"School wars": Moral panic or self-fulfilling prophecy?
The Metropolitan Police say they still haven't encountered a single incident relating to the viral red vs blue school wars trend. So is the threat real? And are parents unduly worried?
Thanks to everyone who has been reading London Centric’s coverage of Asif Aziz and Criterion Capital’s mass evictions. Asif Aziz has now employed lawyers Carter-Ruck to provide a response to our reporting.
Carter-Ruck state that it is wrong to suggest that Aziz’s Criterion Capital ever considered calling off the evictions in the face of political pressure from Sadiq Khan, even though many residents were verbally told on their doorsteps that a U-turn was underway.
The lawyers also say Criterion Capital will be pushing ahead with the evictions, as they are part of a “lawful and commercially acceptable” process. They also say it is wrong to describe a private tenant being issued with a legal eviction notice as being “made homeless”.
Carter-Ruck also state that Asif Aziz has reported me to the police on unspecified grounds after I visited his office and house in a bid to get a response on behalf of his tenants as to whether they were losing their homes.
I’ll have more on that story in due course. But today we’ve got a very different story – looking at the reality behind the “school wars” meme spreading across London schools. Scroll down to read that.
I’ve been experimenting with making some of our stories into videos on Instagram. Some of them have gone unexpectedly viral and reached a global audience, resulting in the curious sight of actor Sarah Jessica Parker liking a video on Asif Aziz’s eviction of tenants at Britannia Point tower.
If you’d like to join the Sex and the City star in learning more about whether Sadiq Khan will succeed in stopping the Section 21 notices issued to Colliers Wood tenants, do follow London Centric on Instagram.
How the London school wars meme spread from TikTok to mass panic – without a single reported police incident
By Jim Waterson, Sophie Wilkinson and Polly Smythe
On Friday a dozen schoolchildren were kept at home for their own safety in just one year group at a school in Merton. In Haringey, teachers increased their usual patrols outside at kicking-out time. In Forest Hill, a boys’ school cancelled its after-school clubs and warned children that if they were spotted at Lewisham Shopping Centre, they’d be expelled. Schools across the capital have been finishing early.
All of these incidents, described to London Centric in recent days, were prompted by viral online posts warning of “red vs blue school wars” that are supposedly under way across the capital.
The posts follow a simple formula: they divide local schools into two rival groups (“red vs blue”), notify people on social media that there will be a violent battle taking place at a specific time, and warn specific year groups at those schools to prepare for war against the other group of schools. Each graphic follows a simple colour-coded format, sometimes featuring gang iconography and sometimes (in the case of Croydon) rival shopping centres. Some of them specify the weapons that should be brought, usually day-to-day items such as protractors and rulers rather than knives.
In response, schools have been activating emergency protocols. Hundreds of Met police officers have been deployed to school gates. Councils are running special response teams providing daily updates. And as the posts have spread out of teenagers’ social media circles and reached their parents’ feeds, it appears hundreds of children are being kept at home as a safety measure. The trend is now spreading outside the school system, with universities such as Goldsmiths closing campus gates to protect their students against the perceived threat. Cities outside London are now seeing their own variations.
But is there any basis for the abundance of caution – or have parents, schools, and the police overreacted to rumours spread by a handful of teenagers hiding behind anonymous TikTok accounts?
On Monday night the Metropolitan police confirmed to London Centric that there have been no reported incidents that the force has linked to the supposedly all-pervasive “school wars”. Despite this, it said it would continue to provide reassurance in the form of a “strong, visible presence around schools”, issuing dispersal orders, and asking social media sites to remove videos.
One London headteacher, who is receiving daily updates from the police and their local council on the meme, said they were unsure if it posed a real threat: “It’s not a thing – until it is a thing and one child reacts.”
One rogue child?
It’s two weeks since London Centric was one of the first outlets to report on the initial claims of a “school war”, which was supposedly going to take place in Hackney. Like many of our stories, it began when a number of readers got in touch to say their children’s schools had issued warnings about posts from a TikTok account calling itself Hackney706, declaring a battle would be taking place in east London on Mare Street, close to a popular branch of McDonald’s, on Friday 13 February.
