Assault, drugs, sex work: Sharp rise in serious incidents at secondary schools

The Education Inspectorate received a record number of incident reports from secondary schools in the first four months of this year. The reports are also getting increasingly serious, with reports involving drugs, assaults, or even sex work, RTL Nieuws reports.

In the first four months of 2024, the Education Inspectorate received 128 reports of incidents involving physical safety and 242 reports involving social safety, compared to 96 and 184 in the same period in 2023. During the pandemic years, the number of incidents was much lower while students spent large parts of the school year distance learning from home.

“We see more incidents in the field of violence and safety. They are also often more violent in nature. It concerns injuries, or for example, the possession of weapons. We also see that arguments often escalate more quickly,” Rutger Pol, director of secondary education at the Education Inspectorate, told RTL. “This is a worrying development. Students must feel safe at school.”

Teachers and education experts told RTL Nieuws that “street culture” has entered schools. “Drug sales are a problem at almost every school,” education expert Leon Meijs, who supervises secondary schools in the field of safety, told the broadcaster. “Some schools have to close their doors during the day because otherwise dealers would walk in. At one school, there was prostitution of girls in the toilet. Boys from rival gangs have been banned from school because when they meet in the hallway, fights break out. This used to be extreme and unthinkable, but I see this behavior emerging in more and more schools.”

A survey of members of CNV Onderwijs showed that teachers also experience more crime in schools. “We have fights in front of the school, students dealing drugs and vapes, lover boys,” one teacher said. “You can confiscate telephones, but they have three, so to speak.”

Secondary schools are often insufficiently prepared for things like drug dealing and violence, according to Ph.D. research by criminologist Jennifer van den Broek. “This problem was not high on the agenda for years,” she told RTL. She surveyed almost 1,000 teachers and schools taff in secondary education. About half said that there had been drugs or weapons at their school in the past five years. A fifth indicated that criminals were recruiting kids at school.

Only a third said they knew exactly which signs of criminal behavior to look out for. “91 percent of them said they need additional information, but only 6 percent have received training. This shows that crime at school is not yet on the map everywhere,” Van den Broek said.