Stop and Search: What Your Students Already Know

Pathways Project

Sep 3

6 min read

In our last post, we looked at permanent exclusion as a safeguarding event — and at what happens to young people when the one structured, protective institution in their lives closes its doors to them. This post follows that thread. Because the question of what those young people encounter outside school isn't abstract. For a significant proportion of young people in London — disproportionately Black, disproportionately already disadvantaged — the answer, at some point, is the police.

Not in a crisis, or because anything has gone wrong. Just because...

A Question Schools Rarely Ask

Many secondary schools in London have students who have been stopped and searched. Some have students who have been stopped multiple times. Pastoral leads often know this in the way that pastoral leads know many things — as background, as context, as something that happened outside the school gate and therefore outside the school's domain.

But the stop and search encounter doesn't stay outside the school gate, it comes back in on Monday morning. It shapes how a young person understands authority, institutional fairness, and whether the adults in their life are actually on their side. And it sits, largely unaddressed, while schools continue to wonder why some students are so resistant to trust.

Stop and Search — What the Data Actually Shows

The Home Office's stop and search statistics aren't ambiguous. In the year ending March 2024, Black people were stopped and searched at 3.7 times the rate of white people across England and Wales — down from a peak of 5.5 times in 2021. A persistent and documented disparity that has not closed in the decades since it was first recorded. In London, where 62% of all stop and searches involve people from minority ethnic groups, the concentration of that disparity is sharper still.

These aren't figures from a contested source, they are the government's own numbers.

Equally important is what those stops find. In the year ending 2024, around 69% of all stop and searches resulted in no further action — no drugs, no weapons, no arrest, no charge. The person is sent on their way, having been treated as a suspect in public, often with no explanation and no apology.

Research by Crest Advisory found that 45% of adults who had been stopped and searched described the experience as traumatising — rising to 52% of Black adults. For a young person who has been through this, or watched it happen to an older brother, a cousin, a friend, the lesson absorbed isn't theoretical, it's a felt conclusion about who the system works for. And that conclusion doesn't stay contained to interactions with police officers — it bleeds.

This Is Not a New Problem

The disproportionate use of stop and search against Black communities in Britain has a documented history that predates most of the young people now in secondary school by decades. The Sus laws — derived from the Vagrancy Act 1824 — were used overwhelmingly against Black communities in urban areas until 1981, when the Brixton uprising prompted their repeal. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act that replaced them introduced the requirement for reasonable grounds, but did not end the disproportionality.

In 1999, the Macpherson Report — the public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police's handling of Stephen Lawrence's murder — concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist: defined as the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. Thats a documented government finding. The report made 70 recommendations. However, in 2023, Baroness Casey's independent review found that the Metropolitan Police remained institutionally racist.

That history matters for schools because it is the history many of your students are living inside, whether or not anyone at school has ever named it to them.

The Connection Schools Are Missing

There's a direct line between what we described in our exclusion post and this one. The young people most likely to be permanently excluded — those in care, those subject to child protection plans, those from Black Caribbean backgrounds — are also the young people most likely to be stopped and searched. In 2023/24, Black children aged 10–17 represented 15% of all stop and searches despite making up 6% of the population. The overlap isn't coincidental, it reflects the same underlying pattern: systems that are supposed to protect and support certain young people are, in practice, applying disproportionate scrutiny and punitive responses to them.

The effect is cumulative. A young person who feels pushed out of school and treated as a suspect in the street has received, from two of the most significant institutions in their life, a consistent message about their status. That message doesn't make them more likely to trust, more likely to engage, more likely to respond to the next intervention offered to them. It makes them less likely to.

What Young People Are Entitled to Know — and Rarely Do

There is a practical dimension to this conversation that schools are well placed to address. Young people have legal rights during a stop and search encounter, and most do not know them. Research by YouGov commissioned by StopWatch found that most Britons cannot correctly identify their rights when stopped by the police, and that police rely on this knowledge gap. That's not a minor issue. In the moment of an encounter, knowledge is protective because, although not guaranteeing a fair outcome, it changes what a young person can do with an unfair one.

Under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, an officer must have reasonable grounds to stop someone — grounds based on specific, observable factors, not on age, race, clothing, or where someone is from. The officer must provide their name, their station, the legal power they are using, and what they are looking for. The person stopped is entitled to a written record of the search.

Under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, a senior officer can designate an area where stop and search requires no individual grounds — anyone present during the authorisation window can be stopped. Young people in London are frequently stopped under this power without knowing it exists, or understanding that it removes the requirement for a reason specific to them.

Knowing the difference between these two powers, knowing what to ask, and knowing that the right to challenge an unlawful search exists — even if that challenge happens later, through the Independent Office for Police Conduct, rather than in the street — is basic civic knowledge. The fact that it is not routinely taught says something about whose interests the curriculum has historically been designed to serve.

Where Schools Come In

None of this requires schools to take a position on policing. It requires them to take a position on their students.

A young person who has been stopped and searched, or who fears they might be, is carrying something into school that their teachers may know nothing about. That experience, and the feelings it produces about fairness, about authority, and whether the rules apply equally, doesn't disappear in the classroom. It shapes attention, behaviour, and engagement in ways that look, from the outside, like defiance or disengagement.

The most effective thing a school can do is make space for that conversation. Not to adjudicate between the young person's experience and the officer's account or to deliver a verdict on whether policing is fair. But to acknowledge that the experience happened, that the statistics show it happens disproportionately, and that young people are entitled to understand their rights and their situation clearly. That's not a political act, it's a pastoral one.

The Bigger Picture

This post is, in part, a gateway to something we have been building toward across this series.

The issues covered in these posts — county lines, gang crime, knife crime, joint enterprise, exclusion, policing — aren't separate problems. They are different angles on the same underlying situation: young people navigating a world that is, for many of them, genuinely unsafe and structurally stacked against them. Schools are not responsible for creating that situation, but they are one of the most important places where young people encounter an adult who might, or might not, understand it.

The Bigger Picture is a programme Pathways has developed to address exactly this gap. It's a series of structured workshops that take the questions young people are already asking — about power, about fairness, about how the world actually works — and brings them into the classroom with honesty and evidence.

One of the modules (Who Are the Police For?) covers stop and search, the history of policing and race in Britain, the documented evidence on disproportionality, and a framework for handling a police encounter safely and with knowledge. It's not designed to tell young people what to think, but to give them what they need to think clearly.

We'll be writing about The Bigger Picture in more detail shortly.

Follow Pathways on LinkedIn for the next post in this series.