**The Prevent Duty in Education** Impact, Enactment and Implications

*Edited by*  **Joel Busher Lee Jerome**

## The Prevent Duty in Education

"This invaluable book brings empirical rigour to a debate that is too often emotive, polarised and selective in its approach to the facts. By examining how the Prevent duty is enacted in practice, the authors provide a sound evidence base for future policy development."

> —David Anderson QC, *House of Lords, and former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, UK*

"In the current context of increased concern and a shifting landscape around terrorism, this is such an important book. As it traces how Prevent is being understood and rolled out across all sectors of education from early years to further education, it provides a nuanced yet persuasive narrative of policy implementation. The great strengths of the book are firstly its careful empirical research – in contrast to some of the armchair rants about the crushing weight and stigma of Prevent. Then it is able to reveal the agency of teachers and students in what they do with Prevent, not portraying them as passive victims of some top-down securitisation strategy. Third, it confirms the problems of attaching a Prevent duty to Fundamental British Values – not that teachers and students do not agree with such values, but that they are rightly scathing about the claimed 'Britishness' of them. This book is crucial reading for at least three audiences: first, policy makers who are revising counter-terror and Prevent type strategies, second, those making judgements on Prevent enactment such as OFSTED, and third, those involved in training around extremism and radicalisation in schools. The book reveals what teachers and students actually want to know in this contested and complex area. It is an impressive read."

> —Lynn Davies, *Emeritus Professor of International Education, Birmingham University, UK, and Director of ConnectFutures*

"The involvement of educational institutions and professionals in counter-terrorism processes through the Prevent Duty has been controversial. This timely collection provides an incisive set of essay that emphasise teachers' and students' lived experiences of both the Prevent Duty and the requirement that teachers promote fundamental British values in schools. Based on up-to-date research, the authors emphasise the varying enactments of the Prevent Duty in different schools and colleges, and conclude by discussing what effect practitioners can have on the Duty as well as the effect it has on them. This is vital reading for those interested in and wanting to go beyond the headlines to learn about the effects of the Prevent Duty on the ground."

> —Carol Vincent, *Professor of Sociology of Education, UCL Institute of Education, UK*

"This book provides evidence-based answers to critical questions that have long concerned those of us in the C/PVE field, especially policymakers and researchers. What is the impact on teachers and students of the "Prevent Duty" policy enactment? Do we need to talk about extremism to our students? Has this enactment had any negative effects? The UK has been a source of inspiration and learning for many countries working on C/PVE and this book helps answer many of the questions that this strategy has raised, especially about the positive and negative effects on the educational system."

> —Pablo Madriaza, *General Chair, UNESCO Chair for the Prevention of Radicalisation and Violent Extremism (UNESCO-PREV), University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada*

# Joel Busher • Lee Jerome Editors The Prevent Duty in Education

Impact, Enactment and Implications

*Editors* Joel Busher Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations Coventry University Coventry, UK

Lee Jerome Department of Education Middlesex University London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-45558-3 ISBN 978-3-030-45559-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45559-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. **Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes

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# **Contents**



#### **Index** 171

# **Notes on Contributors**

**Megan A. Armstrong** is Lecturer in International Relations and International Politics at Liverpool John Moores University. Previously, she held positions at the London School of Economics, the University of Birmingham, and Newcastle University. Her ongoing research is located at the intersection of critical international relations theory and feminist security studies, and her research interests include violent identity politics, everyday securitisations and counter-terrorisms, queer international relations, and critical military studies. Recent research interests have further included gendered and sexualised processes of bordering and migration.

**Joel Busher** is Associate Professor at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR), Coventry University. His main research interests are in the dynamics of contentious politics; the escalation, deescalation and non-escalation of political violence; far right and anti-minority politics; and the enactment of counter-terrorism policy and its societal impacts. He has published extensively on these topics and his book, *The making of anti-Muslim protest: grassroots activism in the English Defence League*, received the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. He tweets @joel\_busher.

**Tufyal Choudhury** is Associate Professor in Law at Durham University, where he teaches human rights law and counter-terrorism law and policy. He is also a Senior Associate of the Canadian Terrorism, Security and Society Research Network. His research covers issues of counter-terrorism, discrimination, human rights and integration. He is co-author of the report *What the Prevent Duty Means for Schools and College in England: An analysis of educationalists' experiences*; other publications include 'Campaigning on Campus: Student Islamic Societies and Counterterrorism' (2017) in *Studies in Conflict & Terrorism* and 'The Radicalization of Citizenship Deprivation' (2017) in *Critical Social Policy*.

**Raquel da Silva** is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham, UK and Integrated Researcher in the Centre for International Studies (CEI-IUL) at ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. Her research mainly focuses on the pathways of engagement with and disengagement from armed organisations, as well as on radicalisation, de-radicalisation, and rehabilitation processes. She is also interested on the impact of Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) interventions in the life of individuals, groups, and communities. She has published a monograph entitled *Narratives of Political Violence: Life Stories of Former Militants* (Routledge, 2019), as well as different articles connecting the fields of political psychology and international relations, engaging in genuinely multidisciplinary and multi-methodological dialogue, and using both standalone qualitative methods and mixed methods approaches. She tweets at @RaquelBPSilva.

**Alex Elwick** is Lecturer at UCL Institute of Education and Middlesex University. Previously he was the research officer at Education Development Trust. He has an AHRC-funded doctorate exploring learning in art galleries and has been British Research Council Fellow at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. His research focuses on the Prevent Duty and approaches towards radicalisation, extremism and terrorism in schools.

**Giuditta Fontana** is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham. She is the author of a monograph entitled *Education Policy and Power-Sharing in Post-conflict Societies: Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Macedonia* (New York: Palgrave, 2016) and of several articles on the relationship between education reform and sustainable conflict management. Her teaching and research focuses on the causes of violent intra-state conflict and on institutional designs for conflict mitigation, with a focus on the design of transformative cultural reforms and of inclusive political institutions.

**Natalie James** is a doctoral researcher in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. She holds a First Class Honours degree in Politics and an MSc in Politics and Research Methods, both from the University of Sheffield. Her research looks at the UK Government's Prevent Duty and experiences of the policy within the further education sector. She is particularly interested in the conceptualisation of threat and the subsequent countering of it and the normalisation of security discourse.

**Lee Jerome** is Associate Professor of Education at Middlesex University and has experience of working with young people as a school teacher, researcher, trainer and project evaluator. His main interests are related to citizenship education and children's rights. In relation to the Prevent policy in schools, he has written guidance for teachers, produced classroom resources and undertaken research exploring what happens in classrooms when young people have opportunities to discuss terrorism, extremism and the fundamental British values.

**James Lewis** is an ESRC-funded doctoral researcher in International Relations at Lancaster University. His research analyses how secondary schools across England are enacting the Prevent Duty, drawing on interviews with Prevent practitioners and educators to understand their experiences of working with the Duty since it was introduced in 2015. He holds an MLitt in Terrorism Studies and an MA (Hons) in International Relations, both awarded by the University of St Andrews, and is also an associate researcher at the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST).

**Jenny Robson** is Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood at the Sir John Cass School of Education and Communities in the University of East London. Previously, she worked as a practitioner, manager and leader in children's services and education. She is interested in issues of justice, equality and rights in early childhood and how these can be addressed through public policy and practice.

**Hans Svennevig** is Senior Teaching Fellow Citizenship Education and Subject Leader for the Citizenship PGCE at UCL Institute of Education. He is vice-chair of council and a trustee for the Association for Citizenship Teaching, as well as co-editor of the journal *Teaching Citizenship*. He has written and developed a range of peace education resources, student and teacher workshops, and is involved in numerous projects to promote citizenship education across different teaching sectors.

**Paul Thomas** is Professor of Youth and Policy and Associate Dean (Research) for the School of Education and Professional Development at the University of Huddersfield. He is a professionally qualified youth and community worker. His research focuses mainly on state policies around young people and multiculturalism, racism, community cohesion, and the prevention of extremism, and particularly on how ground-level policy-makers and practitioners mediate and enact such state policy agendas. He has contributed to national media discussion of Prevent, and in 2009, he gave evidence at the House of Commons to the Select Committee Inquiry regarding the Prevent Strategy.

# **1**

# **Introduction**

**Joel Busher and Lee Jerome**

**Abstract** The introduction in 2015 of a legal duty requiring that all providers of compulsory education in Britain pay 'due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism' prompted extensive policy, academic and public debate. To date however we still have a limited understanding of how this 'Prevent Duty' is playing out on the ground in schools, colleges and early years provision. This chapter sets out how this volume contributes towards addressing this gap in the literature. We draw attention in particular to the volume's emphasis on detailed empirical analysis, introduce the concept of 'policy enactment' (Ball, S., Maguire, M., & Braun, A., *How schools do policy: Policy enactments in* 

J. Busher (\*)

Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, Coventry, UK e-mail: joel.busher@coventry.ac.uk

L. Jerome

Department of Education, Middlesex University, London, UK e-mail: l.jerome@mdx.ac.uk

*secondary schools*. Routledge, Abingdon, 2012) and discuss how this concept has informed the broad analytical approach adopted in this volume.

**Keywords** Prevent • Counter-terrorism • Education • Policy enactment • Policy impact • PVE

## **The Prevent Duty in Education**

In July 2015 the UK government introduced a legal duty requiring that 'specified authorities' show 'due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism' (Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015, s.26)—popularly referred to as the 'Prevent Duty'. due to its association with the Prevent strand of the UK's wider Counter-Terrorism Strategy. The 'specified authorities' to which the Duty applied included all schools, registered early years childcare providers and further education providers, alongside universities, and health and social care providers. For providers of early years, primary, secondary and further education, the statutory and supplemental guidance issued by the government sets out two areas of responsibility: first, ensuring that 'staff are able to identify children who may be vulnerable to radicalisation and know what to do when they are identified' (Department for Education, 2015, p. 5), and second, requiring that they 'build pupils' resilience to radicalisation by promoting fundamental British values and enabling them to challenge extremist views' (Ibid.).

Both aspects of the Duty were presented by the government as a straightforward extension of existing policy and practice. The first requirement was presented as an extension of existing safeguarding requirements and practices (Home Office, 2015); the second as a continuation of nonstatutory guidance already set out in the framework for Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural (SMSC) education urging schools to promote fundamental British values (DfE, 2014). Nonetheless, it has been seen by many observers—among them policymakers, academics, civil society groups and educationalists—as constituting a significant change to the way that the country responds to and conceives of its response to the threat of terrorism. Indeed, with this legislation, the UK became the first country in the world to place specific legal responsibility on educational institutions to play an important role within attempts to prevent extremism and terrorism.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Duty quickly became the focus of substantial policy and public debate. Those supportive of the Duty argued that it was a necessary response to a very real social problem and that its continuity with existing practice meant that it would cause little if any disruption to education provision. Those critical of the Duty argued, among other things, that it would undermine free speech, securitise educational spaces, exacerbate the stigmatisation and alienation of British Muslims, and that the notions of 'risk' and 'vulnerability' that underpinned the Duty denied student agency and potentially pathologised dissent (see Chap. 2 for further details). To date, however, we still have relatively scarce available evidence with which to evaluate such claims or with which we can really understand how the introduction of the Duty has shaped practices within these educational settings and how the enactment of the Duty is evolving over time.

Official government statistics do indicate that the Duty generated a sharp increase in the number of referrals being made to Prevent. There was a steep 75% year-on-year increase in overall referrals when the Duty was introduced, with 7631 referrals between April 2015 and March 2016 (Home Office, 2017). Since then the numbers have fluctuated, but have remained well above where they were prior to the introduction of the Duty (Home Office, 2018a): 6093 referrals in 2016–17 (Home Office, 2018b), 7318 in 2017–18 (Home Office, 2018c) and then a drop to 5738 in 2018–19 (Home Office, 2019). Throughout this time, approximately a third of those referrals have come from the education sector, between 56% and 58% of referrals were for people aged under 20 and over a quarter were aged under 15 years. As well as making up the majority of referrals to Prevent, young people aged 20 and below make up the majority of cases actually discussed at Channel panels and the majority of cases which subsequently receive support through Channel, the government's anti-radicalisation mentoring programme (Home Office data cited above).

There have also emerged a number of academic studies with which we can begin to build a picture. These comprise smaller- and larger-scale studies, and encompass a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods (see Jerome, Elwick, & Kazim, 2019, for a summary). Yet as Jerome and colleagues observe, the evidence base is still in its infancy. This is particularly the case when it comes to capturing how the Prevent Duty is playing out in practice and understanding how this is being shaped by broader developments within policy, politics, society and the relevant professions.

