9th June 2025
Current Safer Schools Officers (SSOs) and the recent restructuring | Metropolitan Police
Details
In June 2025, in response to an FOI request, the Metropolitan Police announced that on the 1st of May 2025, the Safer Schools Officer (SSO) role in London was to be dissolved. A new role, Designated Ward Officer – Children and Young People (DWO-CYP) has been created and aligned to neighbourhood policing wards, with all 371 former Safer School Officer posts being transitioned to this new role profile.
The DWO-CYP role is part of the local Community Policing Team, with a focus on Children and Young People and their safety within a specific local area (a ward and/or cluster of wards) in London. Whilst DWO-CYPs will continue to work with and support school partnerships, they will not be visible officers stationed within a designated school. Instead, they will focus on ensuring children are safer as they travel between home and school and will be readily available to the wider community across the year.
Emphasising community-based policing, the Met have assigned the following responsibilities and duties to DWO-CYPs:
Ward-Based Focus: Dedicated to a specific geographic ward and its associated schools (including PRUs and Colleges), becoming an integral part of the community.
Youth-Centric Crime Prevention & Reduction: Proactively reducing crime and ASB affecting and perpetrated by young people using problem-solving approaches, intelligence analysis, and community engagement
School Liaison: Serving as the primary point of contact for priority schools (including PRUs and Colleges), providing advice, delivering crime prevention presentations, and coordinating Safer Corridors initiatives (safe routes to/from school)
Partnership Working: Collaboration with other police units, Youth Offending Teams, social services, and community partners to address youth-related crime
Intelligence Gathering and Offender Management: Using data and community insight to identify emerging crime trends, manage known offenders, and submit actionable intelligence
Investigation support: Assisting with and advising colleagues on crime investigation involving young people from their assigned schools (including PRUs and Colleges), adopting a restorative justice approach where appropriate
Visibility and Communication: Being visible and communicating regularly with the community. Setting meaningful ward priorities with CYP groups and other key stakeholders
Commentary
For the past two years, the Youth Justice Legal Centre (YJLC) has collaborated with the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Clinic to examine the over-criminalisation of British school children by SSOs. The joint research has focused on the impact of placing Safer Schools Officers (SSOs)—full-time police officers—in schools across the UK, and has explored alternative approaches used in the Bay Area of California.
Since their introduction in the early 2000s, the number of SSOs has risen sharply. In London alone, their presence has more than doubled since 2010, with over 370 officers deployed in London schools. Nationally, more than 950 SSOs were stationed in UK schools in 2022.
YJLC supports the move to reduce or remove police officers from schools, enabling educators to lead on student learning and behaviour as per their professional remit. This position is informed by our research findings and an evaluation of the SSO role. YJLC welcomes recent steps taken by the Metropolitan Police in this direction and encourages other forces to consider similar reforms.
YJLC is available to provide training and support to statutory agencies, schools, local authorities, police bodies, and Police and Crime Commissioners seeking to make progress on this issue.
Written by
Anna Ferris Simpson, Paralegal