County lines and criminal exploitation: what the public data can and cannot tell you

What the public data can tell you

Police forces publish recorded crime every month at the level of a street or a short stretch of one, with a category for each record, and UK Crime Statistics maps it for any address; the safeguarding context report reads that map for one school's gate and routes, and prints UK Crime Statistics' county lines indicator, which checks drug offences against weapons offences and anti-social behaviour. Drug offences, possession of weapons, robbery and violence are all visible. So is anti-social behaviour, which is where much of the low-level activity that surrounds exploitation shows up first. Most forces also publish stop and search records with the reason for the search and its outcome, though some, Greater Manchester, Avon and Somerset and South Wales among them, publish none; the safeguarding context report does not include stop and search. Transport data shows the stations and stops children pass through; deprivation indices show where the pressures on families are greatest.

Put together for the area around a school and along the routes to it, this tells a DSL where the recorded patterns sit, whether they are rising or falling, and which places recur. It also tells them when the answer is "not much is recorded here", which is a legitimate and useful finding.

One more public source comes closer to the children themselves, at the level of the whole local authority. When a social worker in England completes an assessment, they record the factors they found, and the Department for Education publishes those factors for every authority each year: child criminal exploitation, child sexual exploitation, gangs, going missing and trafficking among them. A share of assessments above England's is a prompt worth taking to the local safeguarding partnership. It is still not a statement about any school or pupil, and a higher share can mean better identification as easily as more harm. For Wales, the Welsh Government publishes children's safeguarding measures for each authority, including children reported where child exploitation was a factor, which the report shows as a rate per 10,000 children beside the rate across Wales.

What it cannot tell you

• Whether any pupil is being exploited. Recorded crime describes incidents and places, never the children who might be drawn into them.
• Whether the drugs recorded near the school have anything to do with a county line. A possession record is a possession record.
• Anything about ethnicity. Stop and search records carry ethnicity fields; this site never surfaces them, because they invite exactly the profiling the data cannot support.
• What is happening this week. Published data runs a month or two behind and is revised.

How to write it into a policy without overclaiming

Describe the area, cite the source, and state the limit in the same sentence. "Recorded drug offences around the school are [above, around or below] the level for the wider area; the school treats this as a reason for staff to know the signs of exploitation, not as evidence about any pupil." That sentence survives an inspector, a governor and a parent reading it.

Pair the description with what the school actually does: the training staff have had on the signs of exploitation, the referral route to children's social care and, in an emergency, the police, and the way concerns about a place, rather than a child, are passed on. A child who may be trafficked or exploited can be referred to the National Referral Mechanism by a first responder such as the local authority or the police; a policy that says the school raises such concerns with children's social care, which decides on the referral, is more useful than one that describes county lines at length.

The places worth naming

Exploitation often uses places: a transport interchange, a parade of shops, a park with poor sightlines. The recorded data can show where records cluster; it cannot show that exploitation happens there. Name them in the staff briefing and the local context statement, where staff will use them, rather than in the published policy. The safeguarding context report includes a chapter on exactly this, for the routes around one school.