## **Our Contribution to the Debate About Prevent**

This volume responds to the need for more research that documents how the Duty is playing out on the ground. It does this by bringing together research that examines the enactment, impact and implications of the Prevent Duty across statutory education provision—in early years, primary, secondary and further education. Chapter 2 provides an account of the evolving policy context and the debates that surrounded the Duty as it was introduced in 2015. Chapter 3 uses data collected during the first 18 months after the introduction of the Duty to interrogate claims about the potential impacts of the Duty in school and further education settings. Chapter 4 explores student perspectives on the educational provision around the Duty and assesses the extent to which some of the materials promoted in response to the Duty meet students' requirements. Subsequent chapters examine the enactment of the Duty in early years settings (Chap. 5), primary schools (Chap. 6), secondary schools (Chap. 7) and further education settings (Chap. 8).

The chapters employ a variety of methodological approaches, from medium-scale quantitative surveys to small-scale qualitative studies. They also vary in terms of the extent to which they focus on the perspectives of staff or children and young people, or a combination of the two. What binds them together, however, is a shared interest in asking a relatively simple question: what is happening in the education system as a result of the Prevent Duty?

To date, the literature on Prevent in education, like much of the academic literature on the effects of programmes to counter or prevent violent extremism (C/PVE) more generally, has deployed a number of critical theoretical perspectives in order to identify and interrogate issues raised by the growing emphasis on education within C/PVE programming. One prominent focus has been on concerns about the securitisation of education (Awan, Spiller, & Whiting, 2018; Gearon, 2015) and the way that the Prevent Duty and similar technologies of power might distort the relationships between staff, children and young people, and parents (O'Donnell, 2016). Other scholars have employed a range of perspectives to explore the relationship between C/PVE and secularism (Davies, 2008), religious education (Miller, 2018), cosmopolitanism (Gholami, 2018) and tolerance (Bowie, 2018). There have also been calls for early years practitioners and teachers to define what might constitute a distinctively educational approach to Prevent (as opposed to a securityled approach) (Panjwani, 2016), which recognises young people's agency (Sieckelinck, Kaulingfreks, & De Winter, 2015) and encourages the development of critical citizenship (Vincent, 2019).

Such approaches are important for framing questions and opening up new lines of enquiry, but such theoretical critiques, or proposals, also have their limitations. Indeed, and at worst, the inclination to theorise about such policy problems can encourage a tendency 'to substitute mere abstract ideas for concrete, specific investigations' (Meiklejohn cited in Thomas, 2007, p. 45), and we must remain alert to the risk that theory can sometimes provide a 'strait-jacket' into which the evidence is coerced (Wright Mills, 1959/2000).

In this volume, by contrast, the contributions have been developed adopting what we might call a theoretically parsimonious approach to the collection, analysis and reporting of data. The contributors focus primarily on the detailed description and discussion of empirical data, rather than foregrounding whatever theoretical framework they might prefer. We recognise that there is a fine line to tread between foregrounding empirical data and slipping into a kind of naïve empiricism (Juslin, Winman, & Olsson, 2000), in which we somehow expect empirical observation to speak for itself and deliver conclusions, and in which we become blind to the way that empirical findings themselves are shaped by pre-configured values, world-views and theoretical starting points. We believe however that there is a very real need for the sort of empirically focused research presented in this volume if we are to find a way of cutting through the often heavily polarised and polarising debates that currently dominate public and policy discourse about Prevent, the Prevent Duty and C/PVE work more broadly.

There are also a number of ways in which we can mitigate against falling into a naïve empiricism. One of these is by making clear when we are switching from presenting data to arriving at conclusions, and in doing so, to clarify how those conclusions draw on values or theory (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2006). This is something that all the contributors to this volume have sought, and have been encouraged, to do at every turn.

Another way is to clarify our starting point. There are significant individual variations between the authors in terms of how we identify as researchers or how we would position ourselves in relation to the Prevent Duty. For example, some contributors engage with the Duty as scholars of C/PVE more broadly, whilst others do so more as educational practitioners or researchers. However, one of the key shared starting points that provides coherence to the book is an interest in Ball, Maguire and Braun's (2012) notion of policy enactment.

As Ball and his colleagues observe, policy is not simply implemented, but rather it is interpreted by different actors, in different contexts and potentially as part of different policy ensembles. Through processes of interpretation, translation and reconstruction, practitioners and others transform policy and often develop their own 'take' on it as they enact it. Indeed, whilst policy constrains, it can also open up opportunities for creativity and innovation.

What Ball and his colleagues draw our attention to is the importance of understanding the deeply situated nature of policy enactment. They noted for example that the four schools where they collected data to study 'how schools do policy' were concurrently enacting at least 170 separate policies, highlighting both how much policy work is going on and how many competing priorities there are. The simple fact that something becomes a 'top-down' policy tells us very little therefore about what, if anything, will happen as a result. In addition, individual members of staff may have very different relationships to any one of those policies. Sometimes practitioners will feel like they are rather passive recipients of policy, but others will be actively engaged as critics, enthusiasts or policy entrepreneurs, with some seizing on opportunities for new forms of specialism, responsibility, expertise and, with that, career advancement.

Our shared focus on the enactment of the Duty has tilted all of the contributions to this volume away from taking up or promoting strong substantive positions 'supportive' or 'critical' of the Prevent Duty itself, and towards a focus instead on capturing how the Duty has played out in practice, and with that, how such practice has been shaped by the geographic, temporal, professional and policy contexts in which it has been enacted.

Finally, a third way to avoid slipping into a naïve and potentially misleading empiricism is to be clear and realistic about the limitations of the data that we have been able to compile. While some of the chapters in this volume seek, through the use of survey instruments, to provide something of an overview of how teachers have responded to the Duty (Chaps. 3 and 6), much of the discussion in the volume seeks to use 'lowhovering' (Anderson, 2007) qualitative analysis to provide insights into specific aspects of practice or contexts. As such we are cautious about generalising from this work, and would encourage the contributions to be read as illuminative (Thomas, 2007, p. 110), rather than definitive.

Nevertheless, as the first collection of empirical studies into the effects of the Prevent Duty across the statutory education sector, we believe the material offers an important source of information and insight. On one reading, Chap. 3 provides a snapshot of the first responses to the Prevent Duty, as this data was collected very soon after the Duty was introduced. Subsequent chapters are based on data collected since then and therefore enable us to get some indication of whether interpretations have changed over time. Our observation of this longitudinal reading is that it does not seem to have changed much over time. On another reading, Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 provide an overview of the issues arising, and Chaps. 5, 6, 7, and 8 provide a series of insights into how the Duty is translated in each of the age phases. This reveals some important insights into how the policy has been transformed as it is enacted in these rather different contexts.

#### **A Note of Thanks**

All empirical research relies on finding willing participants, and in the increasingly pressurised world of education, we are grateful to all those who participated in the various research projects reported in the following chapters. Given there are always so many other pressing priorities, it is heartening that people make the time to participate in such activities, and this is even more impressive given the potentially controversial nature of this research. Ultimately, what motivates people to give up their time to such endeavours is the belief that it is worthwhile making some contribution to knowledge. In dealing with the data collected, the authors of this collection bring to mind Thomas's exhortation:

What respondents say and do in interviews and what teachers say and do in their work are what they say and do. We have no right to impute more; no right to impose 'theory'. We can certainly listen, empathize and try to understand. (Thomas, 2007, p. 81)

We hope that our various participants would recognise themselves from the accounts of practice we have produced here and that they would recognise this collection as a valuable contribution to knowledge in this important area.

## **References**


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# **2**

# **Britain's Prevent Strategy: Always Changing, Always the Same?**

**Paul Thomas**

**Abstract** This chapter analyses Prevent's development since its introduction in 2006, alongside discussion of its controversies. It considers both Prevent's changing content and priorities over its distinct phases and its significant controversies that have endured despite such changes. Critics argue that Prevent disproportionately targets British Muslims as a 'suspect community', as well as securitising society and undermining community cohesion. These critiques have persisted despite the very significant shift of focus from community-based engagement work in the 'Prevent 1' phase to the 'Prevent 2' phase and Prevent Duty concern with identifying individual vulnerability to radicalisation. Here, this chapter considers how we can understand both Prevent's changes and the controversies around the 2015 introduction of the 'Prevent Duty', alongside their implications for front-line educational practitioners and institutions.

**Keywords** Prevent • Policy • Counter-terrorism • Education • Muslims

P. Thomas (\*)

Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society (HudCRES), University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK e-mail: d.p.thomas@hud.ac.uk

## **Introduction**

The Prevent Duty's introduction in 2015 represented a significant new development within the UK's Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, but there was nothing new about the tone and content of the public controversy that accompanied it. The Prevent strategy has altered and developed significantly over its policy lifetime, but the sharp public critiques of Prevent as stigmatising British Muslims, threatening free speech and securitising British society have remained constant. For many critics, Prevent always has, and always will be, *really* about Muslims and the perceived threat to broader British society from strands of domestic Muslim communities. Other critics identify a shifting, but enduring, broader securitisation of society and an inherent threat to free speech within Prevent. These already-existing critiques have all been applied since 2015 to the Prevent Duty's introduction across the education, health and social welfare sections of Britain's public services, and they raise an analytical dilemma. Do such critiques represent the reality of the Prevent Duty's implementation, or are they really claims about what Prevent *was*, rather than what it is today?

I have argued elsewhere (Thomas, 2017) that we can identify two distinct phases of Britain's Prevent Strategy, with a significant third phase emerging with the Prevent Duty's introduction. During 'Prevent 1', 2006–2011, the main focus of Prevent activity was community-based work with young Muslims, through Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) funding. The 'Prevent 2' phase was initiated by the new Coalition government's 2011 Prevent Review and was very different in content and focus. That review removed the DCLG from Prevent involvement and largely ended Prevent's community-based element. Instead, it confirmed an enhanced Prevent focus on individuals 'at risk' of, or vulnerable to, 'radicalisation'. The 2015 introduction of the Prevent Duty confirmed and significantly accelerated this 'Prevent 2' trajectory.

This chapter does two things. First, it traces the development of the Prevent strategy from its first implementation in 2006/7. In doing so, it explores both the continuities and changes within Prevent over this period and shows how the Prevent Duty can be understood as an innovation that, in effect, consolidated a series of prior policy developments. Second, it outlines key criticisms of Prevent and how these have, or have not, evolved in response to developments in Prevent. These three phases of the Prevent strategy are explored, in each case outlining both the phase's key content and priorities and identifying the associated controversies and criticisms.

#### **'Prevent 1' and Its Criticisms**

Britain's Prevent strategy is part of the broader UK CONTEST national counter-terrorism strategy, which has gone through several iterations (HMG, 2018) since its inception in 2003. CONTEST is built around four strands, the so-called 4 P's, of Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare, with Prevent undoubtedly the most controversial. This post-9/11 development of a preventative arm within national counter-terrorism strategies has been a feature internationally, with many developed and developing countries initiating such programmes. These national strategies have variously been called 'Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE)' or 'Countering Violent Extremism (CVE)', leading to many international analysts using a hybrid 'P/CVE' description (Rosand, Winterbotham, Jones, & Praxi-Tabuchi, 2018).

Britain originally utilised the PVE title for the 'Prevent 1' local programme and has subsequently reduced this to 'Prevent'. Britain was an early adopter of such a PVE policy approach and has resultantly been much-studied internationally, with this scrutiny being aided by the fact that Britain's comparatively centralised government gives an apparent national coherence to Prevent. Whilst there is significant international dialogue over P/CVE policies through bodies such as the European Union, the United Nations and the so-called five eyes network (UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), Prevent is, and has been, a nationally determined policy. Whilst most developed nations have policies aimed at identifying and supporting individuals vulnerable to radicalisation in ways similar to Prevent's Channel system, Prevent is internationally distinctive in enforcing this through a legal duty on educational professionals, and also, in the 'Prevent 2' and 'Prevent Duty' phases, in its down-playing of broader, community-based resiliencebuilding work.

Originally envisaged as an international-focussed programme, Prevent emerged as a domestic programme in the wake of the 7/7 London bombings of July 2005. Its very emergence was contested, with local government and civil society organisations arguing for broader policy approaches (Thomas, 2012). This 'Prevent 1' phase, initiated by the Labour government, was explicitly only about Muslim communities, with the DCLG PVE funding administered—at very short notice—on the basis of local Muslim populations. Here, the resulting activity focussed overwhelmingly on young Muslims, largely through youth and community work and with little or no concern with formal education (Phillips, Tse, & Johnson, 2011). Funding was also utilised to strengthen Muslim civil society, such as after-school religious education bodies. In some areas, local government deployed the funding itself, but in other areas they largely passed the funding on to Muslim organisations, leading to a very significant inflow of funding to these groups from an explicitly counterterrorism policy fund. This was mirrored by national efforts to develop new representative structures for Muslim women and young people, and even government promotion of more 'moderate' forms of Islamic religious interpretation. Alongside this came 300 new, dedicated Police posts and a significant role for Police Prevent staff in community engagement and in the broader development of local PVE strategies.

