The warning signs had been accumulating for nearly a decade before a coalition of organisations finally put them in writing to the government. In 2016, a parliamentary inquiry by the women and equalities committee established that sexual harassment and violence were endemic in English schools — a finding that, at the time, carried the weight of institutional revelation. It did not produce the structural response that campaigners believed the evidence demanded.
Four years later, in 2020, the Everyone’s Invited movement gathered mass testimonials from young people across the country, documenting the breadth and normalisation of sexual abuse in educational settings. An Ofsted review followed, concluding that every school and college leader should operate on the assumption that sexual harassment and online abuse were problems affecting their pupils. A second women and equalities committee report arrived in 2023. Still, the cycle continued.
It was against this accumulated record of unheeded warnings that a Guardian investigation, drawing on police data spanning 2021 to 2025, quantified what advocates had long described in qualitative terms. The analysis found that an average of close to five sexual crimes against children aged twelve and younger were recorded by police every day in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales — a figure that, rendered as a daily rate, transforms an abstraction into something measurable and, for that reason, harder to deflect.
Among those recorded offences were almost 2,000 rapes and attempted rapes, amounting to an average of one allegation of rape at a school reaching police every single day. More than a third of the rape victims were children under the age of thirteen. In total, at least 8,500 sexual offences against under-thirteens were recorded as having occurred on school premises or in their immediate vicinity over the four-year period, equivalent to 4.7 reported offences per day.
The police data, in most cases, did not specify the age of alleged perpetrators. Lawyers and experts working in the field assess that the majority are fellow pupils. Most victims were girls. And, as the data itself implies, these figures represent only what reached formal reporting — a fraction of actual incidence, given the well-documented barriers to disclosure that child victims face.
Within days of the Guardian‘s publication, a coalition of eighty-seven academics and campaign organisations — including the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Rape Crisis, Women’s Aid, Refuge, the National Education Union, and Everyone’s Invited — addressed a formal letter to Andy Burnham, urging the government to treat the findings as a turning point rather than another entry in a long ledger of unacted-upon evidence.
The letter did not soften its historical framing. “There is a long history of governments being alerted to such crises,” it stated, citing the sequence of inquiries, testimonials, and reviews that had preceded this moment without producing commensurate change. “These should have been watershed moments that led to meaningful change,” the signatories wrote, “and we are urging you to make this difference today.”
The coalition also pressed Labour to honour its manifesto commitment to halve violence against women and girls, calling on the government to “end this cycle of harm once and for all.” The letter was explicit that the published data represented only a partial picture: “This data is only the tip of the iceberg given that most abuse is unreported,” it noted, adding that child sexual abuse within the home — which accounts for the majority of cases — remained entirely outside the school-based figures under discussion.
The Department for Education responded through a spokesperson, who described the scale of abuse and harassment revealed in the figures as “truly appalling” and affirmed that every school carried a legal duty to act on sexual violence and harassment. The spokesperson noted that Education Secretary Lucy Powell had, within the past month, set out a new whole-school approach intended to tackle misogyny and challenge what the department characterised as “toxic influences before they take hold.” Whether that framework will translate into the structural change that campaigners have sought — across successive governments, successive inquiries, and successive moments of public reckoning — remains, for now, precisely the question.