A MOTHER has been forced to remove her young son from a village school after another boy turned up in class with a knife.
She said it was no longer safe for her son to attend his primary school in Banffshire, after an 11-year-old boy was caught with the weapon the day after he threatened to ‘hurt’ him.
The 41-year-old claims the boy had been ‘showing the knife to friends throughout the day’ on January 31 before it was eventually confiscated by teachers and the police were called.
But she said the child has been ‘causing havoc’ and teachers ‘can’t exclude him’ due to Moray Council’s ‘inclusion policies’.
It comes after alarming new figures showed that children as young as ten have been caught with weapons by police stop-and-search teams in Scotland.
The Mail revealed last week that between April and September last year 123 youngsters under 18 were found in possession of a weapon.
They included a ten-year-old caught with a bladed weapon in Edinburgh and a 14-year-old girl with a firearm in Fife, with critics accusing the SNP of ‘falling asleep at the wheel’ while crime has ‘spiralled out of control’.
The horrified mother said she has now been forced to remove her 11-year-old son from the primary and is looking at home-schooling options.
She has also lodged a formal complaint with Moray Council.
‘This has been going on for years and they don’t do anything about it,’ she said.
‘They were playing a game outside. He called my son a swear word, called him a “fat pig”, and started throwing stones at the windows and threatened to hurt him.’
She said the boy was eventually sent home. But despite his outburst he was allowed to sit at the ‘golden table’ with other children who had received praise the next day, she added, and ‘then it turns out he had a knife in school’.
A letter from the school to parents confirmed that there had been an ‘incident’ that involved ‘one of our pupils who had a knife in his possession’.
It added: ‘There was no intent to use it. When it was reported to staff, this matter was dealt with in a timely and appropriate manner.’
The school assured parents that its ‘main priority’ was the ‘safety of all children and no one was harmed’. But the mother said: ‘It’s not safe for my son to go back to school. This is affecting his education.’
Police Scotland confirmed officers were called to a school in the Speyside area at around 1.40pm on Friday, January 31, after they ‘received a report of a child in possession of a knife’.
A spokesman for the force said: ‘Officers spoke with the parents of the child and police are working with partners.’
Moray Council said police were called to a ‘primary school… following established procedures’. It would not confirm the name of the school or respond to the claims. It also refused to confirm its policy for excluding a child from school.
But on its website, the council states: ‘The decision to exclude is never taken lightly and will usually only take place when other strategies have failed.’