Gang Crime in Schools: What's Changed, and What Schools Can Actually Do About It
- Pathways Project
- Jun 2
- 4 min read
While gang crime isn't a new challenge for schools, the nature of it has changed. The gap between how schools are equipped to respond, and what is actually happening on the ground has widened. Understanding that gap is the starting point for doing things more effectively.
The Scale Is Larger Than Most Schools Realise
The figures from the Youth Endowment Fund's 2025 report on exploitation and gangs are stark. One in eight teenagers, around 120,000 young people across England and Wales, have been asked to sell, transport, or hide drugs, weapons, or money. Of those asked, roughly one in four went through with it.
These aren't numbers that describe a problem confined to particular postcodes or school types, they describe a problem that is present, in some form, in many secondary schools in the country.
HM Inspectorate of Probation estimates that around 27,000 children aged 10–17 identify as gang members in England, with a further 313,000 knowing someone they would define as a gang member. Children in a gang are four to five times more likely to be victims of violence than their peers.
What Has Changed
The boundary between gang involvement and exploitation has blurred significantly. In the past, gang membership was more clearly a matter of affiliation and identity. Today, the lines between a young person choosing to join a gang, being groomed into one, and being criminally exploited through one are far less distinct. The Centre for Social Justice describes criminal exploitation as effectively modern slavery, with gangs routinely using coercion, debt bondage, and violence to maintain control once a young person is involved.
This matters for schools because it changes how you should interpret what you see. A young person who appears to be a willing participant in gang activity may be as much a victim as a perpetrator, and treating them primarily through a disciplinary lens can cause significant harm.
Recruitment has moved online. Social media, gaming platforms, and messaging apps are now primary recruitment tools. Gangs use these channels to build relationships with vulnerable young people long before any in-person contact occurs. This means that a young person can be embedded in a dangerous network before any visible signs appear in school.
The overlap with school absence is significant and well-evidenced. The Youth Endowment Fund found that young people in a gang or experiencing exploitation were nearly twice as likely to be persistently absent from school as their peers. Persistent absence is now understood as both a risk factor and a warning sign — not simply an attendance problem to be managed, but a possible indicator of something more serious happening outside school.
Why Young People Join — and Why It Matters
Understanding why young people become involved in gangs is not about making excuses, it’s about understanding the problem accurately enough to respond to it effectively.
HM Inspectorate of Probation identifies the core attractions clearly: friendship, meaning, purpose, belonging, protection, money, and excitement. For a young person who feels invisible at school, unsafe at home, or disconnected from any positive future, a gang offers something concrete and immediate. The risks of criminalisation, violence, and exploitation are abstract and distant by comparison.
The YEF data is stark: exploited young people are five times more likely to have a parent or sibling in prison, and more than half had previously been supported by a social worker. These are young people already navigating significant adversity. And exploitation takes hold precisely where support has been absent or insufficient.
The implication for schools is clear: effective gang crime prevention is not primarily about teaching young people that gangs are dangerous. It’s about addressing the underlying needs that gangs appear to meet.
Gang Crime: The School Exclusion Pipeline
One of the most important and underacknowledged connections in this area is between school exclusion and gang involvement. Children who have been excluded from mainstream education are significantly more likely to become involved with gangs.
This isn’t an argument against exclusion in every case, but an argument for treating the decision to exclude as a safeguarding moment that requires a clear plan for what happens next. A young person excluded without appropriate follow-up support does not become safer. They often become more vulnerable.
What Schools Can Actually Do
Know the difference between involvement and exploitation. Train pastoral staff to approach suspected gang involvement with a safeguarding lens first. A young person displaying signs of gang affiliation may need a referral to specialist support, not a disciplinary process.
Take persistent absence seriously as a safeguarding indicator. When a young person's attendance deteriorates, especially alongside changes in behaviour, social group, or demeanour, the question should not only be how to improve attendance, but why it is declining and what might be happening outside school.
Build the relationships that make disclosure possible. Young people involved in gangs almost never disclose to someone they don't trust. The single most important thing a school can do is ensure that every vulnerable young person has at least one consistent, trusted adult they can turn to. Ideally someone who understands their world and will not respond with judgement.
Create clear referral pathways to specialist provision. Schools cannot address gang involvement alone, and should not try to. Knowing which local organisations can provide mentoring, intervention, or multi-agency support, and being able to activate those pathways quickly, is as important as any internal response.
Where Pathways Comes In
Our credible messengers have direct experience of gang involvement and can speak to young people from a position of genuine understanding, rather than institutional authority.
Our workshops go beyond awareness, addressing the realities of gang life honestly, and exploring the pressures and dynamics that draw young people in — giving students practical tools for recognising and resisting exploitation — including the kind that doesn't initially look like exploitation at all.
For young people who need more sustained support, our one-to-one mentoring programmes, provide the ongoing trusted relationship that a single session cannot deliver alone.
If you would like to talk about how Pathways can support your school's approach, get in touch here.
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