Drugs and knives in classrooms

Reports of students wielding knives, threatening teachers with an iron bar and selling drugs are included in a dossier of 59 critical incidents in State schools which have been sent to the office of Education Minister Liz Constable in the past two years.

The confidential reports, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, come from edited copies of principals' online notifications to the Education Department deemed serious enough to pass on to the Minister.

The firsthand accounts provide a glimpse of the sorts of problems schools deal with regularly.

In one of 12 cases involving physical assaults, a principal from the Fremantle-Peel district said a school had to be locked down when an argument between two students escalated after one threw a rubbish bin at another during a lesson in May 2010.

"The teacher tried to get assistance, wherein (the student) left the room and went into an adjacent room and found a long iron bar," the report said.

"(The student) started to smash various items in the rooms.

"Another teacher came to assist and encountered (the student) with the bar in the doorway between the rooms.

"(The student) swore at the teacher saying, 'Back off or I'll hit you'."

The student was later disarmed and taken away by police.

Also in May 2010 in the Swan district, a principal reported a student was pushed to the ground and "kicked in the head".

An ambulance was required.

In one of nine reports of students carrying knives to school, a Bunbury principal said a student found with two 20cm knives in a bag in March 2010 had made "repeated threats to kill".

Also in the Bunbury district, in February that year, another pupil was caught trying to conceal a knife in their shirt.

"The knife appeared to be a large bread knife, with double serrations approximately 30cm in length," the report said.

"Student indicated . . . had been bullied by a number of Aboriginal students over the previous days and was carrying the knife so . . . could threaten them if they bullied . . . again." That same month, a Swan district principal wrote that two students witnessed another holding a knife to a pupil's throat.

Three reports were made about students selling drugs such as prescription medication.

The last time the Education Department released statistics on the total number of critical incidents flagged by schools was 2008, when 2580 were reported.

It has refused to release data since then because of concerns the inclusion of less serious incidents would inflate the figures and could be misleading.

A department spokeswoman said it was not compulsory for principals to file online notifications of critical incidents but it was encouraged.

The minister's office was alerted to particular incidents that were likely to cause major disruption to a school or raise further questions in the public arena.

WA Secondary School Executives Association president Rob Nairn said though principals were required to submit critical incident reports, it was a grey area because people defined "critical" in different ways.

"What may be a critical incident in one school because it happens so rarely may be something that occurs every second day in another school and they may deem it as operational," he said.

Mr Nairn said it was stressful to deal with incidents such as students carrying weapons.

"I think the key thing is that schools are a reflection of society," he said. "You'd like to not have to deal with those things but the reality is that you do."

State School Teachers Union president Anne Gisborne said the Government had to ensure there were enough behaviour centres, school psychologists and social workers.

"I think our schools need to be drawing a line in the sand in respect to their expectation of students," she said.

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Drugs and knives in classrooms