughly one in every 25 teenagers, experience broader risk factors linked to exploitation. Grooming often starts much earlier than schools expect.

Primary school-aged children are actively recruited because they attract less suspicion. Being asked to "keep watch," carry a bag, or pass on a package can all precede more serious exploitation. It may have been happening for months before it becomes visible at secondary school.

2. It Does Not Always Look Like Criminal Behaviour — It Looks Like Vulnerability

The standard warning signs (unexplained cash, new trainers, multiple phones, going missing) are important but represent a later stage. By the time these appear, a young person is likely already embedded. The NSPCC identifies earlier indicators that are much easier to dismiss, including:

• Increased guardedness or anxiety, particularly around phones or messages

• Declining attendance or punctuality without obvious explanation

• Withdrawing from activities or friendships they previously valued

  
  

None of these are conclusive, but all are worth a conversation.

3. Grooming Looks Like Belonging

This is perhaps the most important thing schools can understand, and the hardest to act on. County lines gangs are effective recruiters because they offer something many vulnerable young people are genuinely missing: status, protection, money, and a sense of belonging.

Young people are not recruited with threats — at least not initially. They're befriended, gifted, and included. Coercion and violence enter the picture only once they're already embedded. By that point, a young person may feel deeply loyal to the group or genuinely afraid of what leaving would mean.

This is why those being exploited may actively resist help. They may deny involvement, protect the people exploiting them, or disengage from professionals who try to intervene. This isn't obstruction; it's a predictable response to a carefully constructed psychological situation. Treating it as uncooperativeness is one of the most common mistakes that schools can make.

4. Online Grooming Has Changed the Landscape

County lines recruitment has moved significantly online. Social media platforms, gaming environments, and messaging apps are all used to build relationships with young people before any in-person contact occurs. A young person does not need to be "on the streets" to be at risk — they can be targeted from their bedroom.

The profile of a young person at elevated risk includes those who are isolated, excluded, frequently absent, in care, or lacking stable family connections. However, the NSPCC is clear that county lines affects young people across social backgrounds and ethnicities. Professionals who hold an unconscious picture of what a "county lines victim" looks like may miss those who don't fit it.

5. It Is a Safeguarding Issue, Not a Criminal Justice Issue

A child or young person involved in county lines activity is a victim of exploitation — not a criminal. The response that is most likely to help is one that maintains trust, avoids judgement, and connects the young person to appropriate specialist support. Schools that approach disclosure or suspected involvement primarily through a disciplinary lens can cause real harm — not through malice, but through misunderstanding the nature of what they are dealing with.

County Lines: What Schools Can Do

Ensure All Staff — Not Just DSLs — Know the Early Warning Signs

County lines referrals often begin with a teaching assistant noticing a change in behaviour, not with a formal disclosure. Those identified as at risk are almost always known to wider services — school staff, youth workers, health professionals — before they appear on a statutory radar.

Create the Conditions for Disclosure

Young people are far more likely to open up to a trusted adult than to formally report. Mentoring relationships, particularly with someone who has credible experience of similar situations, can create the kind of trust that statutory routes cannot manufacture.

Build Referral Pathways Before You Need Them

Know which local specialist organisations can support a young person in the event of suspected exploitation.

Challenge the "Not Our Problem" Assumption

Schools that do not have obvious signs of county lines on their radar are not necessarily problem-free. They may simply be at an earlier stage, or their young people may be concealing it more effectively.

Where Pathways Comes In

Our county lines workshop for secondary schools does not deliver standard "don't get involved" messages. Young people have already heard that. It doesn't reach the ones who are most at risk. What we do instead is use credible messengers: practitioners who have first-hand experience of the situations we are describing. When speaking from lived experience rather than a policy document, young people listen differently. They ask different questions, are more likely to recognise something in what is being said, and are less likely to dismiss it.

County lines is not going to be solved in a single assembly or a one-hour PSHE session. However, schools that respond most effectively are the ones that move beyond awareness into genuine understanding of how exploitation works, who it targets, and why young people often don't look like victims even when they are.

To learn more about our programmes, get in touch.

Let’s keep young people safe by learning how exploitation really works and by responding with care rather than punishment.