This approach was controversial from inception, and the critiques that developed during 'Prevent 1' continue to significantly shape current public perceptions of Prevent (see Chaps. 5, 6, 7, and 8), despite the substantially altered content and priorities of 'Prevent 2' and the subsequent Duty. The first of these was that Prevent stigmatises Muslims, seeing them as an undifferentiated 'suspect community', a term first applied to Irish-origin communities resident in Britain at the time of the Northern Ireland troubles (Hillyard, 1993). Prevent's explicitly Muslim-only focus, and the sheer scale of it—government evaluation of the first year of PVE funding boasted of engaging with over 50,000 young Muslims (Thomas, 2012)—made this analysis hard to refute. Essentially, 'Prevent 1' represented a community development intervention within Muslim communities on a significant scale and on an explicitly counter-terrorism basis. Here, Prevent's monocultural focus clearly contradicted the community cohesion policies, developed following the 2001 riots in northern England, that sought to promote cross-community dialogue and common identities (Thomas, 2011). It focussed only on Islamist terrorism at a time when far-right organisations were both winning local elections and provoking localised racial tensions. This concern of stigmatisation was evident in the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Select Committee Inquiry in to Prevent in 2009–2010, with their report (House of Commons, 2010) urging a re-thinking of Prevent and a much stronger role for cohesion-based work.

Alongside this was a concern that Prevent was securitising society through the role of the Police within it. The new Police 'Prevent Engagement Officer' roles facilitated a large-scale involvement with Muslim communities around the issue of extremism, with some officers working directly with young people and adult community members in roles normally played by youth and community workers (Thomas, 2010). Allegations that such Prevent Police, and staff from the Intelligence and Security Service (MI5), were pressurising front-line youth workers for information on potentially extremist young people were central to Arun Kundnani's 'Spooked' report (2009), which received very considerable media coverage. Beyond dispute is that the Police gradually became more dominant in the local management and direction of Prevent (Bahadur Lamb, 2012). Central to this concern around securitisation was that even prior to the development of Channel and the Prevent Duty, individuals were being surveilled for extremist words and beliefs, so threatening free speech and civil liberties (Kundnani, 2009).

Some key concepts can be useful to help us describe and understand the Prevent strategy's journey. One is 'responsibilisation' (Thomas, 2017), with Prevent making different sectors of society responsible for ensuring that terrorism is prevented over time. Within 'Prevent 1', it was Muslim communities that were responsibilised as 'moral agents' of terrorism prevention (Choudhury & Fenwick, 2011). This approach assumed that the Al-Qaida-inspired attacks in London on July 7, 2005, and other foiled plots could be directly linked to the faith community that attackers claimed to speak on behalf of, and that community and religious bodies could be mobilised to protect against the type of extremism that supposedly led to such acts. Basia Spalek (2013) identifies this 'Prevent 1' approach of trusting and funding Muslim communities as a new departure for counter-terrorism policies. For some (see Abbas, 2018), this was about Prevent encouraging Muslim communities to spy on each other, but McGhee (2010) saw it instead as an approach that attempted to limit stigmatisation by the state working in partnership with communities, rather than 'doing' terrorism prevention to them. Arguably, this was also recognition of the state's limited understanding of and ability to oppose extremism within Muslim communities.

It is certainly true that some Muslim communities refused Prevent funding and rejected policy engagement from the start, but other Muslim communities accepted the funding, using it to develop community organisation and resilience against extremist influences (Lowndes & Thorp, 2010). The devolved funding approach of 'Prevent 1' actively encouraged this, meaning that different areas had different experiences of and views on Prevent. O'Toole, Meer, DeHanas, Jones and Modood (2016) drew on empirical research amongst British Muslim communities to suggest that Prevent implementation was a scene of 'contested practice', with local Prevent involvement enabling many Muslim communities to both strengthen civil society and play a stronger role in local government governance. Here, many Prevent critics were Muslim, but many 'Prevent 1' advocates and actors were also Muslims.

## **'Prevent 2' and Its Criticisms**

Whilst significantly delayed by strong disagreements about Prevent within the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government (Warsi, 2017), the 2011 Prevent Review (HMG, 2011) marked a major turning point for Prevent. Firstly, it officially expanded Prevent's focus to all forms of terrorism (although Prevent does not cover Northern Ireland and its distinct terrorist threats, hence it being a British, rather than UK-wide, policy). Secondly, it expanded Prevent's concern from 'violent extremism' to a broader 'extremism', introducing the concept (and list) of 'fundamental British values' that has subsequently been foregrounded within formal education. For some (see Miah, 2017), this latter expansion is highly significant in that it arguably deepens and widens policy concern with problematic, 'un-British' attitudes and behaviours within Muslim communities. It is questionable, though, as to what tangible difference this expansion of concern has really made to Prevent's priorities and operations. Here, Prevent activity is, by definition, focussed on people and behaviours not yet linked to tangible terrorist planning; otherwise, it would be a 'Pursue' policing concern. P/CVE activity could be seen as *always* being about a broader 'extremism' that *might* move towards violent intentions and plans, if not diverted.

The most tangible change, which marked the effective end of 'Prevent 1' and the commencement of a new phase, was the removal of DCLG from involvement in the programme and the (virtual) ending of Prevent funding for community-based group resilience-building activity. This was justified as a response to the House of Commons (2010) Select Committee Inquiry report, so supposedly ensuring that there was no damage to (separate) community cohesion policy work:

The Prevent programme we inherited from the last government was flawed. It confused the delivery of Government policy to promote integration with Government policy to prevent terrorism. (HMG, 2011, p. 1)

In reality, though, this shift represented a distinctly different understanding of the role and purpose of Prevent, and mis-characterised the actual conclusions of the Select Committee Inquiry. The Select Committee Inquiry evidence hearings (House of Commons, 2010) saw national Police leaders questioning what the point of the community-based Prevent activity was; they described it as simply 'community cohesion' work. Of course, it wasn't cohesion work as it had a monocultural focus. Underpinning this Police questioning was distrust in the efficacy of Prevent 1's community-based work that aimed to build individual and group resilience against extremism well before individual tangible involvements in extremism were developing. The Select Committee findings actually supported such work, but argued that it should be done on a (cross) community cohesion basis, partly because hostility to 'other' communities is a key driver of extremism and terrorism. Instead, the new government chose to largely end community-based Prevent work, with only a limited programme of local activities in 'Prevent priority' areas and those strongly controlled from London by the Home Office. This substantial downsizing of Prevent work in communities also enabled an austerity-focussed government to significantly reduce the overall Prevent budget. They also completely ended national funding for community cohesion work, leaving local government to continue such work with their own (rapidly reducing) resources (Thomas, 2014).

Instead, this new 'Prevent 2' phase was primarily about identifying and diverting individuals vulnerable to radicalisation through the Channel anti-radicalisation mentoring and counselling system. Channel had been developing on a pilot basis in the years prior to 2011 (Thornton & Bouhana, 2017), and it was now foregrounded as the key element of Prevent. Central to this approach of identifying vulnerability is the concept of 'radicalisation', a term that has developed in the post-9/11 era of domestic terrorism to characterise people who move towards terrorist involvements (Coolsaet, 2016). Whilst the engagement of individuals in terrorism is a reality—as the domestic terror attacks and foiled plots in both the UK and across other Western countries show (Nesser, 2015) there is little agreement over *why* people make this journey. Exhaustive academic analysis has clearly demonstrated that there is no definable set of indicators or social and economic circumstances, no identifiable 'conveyer belt' process (Kundnani, 2012), that can predict who will move towards terrorism, when and why. This makes the concept of 'radicalisation' highly problematic, yet the key focus of 'Prevent 2' was to develop systems of identifying and intervening with individuals apparently at risk of radicalising.

This intervention was to come via the nationally designed but locally led 'Channel' system. Here, individuals identified as potentially vulnerable to radicalisation are referred by organisations such as schools or health bodies to a multi-agency Channel panel within their local authority area, where their individual case is considered. Those judged to be at genuine risk are offered an anti-radicalisation intervention package, often mentoring by a government-approved 'Intervention Provider' (IP). Many IPs are ex-extremists or people with what are considered relevant theological or political experience or expertise. Initially, local Channel panels were led by Prevent Police staff, but there has been a move towards civilianising Channel under local authority leadership through the 'Operation Dovetail' pilot process (Thornton & Bouhana, 2017).

How to go about identifying individuals vulnerable to radicalisation and what tools and measures to use is an international challenge (Knudsen, 2020). Various countries have devised, and shared, radicalisation assessment tools, such as the Canadian-origin VERA and VERA2. Britain developed the 'ERG 22+' assessment tool, based on analysis of the pathways towards violence of convicted terrorists, and it has led to the 'Vulnerability Assessment Framework' (VAF), which has underpinned the Channel system. Both these British assessment tools have come under significant criticism, which has focussed both on the unreliability of reported pathways from convicted terrorists and on the apparent policy stretching of such insights to use in identifying people who have not yet planned terrorist violence. Certainly, if the ERG 22+ indicators are taken at face value, items like '*a need for identity, meaning and belonging*' seem to describe virtually any adolescent. However, the argument in support of all such assessment tools is that they are simply a framework for structured professional judgements by trained professionals.

#### **The Prevent Duty and Its Criticisms**

'Prevent 2' was therefore developing Prevent in a different direction, and doing so both in a down-sized way and with a lower media profile in the period following the 2011 Prevent Review. This makes the new and very significant expansion phase represented by the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (CTSA) and its introduction of the Prevent legal duty both unexpected and surprising at first sight. It was, and is, internationally unprecedented in its legal requirement of front-line practitioners and their agencies. Three key events that occurred during the period of 2012–2014 can be identified as motivating the-then-Coalition government's decision to significantly increase Prevent's scale and reach through the introduction of a legal duty'.

Firstly, in 2013, Britain saw the high-profile murder of an off-duty soldier, Fusilier Lee Rigby, by two Islamist militants (both religious converts, as a substantial proportion of domestic AQ/ISIS-inspired terrorist have been) already known to the authorities. Significant public impact of this event in Woolwich, south London, came from the filming by bystanders of the attack and its aftermath, and subsequent media use of this footage. This public concern was re-enforced by the concurrent trial of six young Muslims from Birmingham who had planned violent attacks on an English Defence League rally held in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in 2012 (BBC News, 2013), prompting fears that Islamist and far-right extremist were mutually radicalising each other. At the same time, there was also growing evidence of a significant number of young Britons attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS, which had recently taken by force the large geographical area of northern Syria and western Iraq, and declared a 'caliphate'. These events all highlighted questions around the effectiveness of Prevent, and the fact that Prevent's scale and activities had been significantly reduced in the wake of the 2011 review. Unsurprisingly, following Lee Rigby's murder former Labour ministers closely connected to 'Prevent 1', such as Hazel Blears, criticised the withdrawal of local Prevent funding and direction under 'Prevent 2' (Boffey & Doward, 2013).

Then-Prime Minster David Cameron's response was a 'Task Force on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism' (HMG, 2013). The resulting report suggested that some local authorities '*are not taking the problem seriously*' (ibid: 4) and indicated that it would make Prevent delivery a legal requirement in certain priority areas. It also foregrounded the role of schools, stating that all schools should expect Ofsted inspections to focus clearly on their anti-extremism measures and particularly on their implementation of 'fundamental British values'. Indeed, some were downgraded by Ofsted on this basis in 2014–2015, highlighting the extent to which the introduction of the Prevent Duty in July 2015 was only confirming and deepening an already-existing reality of the need for educational institutions to comply with Prevent.

The Task Force report concluded by saying that further measures would be kept under review. The justification for such further measures was provided by the so-called Trojan Horse affair. This related to a number of state schools with mainly Muslim pupils in Birmingham (Miah, 2017). An anonymous letter claiming 'extremism' in these schools prompted the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, to investigate through an inquiry led by a former counter-terrorism Police chief, Michael Clarke. Whilst the resulting report found no evidence of support for violent extremism, this government approach framed an issue of faith's role within local state schools (and their significant improvements in attainment) as overtly one of extremism and implicitly also of a terrorist threat. This intervention was consistent with the 'values-driven' approach to Prevent that Gove had championed in the 2011 Prevent Review process—significantly contributing to Baroness Warsi's resignation from the government (Warsi, 2017)—and which reflected his suspicion of broader attitudes and dispositions amongst Muslim communities generally (see Gove, 2006). This contrasted with Prevent 1's more 'means-driven' pragmatism over community participation (Birt, 2009). This government interpretation of the 'Trojan Horse' affair also ensured that it would indeed toughen its approach to the role within Prevent of formal education, which it did by placing a legal duty to implement the Prevent strategy on all state education, social welfare and health professionals and their institutions nationally through the 2015 CTSA.

This legal duty is internationally unprecedented in relation to counterterrorism, although a similar duty has been placed on Australian educators to report the sexual exploitation of students (Falkiner, Thomson, & Day, 2017). It is clear that educators and other state professionals have now been responsibilised (Thomas, 2017) for preventing radicalisation towards violent extremism under the CTSA's ramping up of 'Prevent 2', supplanting the focus of responsibilisation on Muslim communities under 'Prevent 1'. The scale of this Duty is obviously significant, with several hundred thousand educators, from early years settings to further education colleges, having received Prevent training, and possibly as many as one and a half million public servants in total, given the scale of the National Health Service.