Some news outlets took the threats at face value, stirring up fear and amplifying the original claims. London Centric instead sent a reporter to spend the day in Hackney watching what actually happened. We found a large police presence and a number of bored children standing around hoping to see something interesting. In the end, no violence was recorded and the children dispersed.
Curiously, that same weekend, two parents got in touch to claim that a child had been suspended at a Hackney school for running the original account that led to the chaos. We have not been able to verify this claim and like any attempt to trace the origins of any unsigned viral material shared over WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, or other platforms, it is hard to pin down exactly who posted what first.
Either way, whoever published the first social media graphic planted a seed that has cost the authorities millions of pounds in extra policing costs and spread fear throughout London – and increasingly the nation.
A perfect meme
The imagery of that initial Hackney “school war” post and the sense of ‘othering’ rival schools into colour-coded blocks proved to be a meme format that was made for going viral. Everyone wanted to know which side of the divide they were on.
Like all successful memes, when a topic connects with an audience, other content creators and influencers pile in to surf the viral wave. Within days of the Hackney non-event other anonymous social media posters began using similarly-formatted graphics to declare more local “school wars” were on their way.
AI image generation tools have made this much easier than in the past, removing the need for graphic design skills. While some AI tools such as ChatGPT refused to create such material, it took London Centric a few minutes using Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool to create a plausible pastiche for a school war poster in the fictional London borough of Downminster.
Influencers and media outlets who wanted to reach big audiences began recording videos on the topic, warning of impending chaos. A user under the name The Bouncer Hub uploaded a popular video calling for parents to “stop and search” their children on the way out to school. Reformed gang member Chris Preddie OBE has posted four videos on Instagram about the school wars, combining them with posts advertising his mentoring services. The Daily Star’s TikTok account attracted almost 3m views for its video on the Croydon version of the graphic, which took the claims at face value.
Viewers were encouraged to alert their friends and fellow parents out of an abundance of caution. School WhatsApp groups pinged with parents posting warnings “just in case”. No one is going to get in trouble for sharing a concern.
“Everyone at school’s really scared”
Back in 2019, parents and schools across the country went into panic over the ‘Momo Challenge’, an entirely false claim that a character on WhatsApp was messaging children and urging them to harm themselves. Schools issued warnings, parents panicked, and children’s charities urged people to stay calm.
While the Momo Challenge was easy to disprove completely, the “school wars” meme is based on a very real fear: knives in London schools are a genuine problem. One of the factors that led the Met police to deploy such a visible presence in Hackney on 13 February was a stabbing that had taken place at a school in Brent just a few days earlier, which was not linked to a “school war” poster. A 13-year-old boy has since appeared at the Old Bailey on charges of two counts of attempted murder.
Patrick Green, chief executive of The Ben Kinsella Trust, an anti-knife crime charity, told London Centric that the “school war” posts posed a threat to young people even if no battles ever actually take place. By raising the fear of an attack at school, children could be tempted to bring in knives to defend themselves, whether this week or in the future.
“The videos clearly have considerable impact in terms of raising concerns of young people about their level of safety and making them more fearful of schools in the opposite brackets,” he said, warning that the substantial quantities of knife crime content on social media increased nervousness among young people.
The London headteacher who spoke to London Centric said the suggestion in the original Hackney “school war” graphic that children should brandish rulers and compasses as weapons was “quite twee” and hinted the author was not exactly a hardened gang member.
But they said the concern is that something could happen as a result of increased fear among young people and their parents who believed the threat was real: “A kid who thinks they’re going to be jumped with a compass could bring in a knife.”
Despite the Met saying no violent incidents have been linked to the school wars, the anxiety continues to spread. Children from different corners of the capital have told London Centric that they’d heard rumours of kids being stabbed. Parents said children in their local area were referring to themselves as being on the “red” or “blue” sides when they met up in recent weeks.
