Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the press release of 5 June 2019 entitled New anti-knife crime lessons ahead of summer, what estimate he has made of the number of schoolchildren (a) reached by the anti knife-crime lessons produced in 2018 and (b) who will be reached by the new lesson plans.

At the start of June 2019, 20,000 teachers and professionals were sent new Key Stage 3 and 4 lesson plans via the PSHE association, to further equip them to challenge myths and communicate to their pupils the dangers of carrying a knife.

The #knifefree lesson plans have been made available to secondary schools across the UK, to download from the PSHE Association website. It is up to individual schools to download and use the lesson plans in their classrooms.

The lesson plans released in 2018 had been downloaded over 14,000 times by June 2019 when the new lesson plans launched. To date (19/06), the lesson plans have been downloaded over 17,000 times, an increase of over 3,000 since the updated plans were released.