Schools need to be “brave enough” to talk about knives, Sky News has been told, as the killer of Sheffield teenager Harvey Willgoose is sentenced today.

The 15-year-old was stabbed outside the school canteen at All Saints Catholic high school by a fellow pupil in February this year.

His killer, who was also 15 and cannot be identified for legal reasons, had brought a 13cm hunting knife into school.

Following Harvey’s murder, his parents Caroline and Mark Willgoose told Sky News they wanted to see knife arches in “all secondary schools and colleges”.

“It’s 100% a conversation, I think, that we need to be empowered and brave enough to have,” says Katie Crook, associate vice principal of Penistone Grammar School.

The school, which teaches 2,000 pupils, is just a few miles away from where Harvey was killed.

After being contacted by the Willgoose family, it has decided to install a knife arch.

The arch – essentially a walk-through metal detector – has been described as a “reassuring tool” and “real success” by school leaders.

“We’re really lucky here that we don’t have a knife crime problem – but we are on the forefront with safeguarding initiatives,” says Mrs Crook.

“I didn’t really think we needed one at first,” says Izzy, 14. “But then I guess at Harvey’s school they wouldn’t think that either and then it did actually happen.”

Joe, 15, says he did find the knife arch “intimidating” at first.

“But after using it a couple of times,” he says, “it’s just like walking through a doorway”.

“And it’s that extra layer of, like, you feel secure in school.”

After Harvey’s death, then home secretary Yvette Cooper said that she would support schools in the use of knife arches.

But there remains no official government policy or national guidance on their use.

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Some headteachers who spoke with Sky News feel knife arches aren’t the answer – saying the issue required a societal approach.

Others said knife arches themselves were a significant expense to schools.

But Mrs Crook says they are “well worth the funding” if they prevent “a student making a catastrophic decision”.

“I’m a parent and, of course, my focus every day is keeping our students safe, just as I want my son to be kept safe in his setting and his school.”

Mrs Crook says she thinks schools would “welcome” a discussion at “national level” about the use of knife arches and other knife-related deterrents in schools.

“It’s sad, though that this is what it’s come to, that we’re having lockdown drills in the UK, in our school settings.

“But I suppose some might argue that has been needed for a long time.”

If you eat beef, and ever stop to wonder where and how it’s produced, Jonathan Chapman’s farm in the Chiltern Hills west of London is what you might imagine. 

A small native herd, eating only the pasture beneath their hooves in a meadow fringed by beech trees, their leaves turning to match the copper coats of the Ruby Red Devons, selected for slaughter only after fattening naturally during a contented if short existence.

But this bucolic scene belies the turmoil in the beef market, where herds are shrinking, costs are rising, and even the promise of the highest prices in years, driven by the steepest price increase of any foodstuff, is not enough to tempt many farmers to invest.

For centuries, a symbolic staple of the British lunch table, beef now tells us a story about spiralling inflation and structural decline in agriculture.

Mr Chapman has been raising beef for just over a decade. A former champion eventing rider with a livery yard near Chalfont St Giles, the main challenge when he shifted his attention from horses to cows was that prices were too low.

“Ten years ago, the deadweight carcass price for beef was £3.60 a kilo. We might clear £60 a head of cattle,” he says. “The only way we could make the sums add up was to process and sell the meat ourselves.”

Processing a carcass doubles the revenue, from around £2,000 at today’s prices to £4,000. That insight saw his farm sprout a butchery and farm shop under the Native Beef brand. Today, they process two animals a week and sell or store every cut on site, from fillet to dripping.

Today, farmgate prices are nearly double what they were in 2015 at £6.50 a kilo, down slightly from the April peak of almost £7, but still up around 25% in a year.

For consumers that has made paying more than £5 for a pack of mince the norm. For farmers, rising prices reflect rising costs, long-term trends, and structural changes to the subsidy regime since Brexit.

“Supply and demand is the short answer,” says Mr Chapman.

“Cow numbers have been falling roughly 3% a year for the last decade, probably in this country. Since Brexit, there is virtually no direct support for food in this country. Well over 50% of the beef supply would have come from the dairy herd, but that’s been reducing because farmers just couldn’t make money.”

Political, environmental and economic forces

Beef farmers also face the same costs of trading as every other business. The rise in employers’ national insurance and the minimum wage have increased labour costs, and energy prices remain above the long-term average.

Then there is the weather, the inescapable variable in agriculture that this year delivered a historically dry summer, leaving pastures dormant, reducing hay and silage yields and forcing up feed costs.

Native Beef is not immune to these forces. Mr Chapman has reduced his suckler herd from 110 to 90, culling older cows to reduce costs this winter. If repeated nationally, the full impact of that reduction will only be fully clear in three years’ time, when fewer calves will reach maturity for sale, potentially keeping prices high.

That lag demonstrates one of the challenges in bringing prices down.

