Thousands of sexual offences involving children have been reported at or near schools in England and Wales, with police recording at least 8,500 offences against children aged 12 and under between 2021 and 2025. The figures expose not only the scale of alleged abuse, but a difficult safeguarding problem in which many identified alleged offenders are themselves children
INR Report: Based on reporting by The Guardian and RT.
Police recorded an average of almost five sexual offences a day against children aged 12 and under at or near schools in England and Wales between 2021 and 2025, according to a Guardian investigation based on Freedom of Information data.
At least 8,500 offences involving victims under 13 were recorded during the five-year period.
Among them were almost 2,000 reports of rape or attempted rape, equivalent to approximately one report for every school day.
The figures should be interpreted carefully. They represent offences reported to and recorded by police, rather than convictions or judicial findings that each allegation occurred exactly as reported. They are also incomplete because only 33 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales supplied information.
The actual scale of abuse could therefore be larger, while changes in reporting behaviour may also influence comparisons over time.
Children Accused of Abusing Children
One of the most significant findings is the age of the alleged offenders.
Police records frequently did not specify an offender's age. But among cases involving victims under 13, at least 1,890 identified an alleged offender who was also under 18.
The Guardian's broader investigation describes the problem primarily as child-on-child sexual abuse.
Girls accounted for nearly two-thirds of victims in cases where the victim's sex was recorded, although boys were also among those reporting serious assaults.
Police additionally recorded at least 9,100 sexual offences against children aged 13 and older at or near schools.
Another 6,140 recorded offences involved the possession, production or distribution of sexual images involving children.
Together, the figures reveal a safeguarding challenge substantially wider than isolated attacks by adult offenders entering school environments.
Schools are confronting sexual behaviour and alleged criminal offending occurring within the student population itself.
Abuse From Primary School Age
The cases are not confined to teenagers.
Lawyers interviewed by The Guardian described dealing with allegations involving primary-school children, including incidents where children were allegedly taken into concealed areas of school grounds, threatened, forced to undress or sexually assaulted by other children.
That creates particularly difficult legal and safeguarding questions when alleged offenders are below the age of criminal responsibility.
Lawyer Andrew Lord told The Guardian that incidents involving very young children can sometimes be treated as age-related sexual exploration rather than investigated as potential abuse.
He argued that schools generally understand how to respond to physical violence between pupils but can struggle when confronted with allegations of sexual assault.
The consequences can extend beyond the alleged incident itself.
Victims may remain at the same school as the child accused of abusing them, potentially leaving schools responsible for simultaneously protecting one child, respecting the rights of another and maintaining access to education while police or safeguarding investigations proceed.
Why Is This Happening?
There is no single established explanation for the figures.
Greater awareness of sexual abuse and increased willingness among children to disclose incidents may account for part of the recorded numbers. An increase in police reports does not automatically establish that offending itself has risen by the same proportion.
But child-protection specialists interviewed by The Guardian also point to profound changes in children's exposure to sexual material.
Children's Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza has warned that violent pornography and online sexual content are influencing children's behaviour and that peer-on-peer sexual abuse has become widespread and, in some environments, normalised.
Lawyers working with victims have similarly raised concerns about the accessibility of pornography, sharing of intimate images, so-called revenge pornography and sexual behaviours learned through online environments.
This creates a problem that extends beyond the school gate.
Schools may be where abuse occurs or becomes visible, but the influences shaping children's behaviour increasingly originate in smartphones, social-media platforms, pornography sites, messaging applications and wider online culture.
A Decade of Warnings
The latest findings are particularly significant because Britain has been warned about sexual harassment and abuse within schools for years.
A parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee investigation raised serious concerns about sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools a decade ago.
Government reviews followed, along with changes to relationships and sex education and safeguarding procedures.
The Children's Commissioner says progress has been made, including measures intended to restrict children's access to pornography and improve relationships education.
Yet the new police figures suggest the underlying safeguarding problem remains substantial.
The issue is therefore no longer simply whether authorities know abuse exists.
The question is whether existing interventions are reducing it.
More Than a School Problem
There is also a danger in treating every recorded offence as evidence of institutional failure by an individual school.
Schools cannot control everything children encounter outside school hours, particularly online.
Teachers are increasingly expected to respond to social problems that originate in homes, peer groups, online platforms and broader culture.
At the same time, schools have an unavoidable duty to provide safe environments and respond appropriately when allegations are made.
The Guardian investigation suggests that both propositions can be true.
Schools are confronting a broader societal problem, while some victims and families report inadequate responses when abuse is disclosed.
Effective safeguarding therefore requires more than simply adding another responsibility to teachers.
It involves parents, police, child-protection agencies, technology companies, health professionals and the justice system, as well as schools themselves.
Does This Affect New Zealand?
The British figures do not establish that New Zealand schools are experiencing sexual offending at the same rate.
No directly comparable national dataset has been identified that would justify transferring the England and Wales figures to New Zealand.
But the mechanisms highlighted by the investigation are not uniquely British.
New Zealand children use the same global social-media platforms, messaging services and pornography websites. They are exposed to many of the same online cultures and technological changes affecting children elsewhere in the English-speaking world.
The British experience therefore raises legitimate questions for New Zealand about whether safeguarding systems are keeping pace with children's digital lives.
There is another important lesson in the data itself.
Britain's investigation required Freedom of Information requests to individual police forces to reveal the scale of recorded offending. Even then, ten of 43 forces did not provide usable information.
Without consistent national measurement, serious problems can remain fragmented across schools, police districts and government agencies, preventing the public from seeing the overall pattern.
New Zealand should therefore be able to answer some basic questions clearly: how many sexual offences are reported at or near schools, how many involve child-on-child offending, how many involve children below secondary-school age, whether those numbers are increasing, and what happens after an allegation is reported.
Those questions do not presume that New Zealand has Britain's problem at Britain's scale.
They are the information necessary to determine whether it does.
The British experience demonstrates why transparency matters. Nearly five recorded sexual offences involving under-13s every day cannot reasonably be dismissed as a collection of isolated incidents.
Nor can a problem involving children abusing other children be solved solely through criminal punishment after the event.
Prevention requires understanding what is shaping children's behaviour before offending occurs, effective intervention when harmful behaviour emerges, protection and support for victims, and credible measurement of whether safeguarding policies are actually working.
For New Zealand, that is the warning contained in the British figures.
Independent reporting. Original context. Credited sources.
Sources
The Guardian – Thousands of child-on-child sexual offences reported at schools in England and Wales
The Guardian – From unwanted touching to rape: the scale of child-on-child abuse in English and Welsh schools
Children's Commissioner for England – Online Safety Commission: recommendations for making the online world safer for children
RT – Child sex crimes rampant in UK schools – Guardian