Southport killer Axel Rudakubana referred to Prevent terror programme several times

After this, he attended The Acorns School, which provides specialist education for those with extra needs, and was then enrolled in Presfield High School & Specialist College.

He only attended sixth form there for a few days and was largely dealt with by home visits. The school would sometimes ask for police to attend when they visited.

It was revealed last August he had an “autism spectrum disorder diagnosis” and had been “unwilling to leave the house and communicate with family for a period of time”.

Rudakubana called Childline several times as a young teenager, eventually telling the service he was going to take a knife into school because of racial bullying.

This was one of the incidents that led to him be excluded from Range High School.

The NSPCC said Rudakubana’s last call to Childline was “sufficiently serious to breach a threshold” which led Childline to inform local authorities of its concerns in 2019.

An NSPCC spokesperson said the attack was a tragedy and said it was “vital” that any review that follows the court case examines “all the circumstances and reasons which contributed to this terrible attack” to ensure similar tragedies can be stopped in the future.

Rudakubana was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents in 2006, and moved to the Southport area in 2013.

He took acting classes at the Pauline Quirk Academy and appeared in a promotional video for BBC Children in Need in 2018, which has since said it had no affiliation with him.

The BBC removed the video from its websites in the wake of the Southport attack.

Neighbours on the street where he and his family lived in Banks, West Lancashire, about 6 miles (9km) from Southport, have told the BBC that the police visited the home on several occasions in the months leading up to the Southport attack.

On the day of the attack, a doorbell camera caught him pacing outside of his family home, before catching a taxi to the dance studio where he would carry out the stabbings.

Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, were all killed.

Initially, not guilty pleas were entered for Rudakubana, after he refused to speak during a hearing, but these changed to guilty on Monday, the first day of his trial.

He is due to be sentenced on Thursday and is expected to be given a life sentence.

However, he cannot be sentenced to a whole-life term for his crimes because he is under the age of 21.