Drugs on Educational Premises (1728/20)
Request
1. Please state the total number of persons under the age of 18 caught with illegal drugs on school premises.
Please provide information for the following calendar years:
a) 2015
b) 2016
c) 2017
d) 2018
e) 2019
2. If possible, please provide the ages of the individuals involved in Q1a-e.
Please provide information for the following calendar years:
a) 2015
b) 2016
c) 2017
d) 2018
e) 2019
3. Please provide a breakdown of the number of incidents from Q1a-e relating to the following illegal drugs
Please provide information for the following calendar years as above
a) Class-A drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine
b) Cannabis
c) Other drugs
4. Please provide a breakdown of the number of incidents in Q1a-e, where the illegal drugs were seized from:
Please provide information for the following calendar years as above.
a) Primary schools
b) Secondary schools
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not available in an easily retrievable format. We do not have a recording category on our systems to differentiate between the types of educational establishments (i.e. primary schools, secondary schools, academies etc). Therefore, to try to identify the type of school as requested, we would need to review every line of data.
This means the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can advise that we have a location marker on our database for ‘educational’. This marker will search for all educational establishments (which could include universities, academies, schools, further educational establishments etc), therefore, I have provided the information requested for questions 1 – 3 using this location marker.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: