County lines and criminal exploitation: what the public data can and cannot tell you
County lines is the movement of drugs from cities into towns using dedicated phone lines, and the exploitation of children to carry and sell them. Schools are asked to be alert to it. The public data can help with the "where"; it cannot help with the "who". This guide keeps the two apart.
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. 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. Stop and search records are published with the reason for the search and its outcome. 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.
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 within a short walk of the school were [number] in the last year, concentrated around [place]; 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 the local safeguarding partnership and the police, and the way concerns about a place, rather than a child, are passed on. The National Referral Mechanism exists for children as well as adults; a policy that says how the school would use it is more useful than one that describes county lines at length.
The places worth naming
Exploitation happens in places: a transport interchange, a parade of shops, a park with poor sightlines, an underpass on the way home. The recorded data will often show those places as clusters. Naming them in the policy, and in staff briefings, is more protective than any general statement. The safeguarding context report includes a chapter on exactly this, for the routes around one school.
Find your school by local authority, then order its report from the school page.