Academies cop is helping to educate kids (From Echo)

Academies cop is helping to educate kids

5:00pm Wednesday 6th April 2011 in Education

A SCHOOL liaison officer is helping keep youngsters on the straight and narrow by gaining their trust and offering timely advice.

For PC Peter Kittle, the job is about showing teenagers the friendly side of the police, as well as making sure they behave.

He works with Basildon Academies and deals with anything from playground spats to cyber bullying and minor thefts.

Explaining how liaison officers are called in at a school’s request, PC Kittle said: “If there’s a dispute, we sort the issues out to stop them happening in future.

“If there are fights, we give advice, and we deal with any thefts appropriately. This will be under the school’s policy to start with but, if it continues, they’re obviously not learning, so we look at alternatives.”

However, the main aim of school liaison officers like PC Kittle and his colleague PC Chris Burch is to set up a good relationship with the youngsters.

It helps nip any problems in the bud – before a difficult teenager can end up with a criminal conviction.

PC Kittle said: “We want to keep kids out of the criminal justice system, as potentially that could affect them later. If they’ve done something silly, it could affect them going for certain jobs.

“I think by explaining the potential consequences if they continue with the way they are behaving, more often than not they do seem to learn.”

He added: “I’ve only been doing this since September, but speaking to the kids once, twice maximum, generally sorts them out. I don’t normally speak to them again.”

However, social networking sites like Facebook are causing problems for the officers. Youngsters can make cutting comments, which then cause trouble at schools.

PC Kittle said: “The thing with Facebook is you used to have old-fashioned bullying in school which finished when they got home. But now it can continue outside, online.”

Serious issues, such as drugs or carrying knives, are dealt with through normal police procedures. Less serious issues can be tackled with a mediation session between the affected parties. Officers can also deal with issues created by school-aged children after they finish for the day.

PC Kittle said: “The school can ask us to go and speak to residents about what’s going on and see if there’s anything we can do to prevent it.

“In the past, we have spoken to residents about what we can do to combat problems with kids kicking fences, hanging around at the shops and making lots of noise.

“If we know who’s doing it then we speak to them. But if not, we keep an eye out and see if we can find out who it is.”

Another important aspect of the officers’ work is in feeder schools for Basildon Academies, where they give assemblies about everything from stranger danger to achieving their goals.

They also take part in regular meetings about troubled children, working with a range of agencies, including social services, schools and the youth offending service, to solve issues the children face.

But PC Kittle said the key to his role is to get to know the youngsters well and build respect.

He said: “It helps youngsters seeing us in a friendly way, because a lot of the time youngsters only see us when police are called to deal with something.”

Alan Roach, executive principal of the academies, said: “It means we’ve got, within the school, support in terms of the education of children.

“It helps them learn about the law and upholding justice, develop social skills and roots out antisocial behaviour.”