One father in Haringey said his son’s class WhatsApp chat was full of 12-year-olds discussing their fears over the viral memes. His child intended to “run home after school this week and change out of his uniform quickly” to avoid being identified by members of the opposite colour gang.
The son told London Centric: “Everyone at school’s really scared and people have decided not to walk home alone anymore. I’m thinking about not going to a club that ends pretty late because I don’t want to be out when it’s darker.”
“My students can barely manage to equip themselves with a black biro”
What’s hard to ascertain is whether the heavy police presence and school interventions have stopped any actual violence – or just increased the tension. The authorities have to strike a difficult balance between taking the threat seriously and accidentally exacerbating it. Footage of police officers outside schools at kicking-out time has been uploaded to TikTok and Snapchat as evidence that the threat is legitimate.
While some children profess their fear and stay at home, other children are now making videos mocking the trend. TikTok is full of clips of teenagers buying water guns, wiggling rulers in a faux-threatening manner, and trying to emulate the speed of footballer Kylian Mbappé as they leave the school gates.
Other videos by teenage TikTokers raise the surprisingly prevalent concern that the “school wars” are a hoax started by the government as a way to find a “legit reason” to ban social media for under-16s.
Even some London teachers are quietly rolling their eyes.
“It made me laugh a bit that the social media posts are like ‘bring compasses, a ruler, a metal comb’,” said one. “My students can barely manage to equip themselves with a black biro. Plus, if we’re being real, everyone knows that ‘perilously sharp-edged broken protractor’ would be the true weapon of choice.”
One parent of a secondary school child in Merton said she blamed the proliferation of school WhatsApp groups for the panic: “The parents were getting scared and spreading it. The kids were laughing about it.”
The biggest impact of the “school war” in her part of south west London had been chaos at pick-up time on the scheduled day of the supposed fight, with “people parking on yellow lines and shouting at each other” as parents drove to pick-up rather than letting their children take the bus home.
She argued that the meme is just the traditional school rumour mill colliding with social media algorithms. What used to spread around the playground as gossip is now visible to millions: "Of course youth violence is a problem, but it's not a problem in Merton in that way. School fights have been going on forever. I'm 42. I remember girls attacking girls from other schools in town centres. That has always happened."
“Why is it allowed to go on a platform?”
TikTok has now banned the search term “school wars”. The social media giant may be trying to stop people posting new school wars flyers, but it cannot fully stamp out the paranoia. Posters have managed to get round the ban by using search terms like “red v blue”, “school wrs” and “school warrs”.
One London Centric reader based in Islington said her daughter was concerned for her safety. At the same time, the parent considered the content to be in the same league as the “London is fallen” genre of negative videos about the capital: “Reaction among parents I know is mixed, some are genuinely worried and others think it’s all social media chatter. But school WhatsApp groups tend to be dominated by drama and scaremongering so maybe they’re not representative of wider concern.”
For Patrick Green, who runs The Ben Kinsella Trust, the question of who is creating the videos is less important than how video platforms such as TikTok have made them easy to spread: “Regardless of whether they’re created by somebody who is doing this for menace or for fun, why is it allowed to go on a platform which then accelerates it through an algorithm?”
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I too felt that these videos were part of the “London has fallen” genre, most likely dreamt up by an adult (a bit like our ‘friend’ at Reform_UK_2025) rather than a teenager. Because, let’s face it, the idea of a rivalry against another school in this day and age - let alone a rivalry you’d inflict or endure violence for - is ridiculous. Most of the teenagers I work with couldn’t care less about their own school let alone someone else’s (and as a former teenager, I concur).
Quite often I find these issues are a symptom of poor digital literacy and critical thinking skills when it comes to matters of “the internet” in those who weren’t brought up with it. Couple this with the ever increasing use of social media and AI to craft pernicious narratives for political, cultural or nativist gain, our ability to spot and sift out nonsense is at an all time low.
God bless Goldsmiths and everything but the idea that their students might get drawn into a vicious turf war stretches credulity.