Implementing this Duty also raises an issue that has dogged Prevent throughout its history—the partial and varied nature of the (funded) policy implementation structures. Here, a number of local authority areas have been designated as 'Prevent priority areas' and have received Home Office funding for full-time Prevent coordinators (and, in recent years, also for education officers to support implementation within the education sector). The number of 'priority areas' during the 'Prevent 1' phase was very significantly reduced by the 2011 Prevent Review. It has subsequently grown somewhat, but it remains a reality that many local government areas are not priority areas and so do not have funding to support full-time Prevent staff, yet are legally required to ensure that all the schools and social service organisations within their area are correctly implementing Prevent. This complex contextual reality should be borne in mind as this chapter considers below the key critiques, contestations and issues which accompanied the implementation of the Prevent Duty, particularly in the educational sector.

The first, and certainly the most prominent criticism of the Prevent Duty's implementation, was whether it had simply re-doubled the targeting and stigmatisation of young Muslims that was inherent to 'Prevent 1'. Here, the suggestion was that while the Prevent Duty is theoretically about all forms of extremism, Prevent is still *really* still about Muslims (see the review of educationally focussed literature within Jerome, Elwick, & Kazim, 2019). Certainly, the number of Prevent referrals of young people to Channel grew by over 75% in the year following the Duty's implementation, with those from the educational sector, particularly schools and colleges, more than doubling (Open Society Foundation Justice Initiative (OSFJI), 2016). Young Muslims were, and are, disproportionately represented within these figures.

A number of high-profile, apparently deeply inappropriate, referrals of young Muslims were featured in the media in the months following the Duty's introduction, not all of them factually accurate. These included the so-called terrorist house investigation in Blackburn (which was actually not a counter-terrorism case), and a case in Luton that saw a fouryear-old girl reported to Prevent for mispronouncing 'cucumber' as 'cooker bomb'. Such early cases reinforced public perceptions, which first developed in the 'Prevent 1' phase and which did not weaken during 'Prevent 2', of Prevent as being an Islamophobic policy that undermines the human rights and civil liberties of young Muslims (see OSFJI, 2016). The reality of the significant over-representation of young Muslims within Prevent referrals in relation to their proportion of the school and college population (see below) has been highlighted by greater government transparency, post-2015, around Prevent operations, with detailed annual statistic bulletins of Channel referrals and what happens to them (Home Office, 2019).

The meaning of this Muslim over-representation is significantly contested. For some, this is prima facie evidence of the continued 'suspect community' logic of Prevent, but for others it represents the past reality of the domestic terrorist threat and of the very considerable travel (or attempted travel) to Syria by British Muslims. Certainly, the numbers of people now receiving actual Channel mentoring support for right-wing extremism are very similar to those from ISIS-inspired extremism referrals, a picture which emboldened the Conservative government to accept an Independent Review of Prevent, initiated in 2019. However, the total number of Muslims referred does represent a significant overrepresentation in relation to their place both in Britain's school and college student population, and in the general population. The higher 'no further action', attrition rate for young Muslims within Prevent referrals also raises the issue of whether many of these represent inappropriate professional referrals on the basis of a (mis-)reading of Muslim dress, belief or practice as an indicator of extremism. Is the operation of the Prevent Duty within education leading to further stigmatisation of Muslim students?

One of the factors driving criticism of Prevent Duty operations is the general high attrition rate or Channel referrals, with a very significant proportion leading either to no further action or to other forms of intervention unconnected to issues of extremism. For some critics, this attrition rate in itself demonstrates the generic ineffectiveness of the Prevent strategy, but it's not clear whether such an attrition rate is inconsistent with attrition rates for reporting over other aspects of safeguarding within education. The government framing of Prevent as safeguarding is central to the Duty's operation (see Chaps. 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8), but it is also contested. This contestation has come particularly from the social welfare and health sectors. For social work theorists, Prevent has misappropriated the language of child protection and safeguarding work with vulnerable children and adults, in the cause of counter-terrorism (Coppock & McGovern, 2014). In particular, they argue that safeguarding has been, and should be, about protecting the needs and interest of these vulnerable individuals, but safeguarding in the name of Prevent is actually protecting wider society from these risky individuals. This emphasises the need for more empirical research around how the 'Prevent-as-safeguarding' frame (Busher, Choudhury, & Thomas, 2019) has been understood and practised within education. Research in adult mental health settings has suggested that professionals are resistant to Prevent reporting over-riding a duty of confidentiality to clients (Heath-Kelly & Strausz, 2019), but whether patient confidentiality is ever truly absolute is contested. Do educational professionals accept the 'Prevent-as-safeguarding' frame?

Closely connected to these critiques of the Prevent-as-safeguarding frame have been allegations that the introduction of the Prevent Duty represents a securitisation of education**,** as well as of health and welfare, with educational professionals asked to play policing roles. For supporters of the Prevent Duty, its implementation is genuinely consistent with the focus and operation of wider, pre-existing safeguarding approaches within the education sector. Critics, meanwhile, see it as representing a disjuncture in the systems and assumptions that educationalists utilise and in the way that agencies such as the Police interact with educational institutions. If empirical evidence from educational settings suggests the former interpretation, then to what extent is the Prevent Duty implementation actually a 'securitisation' of education?

An issue for all professionals covered by the Prevent Duty is *what* they are actually being asked to spot and report—the indicators or warning signs of radicalisation that professionals should be aware of and look for. Discussions above highlighted the problematic concept of 'radicalisation' and the international academic and policy consensus that there is not one clear pathway towards terrorism. However, we know that people do make that journey, and many of the people involved in plots of the last decade, and particularly those travelling to Syria, have been young people who were in, or had only recently left, schools and further education. Both that reality and the Prevent Duty to spot and report any individual at risk raise the issue of how clear individual educators feel they are about what they should look for and what level of concern justifies an external Channel referral. Here, there has been a need for more empirical evidence around who delivers Prevent training, their qualifications and credibility to do so, and what sort of ongoing support is available for educational institutions as they develop their approach to Prevent implementation. What does empirical evidence tell us about the quality, clarity and helpfulness of training for professionals in relation to the role mandated by the Prevent Duty?

Throughout the changing focus of Prevent, there has been a concern with the clarity and confidence of the front-line educational professionals being asked to implement Prevent. In 'Prevent 1', there was no policy focus on training or skills development for the youth and community workers at the forefront of Prevent (Thomas, 2012). The implication of this community-based approach was that youth workers would utilise opportunities to develop projects around citizenship and political education that could both address youth grievances and support resilience against extremism, yet there was no Prevent focus on professional competence or confidence. This echoed the failings of previous anti-racism educational policy initiatives, which neglected the crucial issue of practitioners lacking the confidence to successfully facilitate discussion of 'difficult issues' (Thomas, 2009). Under the Prevent Duty, there are clearly two distinct challenges for front-line educators. One is the issue raised above, the safeguarding competence and confidence around spotting relevant signs of 'risk of radicalisation', and knowing what to do about it. The other is one of pedagogical confidence, how educators successfully implement 'fundamental British values' within the curriculum in a way that bolsters students support for common values and which scaffolds resilience against extremist messages—something that may well entail 'difficult conversations' (Thomas, 2016)—as well as being consistent with wider responsibilities to promote equality and cohesion. Here, the 'Prevent 1' concerns of youth and community workers about their confidence and clarity to do such pedagogical work, and the availability of good training and resources to support it, are now challenges for formal educational practitioners within early years, schools and colleges in the Prevent Duty phase. Do educational practitioners feel confident in their ability to fulfil the Prevent Duty?

A final major criticism of the Prevent Duty was that it would be likely to have a 'chilling effect' on the speech and behaviour of students, and of Muslim students in particular, who perceive themselves to be a target of this measure and fear that they will be referred to Prevent. If this is true, it would support claims that Prevent is curtailing the human rights and particularly the right to free speech, of Muslim students (OSFJI, 2016). It would also make Prevent counter-productive on its own terms, as Prevent cannot succeed without community members being willing to share concerns and challenge the extremism of others within day-to-day life. There is certainly evidence from the Higher Education (HE) sector (Scott-Baumann, 2018) that Muslim students *perceive* themselves to be under Prevent surveillance, although other studies of Prevent Duty implementation within higher education suggest something more akin to a form of 'tick box compliance', rather than more significant changes in practice (McGlynn & McDaid, 2019). Indeed, the Prevent Duty provisions for HE were amended after legal challenge to reflect the equal legal responsibility to uphold free speech. A highly relevant context for this concern is the very significant anti-Prevent campaigning by civil society groups (Thomas, 2017) and the National Union of Students, based on claims that Prevent is indeed surveillance of Muslims. Here, the sociological theorem that if enough people believe something to be true, it is real in its consequences, has considerable relevance for the public understanding of Prevent and its legal duty, and it certainly makes empirical analysis of any 'chilling effect' amongst students in schools and colleges more complicated. Has the Prevent Duty led to a 'chilling effect' amongst Muslim students, and if so, how can we judge this?

# **Closing Thoughts**

This chapter has charted the development of the Prevent strategy from its introduction in 2006/7 to the introduction of the Prevent Duty in 2015. In doing so, it has highlighted the very significant changes in Prevent's content and priorities from the 'Prevent 1' phase of community development work with British Muslims to the 'Prevent 2' focus on systems for identifying, reporting and intervening with individuals perceived to be 'at risk' of radicalisation, which was expanded by the Prevent Duty. This shift from 'Prevent 1' to 'Prevent 2' also involved a shift from a primary Prevent concern with youth and community workers to a concern with the educational professionals working in early years, school and further education settings, a shift which the enhanced Prevent Duty phase confirmed and deepened.

This chapter highlighted the significant public controversies over Prevent in its original, 'Prevent 1' form, particularly its overt focus on Muslims only, and the resulting contradiction with policies of community cohesion, and the role of the Police in community engagement with young people. The argument I make in this chapter is that those original 'Prevent 1' controversies have significantly shaped public perceptions and criticisms of the very different content and focus of 'Prevent 2' and its post-2015 phase of the implementation of the Prevent Duty.

Specifically, this chapter has highlighted how the Prevent Duty's introduction elicited a number of key criticisms that built on those prior objections to Prevent. These included concerns over whether the Duty's new version of Prevent represented an enhanced suspicion and stigmatisation of young Muslims, whether it was consequently 'chilling' the speech and behaviour of Muslim students and whether the Duty represented a significant securitisation of education. Alongside this were questions of whether the government's 'Prevent-as-safeguarding' frame was understood and accepted by educational professionals, whether those professionals felt clear about the role of identifying radicalisation that the Duty requires them to play and whether they generally had the confidence, clarity and skills to implement the safeguarding and pedagogical dimensions of the Prevent Duty.

This in turn raises questions for researchers about the extent to which these vociferous public criticisms reflect the reality of the Prevent Duty's implementation within education, or rather whether they actually represent a form of inertia or 'lag' amongst critics who still understand Prevent as what it *was*, rather than the significantly modified strategy that it now is. It suggests the possibility that government and the Prevent critics are, in effect, 'talking past each other' in their heated dialogue about justifications for and impacts of Prevent, with educators at the centre of these disputes. Others will reject such a view and argue that Prevent Duty implementation is a damaging reality within education. These are important questions and issues that we need more empirically based investigation of, and the following chapters respond to that challenge.

## **References**


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# **3**

# **The Introduction of the Prevent Duty into Schools and Colleges: Stories of Continuity and Change**

**Joel Busher, Tufyal Choudhury, and Paul Thomas**

**Abstract** Drawing on mixed methods research carried out with school and college staff during 2015 and 2016, this chapter provides insight into how the Prevent Duty 'landed' in schools and colleges during the first 18 months after its introduction in July 2015. The discussion centres on

J. Busher (\*)

Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, Coventry, UK e-mail: joel.busher@coventry.ac.uk

T. Choudhury Durham Law School, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: t.a.choudhury@durham.ac.uk

P. Thomas Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society (HudCRES), University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK e-mail: d.p.thomas@hud.ac.uk

This research was carried out with support from the Aziz Foundation. We acknowledge the contribution of Gareth Harris to the structuring and analysis of the survey data, and the transcription work undertaken by Will Jessop, Tam Sanger and Victoria Butkova.

four key questions: (1) To what extent did staff express overall opposition to or support for the Prevent Duty? (2) To what extent was the Prevent Duty interpreted by staff in schools and colleges as a straightforward extension of existing safeguarding responsibilities? (3) To what extent did staff perceive the Duty to be exacerbating the stigmatisation of Muslim students? (4) To what extent did staff perceive the Duty to have a 'chilling effect' on classrooms and on student voices?