Basic economics says high prices ought to provide an opportunity and prompt increased supply, but there is no quick fix. Calves take nine months to gestate and another 20 to 24 months to reach maturity, and without certainty about price, there is greater risk.

There is another long-term issue weighing on farmers of all kinds: inheritance tax. The ending of the exemption for agriculture, announced in the last budget and due to be imposed from next April, has undermined confidence.

Neil Shand of the National Beef Association cites farmers who are spending what available capital they have on expensive life insurance to protect their estates, rather than expanding their herds.

“The farmgate price is such that we should be in an environment that we should be in a great place to expand, there is a market there that wants the product,” he says. “But the inheritance tax challenge has made everyone terrified to invest in something that will be more heavily taxed in the future.”

While some of the issues are domestic, the UK is not alone.

Beef prices are rising in the US and Europe too, but that is small consolation to the consumer, and none at all to the cow.

“No one can listen to our calls?” a manager from Clarion, the UK’s largest housing association, asks one of her team on a recording that has been leaked to Sky News.

“Don’t tell anyone I told you this,” she goes on – before instructing him how to pretend he’s put up an important fire safety notice in one of their buildings.

“Just put it up on a plain bit of wall … take a picture,” she says, telling him that she’ll “come and find” him if it turns out she can’t trust him.

She brags about her management style. “I’m trying to help you hit your targets,” she says – adding: “My team is always on point, we always meet our targets.”

The recording will add to fears of residents of social housing that their safety is not taken seriously by landlords.

The conversation took place in 2022. It was reported to Clarion’s HR team in September 2023. However, an investigation only began in September 2024 when the recording was sent to Clarion management.

The manager involved was only sacked this summer – almost two years after it was first raised with Clarion.

A Clarion spokesperson told Sky News: “In 2023, our HR team received an email from a former employee raising concerns, but no supporting evidence was provided despite our request. When an audio recording was shared with us in September 2024, we immediately launched a full investigation, which led to the dismissal of a staff member.

“It is deeply regrettable that information was not shared sooner, as this would have enabled earlier action. Building safety remains our top priority across all Clarion homes.”

They added that their “investigation included interviews of all relevant team members to ensure this was an isolated incident”.

The fire safety notice being discussed in the recording was a poster advising residents who have disabilities or vulnerabilities to contact Clarion.

The need for a building owner to identify people who will need additional help in the event of a fire is part of compliance with new regulations introduced since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 killed 72 people.

Disabled and vulnerable residents must be identified so that a “person-centred fire risk assessment” can be drawn up by the fire brigade.

Those documents should then be stored in a box on the ground floor of high-rise buildings so firefighters can easily access them in an emergency.

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Experts warn safety failures are industry-wide

Arnold Tarling, a chartered surveyor, says the consequence of the information not being available in the event of a fire could be “death or serious injury”.

However, he says he isn’t surprised by the recording we have obtained. He believes cutting corners on fire safety “will be industry-wide” for several reasons.

“Money saving, couldn’t care less, lessons haven’t been learned, ‘it won’t happen to me,'” he says, describing an attitude he says he encounters across the housing sector.

He believes there needs to be stricter enforcement but also says workers in the industry must be prepared to call out wrongdoing.

“The fire brigade, the building safety regulator, whoever it is, needs to check, do spot checks and enforce. But when you’ve got a file which has been faked, how do you know that it’s been faked? So these issues will just simply slip through and won’t get corrected,” he warns.

‘Those in power don’t care enough’

Edward Daffarn, who survived the Grenfell fire, told Sky News that complacency about fire safety “is actually a widespread problem that still prevails”.

“I stood underneath the burning carcass of Grenfell in the days after the fire and I was absolutely convinced that it would be the catalyst for societal change,” he said.

However, more than eight years on, a new competence and conduct standard for social housing is yet to come into force and will not be fully implemented for another three to four years.

“The only conclusion I can come to is that those in power, those people who have the power to make the change necessary, really don’t care enough about people that live in social housing,” Mr Daffarn claimed.

Clarion central to government’s housing plans

As a major home builder Clarion will be one of the companies needed if the government is to deliver its ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament.

Housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa told Sky News: “I do worry about the fact that they are going to be in charge of housing thousands of more people up and down the country.

“They are also my landlords and it’s an absolute disgrace that five years into me campaigning, there’s still situations like this.”

A company spokesperson said: “Clarion continues to invest heavily in maintaining and improving our homes, and as a strategic partner of Homes England we are committed to playing our part in building safe, affordable homes that help tackle the housing crisis and give people a place they can call home.”

A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “These allegations show a total disregard of vulnerable people whose lives and safety depend on strict fire safety laws.

“We are tackling the poor treatment of social housing tenants using lessons learned from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, so it can never happen again.

“Those breaking the law can already face prosecution for criminal offences including prison sentences and we’re introducing new laws so that residential personal emergency evacuation plans are required for all high-rise homes – with funding to help social landlords provide these for tenants – and ensure staff managing social housing have the skills and training to keep residents safe.”