'It's kill or be killed': Chilling view of schoolboy, 9, as LBC reveals true scale of knives being brought to schools

29 May 2025, 08:22 | Updated: 1 June 2025, 18:57

Children as young as nine are among thousands of kids caught taking knives into schools, an LBC investigation can reveal.

Exclusive data obtained by LBC shows a 60% increase in youngsters caught with a blade on school premises in the last two years.

This means, on average, 12 blades are found in classrooms every single day.

One young boy, aged just nine-years-old, was caught with a blade and his mentor said he was willing to use it as he had a “kill or be killed” mentality.

A youth worker who worked on the case, Malachi Nunes, said: “The youngest one, for me, was 9 years old.

“He was in a situation where his older brother was in a gang - he was locked up in jail - and he was just left. He said to me that he’d carry a knife to protect himself - because in his mind, it's a kill-or-be-killed mentality.

“In his mind, it’s like: they can’t get to my brother [because he’s in prison], they get to me - but if I’ve got a knife, I’ve got a chance of killing them first.”

The data obtained by LBC comes just days after two teenagers pleaded guilty to the murder of 14-year-old Kelyan Bokassa on a bus in Woolwich earlier this year, and can reveal that knives were found on school children 2,363 times in the last full school year (2023/24).

In an extensive investigation, LBC went to the heart of the issue plaguing Britain’s classrooms, speaking to active gang members, teachers and mentors about their experiences and finding out what's behind this dramatic uptake in knives.

Some, still fearing the consequences of speaking out about these issues, did not want to be identified.

Over the past few years, the West Midlands has developed a reputation as the knife crime capital of the United Kingdom.

There are signs of improvement in the region, with knife crime down 8% in 2024, but adjusted for population size, the area has one of the highest rates of knife crime compared to anywhere else in the country, with the local police force recording 165 offences for every 100,000 people.

Moses grew up in the area, and was just 11 years old when he started to carry a knife. He became embroiled in gang culture, and frequently brought his blade into school.

Now 18 and hoping to turn his life around, Moses has agreed to open up about his experience for the first time. We met on a nondescript bridge in West Bromwich.

Keen to conceal his identity, Moses keeps his hood up throughout the duration of our conversation and routinely checked his surroundings in case he was recognised.

Violence has been a fixture of his young life.

“I’ve lost three friends to knife crime or shootings,” Moses admitted. One of his close friends was just 15 when he was killed.

“It was gang violence… your friend’s gone [and] you just can’t chat to him again.

“It’s not normal [to have lost friends] but it is normal.”

Moses then explained what he feels is leading to the uptick in young people carrying knives.

“People bring knives into schools because people are getting attacked… they’re bringing knives into schools because they feel scared and that,” Moses tells me, before homing in on one example from his high school days.

“There was this one time [where] a kid brought a knife in. It wasn’t like a normal knife; it was like one of them big knives - a machete.”

He explained that a couple of drivers had rammed the school gates with their vehicles, and his schoolmate had jumped out of one of them holding a machete.

“It got stopped [by a teacher] in time, but imagine if… he used a machete on them [the other children in the school].”

For Moses, the fact that so many young people see arming themselves as a means of self-defence is one of the key things driving the rise in knives being carried in schools.

On top of that, though, he pointed to the impact of social media.

“It brainwashes you. It literally brainwashes you… there’s group chats out there, people sending videos and that - people running people down and getting stabbed. It’s stupid.”

Whilst the West Midlands has the highest rate of knife crime anywhere in the UK, our data shows the problem is pervasive.

One of the schools which has the most experience dealing with knife crime is New Rush Hall School in Ilford, East London.

As a Pupil Referral Unit, it is one of the most secure schools in the country, providing for kids with a series of complex behavioural issues. Some of its students have been excluded from their previous schools for knife possession.

Headteacher Sam Walters has seen it all.

“I’ve worked with young people who have been stabbed and murdered with knives; I’ve worked with young people who are in prison who have killed other young people,” he says as we tour the school’s corridors.

I put Moses’s comments about the impact of social media to Mr Walters:

“Kids have access to things that adults don’t even think exist. Kids are in their bedrooms for hours in the evening, kids are scrolling through TikTok, kids are seeing things on Snapchat, Instagram, social media [and] out in the community that they haven’t seen before.

“We’re going through a process now where violent behaviour is almost normalised in the minds of some young people. Kids are becoming desensitised to things that we would, once upon a time, have been completely shocked and blown away by.

“There’s also lots of young people who do not necessarily want to commit violence, and they’re not thinking ‘I’m carrying a knife because I want to stab someone and hurt someone’ but because of all the stuff they’re seeing on social media, they’re scared.”

Mr Walters is on constant alert as we walk through the school, hyper-attuned to potential disruption among his pupils. He introduces us to a few of the school’s students, one of whom, 14 year-old Ricaldo, opened up about how knife crime had affected his life.

“I know quite a few people [who’ve been stabbed], like four or five,” Ricaldo says.

He then told us about what he sees on social media and how this impacts the way his peers think.

“I see quite a bit [of violent content online] - more than I used to,” Ricaldo observes. “People [are] brandishing knives as though it is a flex habit. They look up to the older people who are carrying knives, and since they know other young people are carrying knives, they feel that they need it for safety.

“It’s kind of like a cycle: if I see someone with a knife, I’m going to want one to protect myself, and the next person and the next person [thinks the same].”

As shocking as Ricaldo’s testimony is, he is by no means the youngest person we encountered in our investigation.

LBC received responses from a number of primary schools which conceded that their pupils had been caught with knives.

With LBC’s research indicating that since the start of the academic year 2021/22, schools have faced around 7,500 incidents of knife possession, Malachi feels urgent action is required to tackle the crisis.

“[We] need to get more young people to change their mentality. I am just tackling as it comes in - not waiting for a child to die.”

The government has set an objective of halving knife crime over the course of the next decade.