**Keywords** Prevent • PVE • Education • Policy enactment • Safeguarding • Fundamental British values

In this chapter we examine how staff in schools and further education colleges in England understood, enacted and perceived the impacts of the Prevent Duty during the first 18 months after its introduction in July 2015. In doing so, this chapter provides insight into how the Duty 'landed' during this initial period and begins to empirically draw out themes that are explored further in the subsequent chapters.

We organise our discussion around four questions that cut to the heart of the policy debates that have surrounded the Prevent Duty and the wider Prevent strategy (Chap. 2):


This chapter draws on mixed methods research carried out during 2015 and 2016. This comprised 70 semi-structured interviews across 14 schools and colleges in London and West Yorkshire; semi-structured interviews with Prevent practitioners in 8 local authority areas; a national online survey of school and college staff in England (*n* = 225) and a series of focus group discussions with policy stakeholders, including individuals from national teaching unions, relevant local and national government departments, and prominent national Muslim and black and minority ethnic (BME) civil society organisations (for further details see Busher, Choudhury, Thomas, & Harris, 2017).

## **To What Extent Did Staff Express Overall Opposition to or Support for the Prevent Duty?**

Since the Prevent Duty was first discussed in Parliament, it had been the focus of extensive and often highly critical debate (Chap. 2). We expected therefore to encounter widespread opposition to the Duty among school and college staff, particularly in the context of confidential research interviews and an anonymous survey. Yet while we found some unease about the Duty, and some concerns, we did not find the breadth or depth of opposition that we anticipated.

Within the survey data we found more agreement than disagreement with the statement 'the Prevent Duty on schools and colleges is a proportionate response to a clearly identified problem'. About 54.5% of the survey respondents agreed or agreed strongly (1–4 on a scale of 1–10), compared with 29.3% of respondents who disagreed or disagreed strongly (7–10) and 16.2% who gave a broadly neutral response (5–6).

This picture was supported by the interview data. Here we encountered a number of criticisms and concerns about the Duty. The most frequent of these was about the possible stigmatisation of Muslim students, to which we return below. Alongside this we encountered some scepticism about the effectiveness of the Duty, with several respondents expressing doubts about whether it was possible to effectively identify, or train people to identify, signs that a student was being drawn into terrorism. Such doubts were often reinforced by expectations, and anxieties, that students who were a 'genuine' risk would be adept at not giving themselves away—a clear recognition of student agency and one that raises important questions about the use and limitations of the concept of 'vulnerability' in this area of policy and practice (see O'Donnell, 2016).

I think the problem with a lot of this training is that it is very difficult to identify someone who is at risk of this. If people had a very tell-tale sign then you would be able to stop it happening, wouldn't you, all of the time? So how do you successfully spot the correct signs? All you can really do is hope that someone will be able to pick up something that is not quite right and report it to the correct channel. (R32, teacher, secondary school, Yorkshire)

Some respondents indicated they believed the Duty might even be counterproductive because, by making the students more guarded, it could make detection of 'at risk' students more difficult.

I have not had any serious suspicions that any of them might want to go [to Syria] or if they do harbour those extremist views they are very cautious in keeping it to themselves. The kids know exactly what they can and can't say so they are very guarded. So, if anything, it has really driven it underground. (R50, Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL), secondary school, London)

Yet with the exception of one college, where multiple respondents expressed both concern that Prevent is an anti-Muslim agenda and reluctance to raise this with senior colleagues, few respondents expressed general opposition to the Duty or reported encountering substantial opposition among their colleagues. Furthermore, where opposition was observed, it was described as having dissipated fairly quickly after staff received training, and once the policies and practices that came to be associated with Prevent had been embedded within wider organisational policies and practices (see also Chap. 7).

As we have argued elsewhere, part of the explanation for the relative absence of expressed opposition likely lies in 'pragmatic acceptance' (Busher, Choudhury, & Thomas, 2019). The Duty was a legal requirement and non-compliance risked significant institutional and professional sanction. As one respondent recalled, in their institution senior management had responded to initial expressions of staff reticence about the Duty by telling them,

This is a duty and we have to implement it, and if we don't implement it the college could be closed down. So there's your facts, okay? (R1, DSL, college, Yorkshire)

Yet pragmatic acceptance only appears to be part of the explanation, and certainly insufficient to explain observed instances of positive acceptance (see below). Another part of the explanation appears to relate to the fairly widespread perception that, despite some of the concerns described above, the Duty was responding to a real and important issue. For example, the same respondent who expressed concern that the Duty had 'really driven it underground' nonetheless described the Duty as 'completely necessary':

I understood that it was completely necessary. Initially when you don't see [the students] on a daily basis, you think, 'is it; does it really need to be that strong?' But I actually think it probably does; I do see the point of it. Again I do remember just thinking, 'Oh this is just another thing that we need to be vigilant about', but actually it is really important. (R50, DSL, secondary school, London)

Such perceptions were particularly acute in 2015–16, amidst frequent news stories about young people travelling to join the so-called Islamic State. There were also growing concerns about the extreme right at the time, fuelled at least partly by the murder of Jo Cox MP on 16 June 2016, and by emerging evidence that the UK's referendum on leaving the European Union had been accompanied by a significant rise in hate crime (Cavalli, 2019).

What also seems to be relevant to this picture of fairly broad acceptance of the Duty is the fact that the challenges that respondents associated with the Duty were usually described as challenges that could largely be addressed through careful management and suitable training and support. With the exception of the college mentioned above, most respondents drew important distinctions between the potential impacts of the Duty in the education sector in general, and the practice and experience of Prevent within their specific institution, with discussion of the latter largely characterised by stories of effective management and adaptation. Indeed, some respondents described the Duty as having positive enabling effects in their particular institution. Some stated, for example, that it had given them more confidence to work with students on topics previously considered too contentious. As one respondent put it,

It's a real sort of backbone to have that behind you, to say 'actually we are entitled to teach this', and especially to tackle the staff and say 'we don't need to pussy foot around this anymore'. (R24, teacher, secondary school, Yorkshire)

Other respondents reported that the Duty had provided an opportunity to reinvigorate work around anti-racism and positive citizenship, which was perceived to have been de-prioritised in recent years within national policy frameworks (Thomas, 2016).

Where we did encounter clear and frequent opposition to the Duty was around the requirement to promote 'fundamental British values' (see also Revell & Bryan, 2018). Respondents consistently expressed support for, and described extensive experience of, values-based teaching. However, the emphasis placed on the supposed *Britishness* of these values was repeatedly identified as unnecessary and potentially problematic. Specifically, respondents expressed concern that this framing of values played into societal narratives of exclusion, superiority, fixed cultural boundaries and a them-and-us politics that could too easily play into the hands of the far right and others who prosper from sowing division.

The title 'British values', the title 'fundamental British values', whoever thought that up should've been shot in my opinion. I think it's disgraceful, because it just has too many connotations, it's like tit for tat, 'well you want to be fundamental, well we'll be fundamental'. (R20, DSL, college, Yorkshire)

As a result, respondents in some institutions described subtle forms of individual and institution-level resistance, such as opting to talk about 'school values' or simply 'our values' rather than actively labelling them '*British* values' (see also Chaps. 5 and 8).

## **To What Extent Was the Prevent Duty Perceived by Staff in Schools and Colleges as a Straightforward Extension of Existing Safeguarding Requirements?**

The idea that the Prevent Duty comprised a straightforward extension of existing requirements to safeguard young people from harms such as child sexual exploitation, gangs, neglect or drug use was central to the government's framing of the Duty and reflected the way that, since 2011, Prevent itself had increasingly been framed in terms of protecting 'vulnerable' people. Such framing of Prevent has faced criticism, however. As discussed in Chap. 2, social workers and social work academics, for example, have criticised this elision of Prevent and safeguarding, arguing that it risks silencing and pathologising individuals rather than understanding and engaging with their practices as acts of dissent, and that the expansion of surveillance entailed by Prevent could actually undermine safeguarding work by generating a climate of suspicion between service providers and the individuals and families with which they work.

To what extent then did our respondents accept or challenge the government's framing of Prevent as a straightforward extension of safeguarding? On one level, our findings were clear: a very significant majority of interview and survey respondents did indeed describe Prevent simply as an extension of safeguarding. Among survey respondents, 86% agreed or agreed strongly that 'The Prevent Duty in schools/colleges is a continuation of existing safeguarding responsibilities', with only 9% disagreeing or disagreeing strongly.

The majority of interview respondents also expressed little doubt that Prevent fitted within existing safeguarding practices—as 'just a bit of extra vigilance that were put on us: not an extra duty' (R19, estates manager, college, Yorkshire). The Duty was frequently described as entailing little more than subtle adjustments, or even just some relabelling of what they were already doing.

I've always seen Prevent as being a model of safeguarding. I don't see it as much different from safeguarding. Indeed, we've had a line in our safeguarding for extremism for many, many years, so it's been a part of our safeguarding. (R20, DSL, college, Yorkshire)

A number of factors have contributed to this broad professional acceptance of the Prevent-as-safeguarding policy frame. First, the organisational processes used to meet Prevent-related obligations were in practice very similar to those used for safeguarding, with Prevent-related training, monitoring, referrals and coordination all managed through existing, albeit in some cases expanded, safeguarding structures and processes. Here, an important part of the backstory is the extent to which educational institutions in the UK had, particularly since 2001, already become sites of extensive surveillance, usually in the name of student safety (Taylor, 2013). By the summer of 2015, online safety was already high on the agenda, the use of software to block access to 'dangerous material' was widespread, and there was growing use of digital systems to report and collate safeguarding concerns, meaning that on a day-to-day level Prevent felt to most respondents to be largely a case of adapting and repurposing existing tools and procedures.

Second, there was considerable similarity between what the respondents' understood as the signs and indicators that a young person is being drawn into terrorism and the behaviours they had previously been trained to identify as indicators of 'vulnerability' to other safeguarding issues such as sudden changes in behaviour, disposition and friendship groups.

When you look at the action it's exactly the same as the actions we'd take against FGM [female genital mutilation] and against child sexual exploitation … It is a safeguarding issue. It's the same, it's about keeping children safe from predators. If you look at, well when I look at a profile of a radicaliser, you know, and a groomer, it's the same tactics and they're targeting the same sorts of vulnerabilities in children. (R61, DSL, secondary school, London)

Third, these narratives of policy and practice continuity were consolidated as staff incorporated the new requirements into their existing practice and organisational culture through activities such as 'mapping' or 'self-assessment' exercises. Without exception, these exercises, in which staff essentially assessed what they needed to do to ensure compliance with the Duty, were reported to have revealed to participants that they were already largely addressing the requirements of the Duty—a 'realisation' often accompanied by strongly recalled feelings of relief. Such processes reflect established patterns of response in schools as they comply with new policy (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012), and helped to generate narratives of policy and practice continuity both for the 'safeguarding' dimension of the Duty and for the curriculum requirements around the promotion of fundamental British values.

We went through [the policy documentation] and decided whether we were meeting what was required as a school or whether we still had some work to do in some areas. For a lot of them we decided that we were already providing adequate provision through our policies … We had a copy of the document each, [name A] was leading the meeting and we read through all of the individual points and we discussed the elements that we cover. So sometimes [name B] would be saying, well we already covered this throughout PSHE, or I would be saying, actually in our scheme of work within history we promote tolerance and democracy through this. (R32, teacher, secondary school, Yorkshire)

These narratives of continuity played an important role in smoothing the introduction of the Duty and softening possible opposition. This was partly about the relief that staff experienced as the Prevent Duty came to be seen as something that did not entail substantial changes to their dayto-day practices. They also helped to 'cushion' fears about possible negative consequences and implications of the Duty.

One of the things that we've found when we've been rolling out the training is staff can get quite nervous about it. They feel, some of them, not all, feel that, what does it exactly mean 'referring our students'? Are we going to lose the element of trust? But we talk about duty of care, which our lecturers have always had for years. Whether or not that's making sure the students are happy, safe, on the right course, all those kinds of elements. And this is just another thing. But we kind of like cushion it with, we refer to our safeguarding team, which I think does make some people feel better. (R2, middle manager, college, Yorkshire)

The fact that it sits under the safeguarding thing makes things much easier with staff, and it's less sort of racist in its tones, and the assumptions and the sort of Islamophobia kind of viewpoint on things disappears when you're saying 'we're just trying to keep kids free from grooming, all types of grooming'. (R21, middle manager, secondary school, Yorkshire)

Yet these narratives of continuity were not entirely straightforward, and there were several instances in which they were disrupted, at least temporarily. In the following quotes, for example, while Prevent is seen as being similar to safeguarding, the straightforward narrative of continuity is disrupted either by the additional 'depth' of surveillance that Prevent entails or by the way that Prevent is seen to have refocused work on safeguarding.

[It is] like safeguarding: we must be there to protect and to be there for the young and vulnerable people, the vulnerable adults and so on. But then Prevent is a little bit more deeper, where we have to know what is terrorism, what is radicalisation, what to listen for. (R19, estates manager, college, Yorkshire)

Obviously, safeguarding had fallen off the radar really for Ofsted, and then suddenly it zoomed. […] we thought […] Ofsted were relaxing about it a bit, suddenly it's right up there, and now they're fierce about it. (R1, DSL, college, Yorkshire)

Other respondents observe how, in comparison with previous safeguarding expectations, the Prevent Duty had foregrounded and intensified security and reputational risks, and induced or deepened anxieties about 'missing something'.

