Almost exactly 20 years since the first “campus cop” started work in Scotland, the role has stirred up controversy all over again.
While there was much debate over how appropriate it was to have police officers based in schools, the role has become well established in some.
In 2018, however, Vlog Scotland reported fresh concerns over the use of money from the new Pupil Equity Fund for campus cops.
At the time, Martin Canavan, policy and participation officer at Aberlour Child Care Trust, said that, while there might be a role for police in schools - he cited ”excellent focused programmes around antisocial behaviour” - if ”uniformed campus officers are patrolling schools, we’re not sure that’s an appropriate use of PEF funding”.
Aberlour has brought the issue to light once again in the past few days, after its own research found that nearly £2 million of Pupil Equity Funding had, since 2018, been used to pay for police officers in Glasgow, West Lothian, North Ayrshire, Fife and South Lanarkshire.
Freedom of information requests by the charity found that 91 officers were stationed on school campuses across Scotland as of December 2021, up from 71 eight years previously.
And this afternoon the issue was discussed in the Scottish Parliament, with Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie demanding to know what “immediate action” the Scottish government would take.
He said no evidence had been presented that school-based police officers helped close the “poverty-related attainment gap”.
Education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said today that headteachers had reported in-house police officers being of “great benefit” to schools, and added: “They are not policing in schools.”
She said the sum of nearly £2 million represented 0.3 per cent of all PEF money allocated to Scottish schools since 2017-18.