I think what the Prevent agenda does, is, as a teacher it makes you feel anxious and that you will miss something in some way, that you will get into trouble because you'll miss something. (R5, senior leader, secondary school, Yorkshire)

There were also other comments and observations that suggest the continuity between safeguarding and Prevent was more unstable than it might at first glance appear. When asked, teachers were often uncertain about what happens to referrals once they go outside the school or college, and some respondents questioned whether Prevent-related referrals might in fact result in students coming under wider state surveillance mechanisms. For example, one respondent mused over what it meant once a student was on 'the Prevent list':

[Is that] being tracked, followed, all his movements for, I don't know, is that forever? … You are on a database. You are on there aren't you? That's it forever more? If anybody wanted to look it up you are there? All your details and where you live and who you associate with? (R48, middle manager, secondary school, London)

In another interview, an institutional safeguarding lead observed that in other areas of safeguarding they are able to obtain a clearly evidenced assessment of their local risk profile, but that this has not been the case with Prevent-related concerns.

With Prevent, I mean, there's no data available, there's no, it's all secret secret. We're a category two, or category one borough, so it's a high risk borough, but low referrals under eighteens, very low. I don't know what the over eighteen referral rate is, do you know? And there's no comparative data so you can't compare it to other boroughs: it's very, it's all quite clandestine so I can't tell you if things are better elsewhere. […] What is the actual risk? Like, we know, for example with female genital mutilation we know how many, up to about three years ago, two years ago, were affected in [name of borough]. So like, wow, you know, it's huge, so we've got to sort this out, you know? But we don't know how many are affected [in terms of Prevent-related concerns], I don't know how many are affected, and all I know is that we're category one, or whatever, but there's no, I can't find a …, there's …, no-one's given us a description of what that is. Well why is it a category one? What is it? I think it's just based on the number of Muslims, but I don't know. Is it? (R61, DSL, secondary school, London)

Wider evidence also problematises narratives of straightforward continuity. Within our survey data, we found that a substantial proportion of respondents—33% across the whole sample, but 54% among senior leaders—describe the introduction of the Prevent Duty as increasing their personal workload 'a lot' or 'a moderate amount', at least initially. And after the first year of the Duty being in place, there had been a dramatic 75% year-on-year increase in referrals to Channel, the government's anti-radicalisation mentoring scheme (Chap. 1).

As such, while the Prevent-as-safeguarding frame appears to have achieved fairly broad professional support, this narrative of continuity was not quite as straightforward as it might at first have seemed. It contained within it anxieties about the heightened risks and pressures that Prevent brought with it, and there were moments during the research interviews in which the narrative of continuity was disrupted, at least temporarily, as respondents struggled to reconcile apparent contradictions. Furthermore, the dominant narrative of continuity, and the significant professional relief that accompanied it, was at least partly a product of the policy enactment processes through which staff had actively sought to ensure that the Duty fitted within existing practices, policies and their own personal comfort zones.

## **To What Extent Did Staff Perceive the Prevent Duty to Be Exacerbating the Stigmatisation of Muslim Students?**

Where our respondents' perceptions of the Prevent Duty coincided most closely with criticisms of the Duty and of Prevent more broadly was in relation to concerns that the Duty could exacerbate the stigmatisation of Muslim students. There was strong support both within the survey and interview data for the idea that the Prevent Duty was about all forms of extremism and not just that associated with Al Qaeda or Islamic State. Among survey respondents, 82% agreed or agreed strongly, and just 13% disagreed or disagreed strongly, with the statement 'the Prevent Duty is about all forms of extremism'. Nonetheless, over half (57%) the survey respondents said that the Duty has made Muslim students more likely or considerably more likely to feel stigmatised. This pattern was stronger still among BME respondents, where 76% said that the Duty made Muslim students more likely, or considerably more likely, to feel stigmatised.

These findings were supported by the interview data. Here we again found broad agreement that the Duty was intended to address all forms of extremism. Respondents across all of the schools and colleges also spoke about how they and, in most cases, their colleagues had sought to ensure the Duty did not result in Muslim students feeling alienated or stigmatised. Respondents reported that staff training had emphasised that the Duty was about all forms of extremism, that within their institution Prevent had been closely linked to ongoing work around anti-racism and anti-discrimination, and some described working with older Muslim students in their institution to assess how teaching materials relating to Prevent might be perceived and interpreted by other Muslim students.

Nonetheless, concerns persisted that Muslim students might be experiencing greater stigmatisation as a result of the Prevent Duty. These concerns were sometimes externalised and projected onto other institutions. In several cases interviewees drew distinctions between institutions, like their own, where staff were seen to be well trained, supported and managed, and those where 'knee-jerk reactions' and staff 'jumping to conclusions' were more likely to give rise to poor decision making or the Duty being 'done badly' (Busher et al., 2019, p. 456). Yet some respondents also expressed concern about how the Duty might be affecting students within their own institution.

Some of these concerns were related to respondents' appreciation of the wider societal context of social and political marginalisation facing Muslim students and colleagues, including an awareness of the history of and debates surrounding Prevent and the Prevent Duty.

I think some of the negativity that I've picked up on, and it's not been said in the training sessions, it's just in conversations, that although the presentation is all around extremism, radicalisation – that it also includes radicalisation and extreme of right-wing as well as ISIS, and animal rights and the Northern Ireland issues – I think still people still believe it's actually aimed at Muslims and ISIS … They believe that Prevent has come about because of Muslims. I don't think they think Prevent has come about because of animal rights or right-wing. (R17, student advisor, college, Yorkshire)

Respondents' concerns were also bound up with reflections on their own practice and the challenges of dealing with issues around unconscious bias and the limits of their own knowledge and understanding. Some respondents observed that, regardless of the intention of staff, Muslim and non-Muslim students might be treated differently, simply because the mainly white and non-Muslim staff were likely to feel more familiar, and therefore more confident making judgement calls about what did or did not constitute a 'genuine' concern, when dealing with white students and possible issues of far right engagement:

[The anxiety of staff] is not about right-wing extremism, which I think they are confident in challenging. I think it's anything to do with Islam, anything to do with the Muslim side of things, anything to do with Syria. They're worried that they'll say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, be seen as saying and doing the wrong thing. (R1, DSL, college, Yorkshire)

Discussion of these concerns was clearly challenging for respondents, particularly when this tipped into reflections that they might themselves be contributing to forms of racialised stigmatisation. One respondent, for example, reflected on how, when a Muslim primary school student had said that their father was not contactable at the time, this, along with a perception that that particular student's 'life seems to be ruled by the mosque', led them to wonder whether the father might have travelled to Syria—something that with hindsight seemed like a 'massive leap' (R28, teaching assistant, primary school, Yorkshire).

This left some respondents struggling to navigate acute and shifting tensions and anxieties as they tried to pick their way through a complex and seemingly sometimes competing set of responsibilities and emotions. In the following passage, for example, a respondent describes picking up on changes in the behaviour of a student that they think could possibly indicate a process of radicalisation; how reflection on the nature of these indicators raises fears and a sense of guilt when they perceive that they might be acting in a way that is racist; but also how these fears are intertwined with worrying that failure to escalate the case further could result in 'missing something'; and how they eventually come to rationalise this dilemma.

she came in with some Pakistani friends. She'd met her father for the first time in years, and she was wearing a headscarf. And of course, it's hard, as somebody who'd known her for 3 years, with absolutely no link to her Pakistani heritage, the first thing I was thinking was 'What's she wearing that scarf for?' She's with this group of her boyfriend and some Asian girls, and she's now wearing a headscarf. Now that's what I mean – you can't become complacent. I admit to feeling a sense of panic, when I saw that, you know, knowing that she was a vulnerable, looked after child, my first reaction was, 'Oh my god, she's been radicalised somehow. She's got this boyfriend, she's within this group, what on earth has happened?' And of course when you unpick the situation, it wasn't like that at all, I think she was just crying out for a group where she fitted in … what you feel is, you know, you're honestly looking at the situation thinking, you've got a girl who has a half-Pakistani heritage, and yet you're deeming her at risk of radicalisation because she's exploring that part of her culture. That feels, you almost feel racist for thinking that, do you see what I mean? Thinking that you'll get it wrong, and yet, your overriding concern is that you'll miss something. […] I suppose that's what I'm trying to get at, and I don't mean to blame it [the Prevent Duty], because there's an overriding system, I think, you know, better to be vigilant and make that mistake, and find out, like we did, that there was absolutely nothing to be concerned about. […] Does that make sense? (R5, senior leader, secondary school, Yorkshire)

As such, while few respondents perceived in the Prevent Duty an intention to stigmatise Muslim students, there were nonetheless persistent concerns that this could be one of the outcomes. This raised difficult questions for staff and their institutions about how to mitigate these risks and how to resolve and manage the attendant anxieties.

## **To What Extent Did Staff Perceive the Duty to Have a 'Chilling Effect' on Classrooms and Student Voices?**

The final question concerns whether staff perceived that the Prevent Duty was, as anticipated by some critics, having a 'chilling effect' on classrooms and student voices. Here, as expected, respondents again raised a number of concerns. Several reflected on the possible tension between wanting to create open spaces for discussion and the effect that reporting requirements might have on students.

I think particularly at the age we're dealing with, it's more them saying things that don't quite sit right […]. But it is hard, because I can totally see why some of the criticism has come about. If children feel that they can't talk about things or disclose things, then you're not creating the environment that you want. (R28, teaching assistant, primary school, Yorkshire)

Some respondents also spoke about self-censoring among students. For example:

They know they can't say things, they know that they are not allowed to get involved in things, they know it will bring them trouble if they make comments or say things. (R55, senior leader, secondary school, London)

I'd think they'd be quite vocal, but I think they're afraid to be vocal […] I just think like with everything that's going on they don't want to be singled out in terms of – or being misinterpreted. There has to be a culture where they can speak freely and discuss things but I don't think that there is such a culture. (R64, support worker, secondary school, London)

Yet respondents also spoke at length about how they and their institutions had sought to address these challenges, often by reinvigorating or initiating new activities intended to foment discussion about topics around politics, peace, conflict and discrimination. These activities included special assemblies, sometimes led by an external expert speaker; 'drop-down days' where the normal curriculum was suspended to allow groups of students or the whole student cohort to focus on what were perceived to be relevant issues; the inclusion of anti-extremism material during form time in schools; the inclusion of new material within existing curriculum; and extra-curricular activities, such as debating clubs, and intercultural dialogue events. Respondents often perceived these initiatives both to have been largely successful and to have softened staff concerns about the impacts of the Duty.

I think in the early years when we did it, I think maybe because of the things that were being said around, [students] said 'we can't say that to you because you can report us'. So, for me, I had to convince them that, 'that's not what we're here for. We're here to actually create a safe environment for you to be able to share your views and hear what other people say and that will help to bring a balance to your own perspective of things'. So yeah, so I think it varies, but as we're going on with it I think people are getting to understand part of the reasoning behind the Prevent agenda. (R68, support worker, college, London)

Some respondents even argued that the Duty had actually opened up more opportunities for dialogue and discussion on issues around extremism, politics and conflict. Here, the Duty itself was reported to have been a 'vehicle' for discussion.

I do think it serves a purpose in school because, like I said, it's a vehicle for discussion and it's almost, it's something that's been a bit taboo in the past and it's made it, it's brought it to the forefront of school life, and it's something that now not only should be discussed but it has to be discussed. (R24, teacher, secondary school, Yorkshire)

Others saw in the Duty an opportunity to pick up again on approaches to equality and anti-racism that go beyond simple proscription of 'unacceptable' language to critical reflection on how students are engaging with the world around them.

If students are making racist comments, you know, it's not saying 'we don't want any of that language in here', and job done: its more about 'why do you feel like that?', 'where have you got that information?' […] I think it's a new way of thinking. Actually it's not a new way of thinking: it's the old equality and diversity way of thinking, but I think that's slipped over the past few years and we need a lot of input in bringing that back. (R12, student support officer, college, Yorkshire)

The survey data paint a similar picture. To our initial surprise, only 12% of respondents stated that the Duty had resulted in less open discussions on topics such as extremism, intolerance and inequality, compared with 32% who stated that it had made no difference, and 41% who stated that the Duty had actually led to more open discussions around these topics.

These findings would appear to bring into question some of the assumptions about the likely impact of the Duty. While staff had clearly been aware of and alert to the possible negative effect of the Duty in terms of producing a 'chilling effect', most appeared fairly confident that such risks had largely been mitigated. Yet we are only talking about staff perceptions here: it does not tell us how accurately those perceptions reflect the lived reality of students themselves (see Chaps. 4 and 8), and some critics have argued that reports of increased classroom debates in the wake of the introduction of the Duty might be 'conflating the abstract discussion of a news story with a more authentic, dialogic, exchange of views' (Faure-Walker, 2019, p. 372).

Furthermore, it is noticeable in both the survey and interview data that BME respondents were generally less optimistic than white British respondents about the ability of staff to mitigate the possible negative effects of the Duty in this regard. In the survey data, for example, 29% of BME respondents state that the Duty has led to less open discussions, 34% that there has been no change and only 25% that there have been more open discussions. This is in sharp contrast with their white British colleagues, among whom just 9% reported a decline in open discussions, 32% stated that there has been no change and 43% stated that the Duty has led to more open discussions. Given evidence elsewhere about selfcensorship among people who perceive themselves to be a focus of security policy attention (Mythen, Walklate, & Khan, 2013; Younis & Jadhav, 2019), this variation warrants serious attention.

### **Conclusions**

By exploring the enactment of the Prevent Duty during the first 18 months after its introduction, the findings and discussion presented in this chapter begin to highlight the complexity of how the Duty has played out 'on the ground'. In doing so, they challenge the more straightforward narratives often offered by advocates and critics of the Duty.

While supporters of the Duty might point to our findings as evidence of the easy fit between safeguarding and Prevent, and as evidence that the Duty is not having the type of chilling effect that some anticipated, it is clear that the Prevent-as-safeguarding policy frame was not quite as stable as it might at first glance appear. It is also clear that both the seemingly broad professional acceptance of the Duty and the limited reports of a chilling effect in classrooms were to an important extent a product not of policy design as such but of processes of policy enactment by professionals as they sought to minimise the Duty's disruption of their existing practice and institutional culture and ethos.

Similarly, while some of the findings resonate with criticisms of the Duty, particularly around concerns that it has the potential to exacerbate the stigmatisation of Muslim students, they also draw attention to how education professionals have worked to mitigate those risks and have identified opportunities to reinvigorate areas of work around citizenship, democracy, equalities and anti-racism that had previously been de-prioritised.

Such observations do not lend themselves easily to grand narratives of policy success or failure. They might however take us a little closer to an appreciation of something approaching the reality of what the Prevent Duty looks like in practice.

## **References**


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# **4**

# **Student Perspectives on Teaching and the Prevent Policy**

**Alex Elwick, Lee Jerome, and Hans Svennevig**

**Abstract** In this chapter we shift our focus away from adults enacting policy to consider how young people think schools can help them to develop their knowledge and understanding of terrorism and extremism. The evidence suggests that young people generally support the values of democracy and reject the use of political violence, but they want their teachers to develop critical media and political literacy and trust them to explore multiple perspectives. Our review of government-endorsed educational resources concludes that they fall short of what young people want and often represent simplistic and uncritical counter-narratives. We argue that a genuinely educational approach will take more heed of young people's opinions and engage in a more critical exploration of the issues.

UCL Institute of Education, London, UK e-mail: a.elwick@ucl.ac.uk; h.svennevig@ucl.ac.uk

L. Jerome (\*)

A. Elwick • H. Svennevig

Department of Education, Middlesex University, London, UK e-mail: l.jerome@mdx.ac.uk

**Keywords** Prevent Duty • Countering Violent Extremism • Student perspectives • Teaching material

# **Introduction**

Research in relation to Prevent in education has tended, as with much education policy research, to focus on the ways in which the policy is interpreted and enacted, primarily by teachers. In this chapter we focus on what we know about young people's views and experiences (see also Chap. 8). One of the most obvious ways in which young people have been affected by the Prevent Duty is through referrals to the Channel programme and approximately half of all referrals to date have been young people up to the age of 20, including several hundred primary school children (see Chap. 1 for more details). There is also a second strand of activity which is more explicit about promoting a positive set of ideas and values that run counter to extremist narratives. Department for Education (DfE) policy states that 'schools and childcare providers can also build pupils' resilience to radicalisation by promoting fundamental British values and enabling them to challenge extremist views' (DfE, 2015, p. 5). The same DfE guidance has a whole section on building children's resilience towards radicalisation which notes that:

Schools can build pupils' resilience to radicalisation by providing a safe environment for debating controversial issues and helping them to understand how they can influence and participate in decision-making. Schools are already expected to promote the spiritual, moral, social and cultural [SMSC] development of pupils and, within this, fundamental British values. (DfE, 2015, p. 8)

This link between SMSC education, fundamental British values (FBVs) and Prevent is further emphasised in Home Office guidance (2019), which highlights that 'all publicly-funded schools in England are required by law to teach a broad and balanced curriculum which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils' (Home Office, 2019).

As the rest of this volume illustrates, the Prevent policy tends to reduce young people's agency, almost inevitably framing them as vulnerable and in need of protection (see Chap. 7 for a discussion of how age has an impact on this). However, it is also important to remind ourselves that children and young people exercise their own agency in the education system. Most obviously they can choose to engage positively, or challenge and reject aspects of what schools attempt to teach them. More subtly, they bring their own life experiences, identities, preconceptions and concerns to school, and experience the curriculum through those individual perspectives. A complete picture of policy enactment will address not just how high-level policy is translated into practice by professionals, but also how the policy is experienced by the young people who are the object of the policy.

This chapter exemplifies how useful it can be to adopt a student perspective by focusing initially on the issue of what students want to learn about terrorism, extremism and Prevent. Once we have outlined the answer, we move on to consider the extent to which the educational resources endorsed by the government provide the kind of education young people want in relation to these issues. We show there is a mismatch between what students want and what the government directs teachers towards, and we start to explore some of the implications of this tension for teachers.

#### **What Do Students Want to Learn?**

In the first part of this chapter we draw on an evaluation conducted by Jerome and Elwick (2016, 2019a) of a project run by the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT) with ten secondary schools.1 The data includes questionnaires from 232 secondary students and 10 student focus groups. Citizenship teachers in each school planned and taught a unit of work related to Prevent, covering an aspect of terrorism or extremism that they thought would be of relevance and interest to their students. The evaluators invited students to reflect on the lessons they had experienced, and also addressed some more general questions about their knowledge and attitudes. In addition we draw on several other relevant studies, which have started to investigate the Prevent Duty from students' perspectives. Quartermaine (2016) conducted research in six schools, which included 264 student questionnaires and group discussions with 73 students, and Lockley-Scott (2016) conducted similar work in three case study schools. In addition Green (2017) conducted three focus groups with Muslim teenagers, which included some discussion of their experiences of school and college. We have also identified one relevant secondary study in which Janmaat (2018) re-analysed existing data from 420 young people for evidence of their knowledge of, and support for, the FBVs. Given that there are over 12 million people below the age of 18 in the UK, we cannot claim to provide a reliable overview of the situation for all children and young people, especially given the small research base on which we are able to draw. However, the findings from these projects illustrate how useful it is to consider young people's views and the data below identifies some insights into how young people feel Prevent should be implemented in the education system.

It is worth making one obvious observation at the outset—that all young people currently in school were born after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA, and for most of them 'terrorism' is generally associated with Islam. This connection is almost inevitable given the dominant media and policy framing of Islamist extremism, and the promotion of Britishness and British values in various guises as a form of antidote to extremism or radicalisation (Revell & Bryan, 2018). Nevertheless, students in our research routinely told us that they had few opportunities to discuss terrorism, extremism or the media portrayal of these issues, either in school or at home (Jerome & Elwick, 2016). Those we spoke to often argued that not only did they want opportunities to learn about the facts, but they also need to be guided by teachers they trust to develop a deeper understanding of what is happening and how to make sense of it. As we listened to the focus groups we developed a strong sense that the students themselves felt that better knowledge and understanding would help them to build some form of resilience—especially against the fear and confusion that often accompanied high-profile terrorist attacks.

Terrorists want us to be scared … and we just can't be scared of it, so we need to talk about it more.

Here they tell you the facts and the truth … not protecting us … they let us know what these people actually do. (Students quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2016)

In the following sections, we consider some of the data about what students feel about terrorism, extremism and the FBVs, and explore what the students think would be useful to them in building their understanding.

#### **Young People Are Already Very Supportive of the FBVs and Less Likely to Support Political Violence Than Adults**

When teachers enact Prevent in the curriculum, this is often framed by the requirement to promote the FBVs (as the other chapters in this volume confirm). In this section we argue that listening to students provides several reasons why this might be both unnecessary and counterproductive.

Within the Prevent policy the FBVs are seen as one way in which schools can promote resilience, as those who agree with the FBVs are likely to reject extremist ideologies. Janmaat (2018) has undertaken a secondary analysis of survey data collected from school students before the introduction of the FBV guidance and Prevent Duty and reports that there were already near universal levels of support for the values listed as FBVs. He combined a number of survey items related to young people's level of support for democracy, the rule of law and toleration (now bundled together in policy as the FBVs) in order to construct what he describes as a measure of 'support for FBVs'. This measure refers to students' attitudes towards the concepts, not to the Prevent policy itself. Janmaat reports that levels of support for FBVs among young people are already very high (97.5% of the respondents scored higher than the neutral mid-point of 3 on his 1–5 FBV scale [p. 260]) and do not differ between the white British majority and various minority ethnic groups (p. 251).

There is also some evidence to suggest that young people are particularly sceptical about whether acts of political violence can ever be justified. In the ACT evaluation research (Jerome & Elwick, 2016) the questionnaires included some questions to explore whether political violence could be justified for a variety of causes (such as religion, the environment, animal rights). These questions were based on an opinion poll conducted in 2011 and discussed in Sobolewska (2012), to enable a comparison between the student sample and the general population. As Sobolewska indicates in her discussion of the opinion poll data, younger respondents tended to be less likely to suggest any justification for terrorism could be legitimate, and our findings reflect this. For example, when asked if terrorism could be justified on the grounds of environmental causes, animal rights or protecting one's faith, only 6–8% thought it could ever be justified (this includes 'strongly agree' and 'agree' options on a 5-point scale, with the mid-point being 'uncertain'). In the opinion poll this was 8–9% when respondents drawn from the general population were given a straightforward yes/no/don't know option, but 13–15% when they were allowed to offer a 'qualified yes'. Over half the opinion poll respondents thought terrorism could be justified if it was part of a fight against foreign occupation or an oppressive government, but only 8–13% of students agreed. The large difference between the students and the general population in the final two questions may well indicate a lack of understanding of how contextual factors may influence judgements about the use of violence, an interpretation supported by the observation that more students opted for 'uncertain' in the last two questions.

Given these two observations, one might reasonably conclude that there is no particular reason to believe that all young people need a specific FBV intervention—on the face of it they are almost unanimously supportive of the concepts now described as FBVs and less likely to support violence than the general population. One might criticise this aspect of policy for being unnecessary, but perhaps no more than that. However, the qualitative data from other studies (e.g. Green, 2017) has indicated that some students experience the specific framing of democracy, the rule of law and tolerance as being 'fundamentally British' in particularly problematic ways, and this raises the possibility that rather than being merely redundant, it may have unintended negative effects.

#### **Some Muslim Students Experience FBV as Discriminatory, Exclusionary and Intimidating**

Islamophobia in schools has been the subject of much debate that predates the introduction of the Prevent Duty (see, e.g. Van Driel, 2004). Against this background, it is perhaps unsurprising that Lockley-Scott (2016) noted that Muslim students do not always feel school is a 'safe place' because of negative labelling and stereotyping—both from students and sometimes from staff. Several of her female respondents reported they felt they were being closely observed and treated in 'a bad way'. For example,

[School] is not always a safe place as ignorant people will associate you with Isis. My headscarf makes society view me as a terrorist.

I think people are intimidated because I wear a headscarf. (Students quoted in Lockley-Scott, 2016, p. 6)

Lockley-Scott also notes that Muslim students sometimes reported an anxiety about 'who's listening', leading to self-censorship. These findings suggest that Muslim students may find the discussion of terrorism and the FBVs particularly uncomfortable.

This conclusion is supported by Green's focus groups with Muslim teenagers in Tower Hamlets, London, who reported feeling discrimination, being spied on and experiencing pressure to secularise. One group who attended the same sixth form cited the example of a school talk by the Quilliam Foundation, which they interpreted as implying, 'if you're not a Quilliam Muslim, you're an extreme Muslim' (Green, 2017, p. 247). For a majority of these young people, despite the fact that they identified as British, greatly valued democracy and embraced the principle of toleration, they felt their Britishness was often not recognised by others and that they were marginalised. One of Green's participants argued:

I don't think British culture and Islam contradict so much, but I think that they want us to change so much that we're no longer following Islam, we're just following British culture. (Focus group participant from Green, 2017, p. 248)

This sentiment implies that the conflation of FBVs and Britishness, and the sustained critique of multiculturalism (Vincent, 2019) are making themselves felt in particularly harmful ways for some young Muslims.

#### **Young People Want to Learn About Terrorism and Extremism to Build Their Religious, Political and Critical Media Literacy**

Given the commonplace connection between Islam and terrorism in the media and social attitudes (Matthes, Schmuck, & von Sikorski, 2019), it is not surprising that Quartermaine found 'there is a genuine interest from pupils in discussing the relationship between terrorism and religion' (2016, p. 25). When they were given the opportunity to engage in such discussions, students were indeed grateful for the opportunity to critically explore the relationship between religion and terrorism. In particular, one of the consistent findings from the evaluation of the ACT project (Jerome & Elwick, 2016) related to the way that students came to perceive the role of the media in reinforcing the idea that there is a relationship between Islam and terrorism:

It's strange to think that maybe the way the media represents these people completely changes the opinion of a person. They might have been fine with a certain person before and then after they've read something about the person or their religion and it completely changes the way they see people … (Student quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2016)

The teachers in the ACT project generally made sure that students were introduced to several different examples of terrorism, such as the IRA or anti-apartheid activists, in order to expand their understanding beyond Islamist terrorism. Having learned about other forms of terrorism and political violence, several students noted that 'the media only really talks about Muslim terrorists, they brush over other forms of terrorism'. For some they were then able to think about how this influenced their own views, both about terrorism and about Islam.

I don't know because the media is so powerful I think we're all just brainwashed and we're all stuck in that mentality that we should be scared of them [Muslims]. (Student quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2019a)

This raises the prospect that the right kind of critical educational engagement with Prevent and the FBVs may also provide students with the resources to question and intervene in the unconscious perpetuation of islamophobia.2

Here there are clear indications of the kind of knowledge that is helpful to expand students' understanding of the relevant issues. For example, having studied media representations, one student commented:

The word Islamophobia is quite interesting because you hear about all the racism that goes on in the world and it kind of sums it up … I like giving it a name, you can identify it more. (Student quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2019a)

Quartermaine's students said they wanted opportunities to consider the ideological views of the 9/11 bombers, and those students who studied the motivations of terrorists as part of the ACT project confirmed that this was valuable and that they were capable of engaging with the openended nature of such an investigation. This questions assumptions from some quarters that young people need to be protected from extremist ideology.

The whole project is to make the students aware of what protests are like for different people and to understand the full story because when you go home the media don't give you the full story … teachers don't want you to believe that – they want you to get the full story. (Student quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2019a)

Students often referred to this idea that they wanted to move beyond partial media representations and to get the 'whole story' including the views of those involved in terrorism. In this way students felt that teachers were best placed to help them move beyond the superficial knowledge they gain through media and social media:

Before I didn't know, I knew what was going on the news, but I didn't know how to understand it.

Lessons help you understand why they're doing it … sometimes when you hear things on the news you think 'why are they doing that?' (Students quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2019a)

If schools do not offer this kind of educational approach, it is difficult to imagine where else young people might get such an education.

Some students demonstrated that there was a level of basic knowledge that they would not gain if it was not covered in lessons. In one school with high levels of English Defence League (EDL) activity in the community, one group of Muslim boys speculated that the 'far right' might be a group of people who were very supportive of rights, demonstrating that it is dangerous to assume young people learn about such issues through informal means. A similar point was made in a focus group:

Before we were learning about this I didn't really know what an extremist group was, I never heard about the neo-Nazis or things like that, but when we started learning about it I started like not only knowing what the groups were and what they did but also two points, like I didn't know you could have a different opinion, I thought they would all just be the same … (Student quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2019a)

Several students in our focus groups went beyond the personal factors often discussed in relation to radicalisation to consider how such processes are shaped by political context and lived experience. For example, some students speculated on how a person's attitudes towards groups such as ISIS might be shaped by how they perceive the West's bombing and other foreign policy interventions in majority Muslim countries, or how they might experience Britain's democracy if they felt marginalised, discriminated against and disempowered.

Obviously a group like ISIS didn't start from nothing, obviously there's something there to help it start and help it build … there's a purpose to it and something has made them do it.

I think the main thing that is the most difficult thing to find out about this topic is why the extremist groups … obviously they have their reasons and their beliefs … I think that's the hardest thing to find out and I don't know if you'll ever get the answer to it. (Student quoted in Jerome & Elwick, 2019a)

In these considerations students demonstrated an ability to apply political empathy and consider how similar situations could be interpreted by others, and to consider how those drawn to terrorism might justify their own actions and perceive their own agency. In doing so they in fact reflect some of the academic critique of simplistic and over-individualised accounts of how people come to engage in or support political violence (Coolsaet, 2016).

The first part of this chapter provides some useful insights into secondary students' perspectives on the Prevent Duty. First, it suggests that young people are sympathetic to the concepts included in the FBV framework, but the framing of the ideas as 'fundamental' and 'British' may be unnecessary (they are supported anyway) and possibly counterproductive. Second, it indicates that young people want opportunities to learn about terrorism, the motivations of terrorists and the different forms of terrorism. Third, they also value opportunities to learn about how the media represents terrorism and the relationship between this and their own perceptions of who constitutes a threat. And finally, we would argue that these responses indicate young people have the capacity to live with a level of uncertainty—they want to be better informed about terrorism as a political phenomenon, but they do not expect to find easy answers or simple explanations.

### **What Do Government-Endorsed Educational Resources Offer Students?**

Having reflected in the previous section on what the evidence to date tells us about student views related to the Prevent Duty, in this section we examine the educational resources that have been developed and promoted by the government, and consider to what extent they meet the challenges outlined above.

We explore resources suggested for teachers in the Educate Against Hate (EAH) website (https://educateagainsthate.com), which has been developed by the Department for Education and the Home Office 'to provide practical advice, support and resources to protect children from extremism and radicalisation'. Methodologically, we follow Ford's (2019) analysis of how textbooks discuss terrorism and extremism, which employs a flexible approach to discourse analysis, reading materials to explore the 'themes, labels, subjectivities and imagery deployed' (Ford, 2019, p. 5). In practical terms this means looking at the ways in which key concepts are defined and employed, what examples are given, who is represented and what narratives are constructed. Our primary objective was to examine the materials promoted by the government to consider how they interpreted the Prevent Duty, the balance they struck between safeguarding and the FBVs, and the extent to which they engaged with the kinds of issues highlighted by the students themselves (as discussed above).

At the time of writing the DfE was reviewing the website, with the possibility that a considerable re-design or replacement project may be implemented. However, as of January 2020 the Teachers Classroom Resource section of the website included references to 40 resources. In deciding which of these to focus on for our review, we went through several screening processes. First, we excluded any links to generic websites or resources which were not explicitly related to the Prevent Duty, the DfE guidance or FBVs, and which failed to refer to terrorism, extremism or radicalisation. One example of such material is UNICEF's Rights Respecting Schools Award which, despite being a popular resource for promoting children's rights, does not relate explicitly to the rationale, aims or themes of the EAH website, nor the Prevent/FBV context. A second stage of screening consisted in testing the web-links, where projects were held on other websites, this resulted in several more exclusions where there were no live links to follow or where users had to register personal details with a third party organisation to get access to material. This left 26 resources for further investigation. Based on the titles and introductory pages for each we identified which resources explicitly addressed the following criteria:


We then selected five resources3 which met four or more of these criteria. This was intended to enable us to focus on those resources most likely to provide comprehensive coverage to enable a fair evaluation of the content. These resources are summarised in Table 4.1.

The sample we have selected represents a rather open and inclusive approach to the production of resources. Some schools and colleges have been involved, some community groups with potentially relevant expertise have contributed resources (e.g. organisations with expertise in working with young people or tackling islamophobia), and victim perspectives are also represented. In reviewing this selection of resources, we seek to illustrate how the Prevent Duty is being enacted within these documents


**Table 4.1** Resources selected for review from Educate Against Hate website

and thus how these contributors have already re-framed the Prevent Duty from their own perspectives (Lundie, 2017, p. 16). We cannot comment on how teachers might select, adapt or interpret such materials in practice (see Chap. 8), and so here we offer some questions that might be useful for teachers encountering these resources.

#### **Where Do These Resources Come from? Who Produced Them and Why?**

Lundie (2017) has noted that the Prevent Duty provided the stimulus for a new group of experts to emerge, often from backgrounds other than education. Such experts emerge as policy entrepreneurs or champions (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012), as the policy opens up new career prospects and new opportunities to advocate for their interpretation of the policy. Whilst the uniform style of the website tends to obscure these issues of provenance, our review demonstrated that the resources reflect the particular expertise or backgrounds of the organisation that produced them. For example, Miriam's Vision was produced by a trust established by her family; unsurprisingly, therefore, this resource tends to focus on the victims of terrorism, rather than on understanding the nature of terrorism itself. By contrast the Getting on Together resources emerge from a long-term ongoing project in Wales to counteract Islamophobia in the wake of the 9/11 bombings. This therefore tends to focus on presenting positive messages about Islam. No Love for Hate is produced by two further education (FE) colleges in Prevent Priority Areas and is largely focused on right-wing extremism in these local areas.

Whilst each of these resources therefore takes a distinctive approach, this reflects the nature, purpose and interests of the groups producing them. One issue that is relevant here is that the organisations rarely have expertise in the issues being discussed, for example, UK Youth produced the Democracy Challenge, but its expertise is in youth associations rather than democracy. Similarly, No Love for Hate is produced by staff and students at the FE colleges, but no contributors are identified as having expertise in Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) or right-wing extremism. This may well be a contributory factor in the issues we discuss below.

#### **What Is the Purpose of These Resources? Do They Promote Critical Thinking or Passive Acceptance of a Simplified Narrative?**

The FBVs are presented in policy as something to be 'promoted' whereas the young people discussed above are clear that they want opportunities for critical, open-ended discussion. Teachers have to make their own judgement about the extent to which they are happy to promote the FBVs as some kind of antidote to the 'fixed, rigid and dogmatic' views espoused by extremists (LGFL, 2015), as opposed to using them as a starting point for deeper exploration. Some of the resources simply imported government definitions of the FBVs and the definition of extremism as 'opposition' to them (see, e.g. Think, Protect, Connect). Similarly, No Love for Hate featured an on-line quiz that included the following question:


At times the resources slipped from discussing (or promoting) the FBVs into narrow cultural representations of Britishness, such as Big Ben, the Queen, fish and chips (Think, Protect, Connect). Another approach was adopted by Democracy Challenge, which simply describes and advocates for a rather narrow (formal, Westminster-centred) version of British democracy. Similarly, the citizenship lessons in Miriam's Vision largely avoid issues related to terrorism in favour of exploring the range of campaigning strategies available to people protesting against the third runway at Heathrow. These examples position the teacher as an uncritical promoter of pre-determined answers and fail to provide students with the opportunities they wanted to discuss and explore the FBVs and terrorism.

In contrast to these positive presentations of the FBVs, No Love for Hate is more explicit in attacking the basis of far-right extremist belief. In this project there is a Prezi on-line presentation which plays along to Beethoven's 7th Symphony. This shows the rise of European fascism as a result of the Wall Street Crash, featuring graphic pictures of dying children and prison camp inmates, and then argues the rise of far-right extremism in the USA and Europe today is a parallel political phenomenon. There is no learning activity, simply some facts and information aligned into a single and simplistic narrative. The shocking images, stirring sound-track and single simplistic narrative/perspective actually illustrate the very propaganda methods students are warned against in a previous lesson on far-right social media strategies.

Taken together these examples indicate that counter-narratives within these resources tend to be fairly simplistic and lack criticality or nuanced engagement with a range of perspectives. This stood out as one of the key requests of young people in our research—they trusted teachers to tell them the truth and introduce them to multiple perspectives. Whilst teachers are among the most trusted professionals in young people's lives (Ipsos MORI, 2018), it seems to us that such trust might be squandered if teachers use it to promote simplified and simplistic thinking, where students want critical and open thinking. The promotion of ideas such as democracy, liberty and toleration in the abstract also fails to induct young people into the kinds of difficult 'turbulent' discussions that are essential in democracy (Davies, 2014).

#### **Who Is Represented in the Resources and How Are They Represented?**

It is not surprising that sometimes teachers reproduce some of the dominant social tropes evident in mainstream discourse around terrorism and extremism (see Chap. 3). To some extent one could argue that for a teacher to engage in preventing something, they have to imagine some sort of threat or problem, and there is some evidence that teachers come to perceive (elements of) the communities they serve as the problem to be solved (Jerome & Elwick, 2019b).

Some of the most obvious examples of unconscious bias are evident in the material produced by teachers—perhaps reflecting the fact that they may lack expertise in the area, lack professional editing services or may have had less time to spend on such projects. It may also reflect the fact that they are imagining their resources being used and interpreted in their particular context, responding to their perception of the problem. In Think, Protect, Connect, for example, all but two of the examples of extremism relate to Islamism and are all related to individuals, rather than groups or movements, but the two examples of the far-right are both linked to images of flags not individuals. In this way pre-existing stereotypes of what terrorists look like are likely to be reinforced—perhaps this is even more serious given this resource claims to be particularly suitable for students with autism, who the authors describe as 'more likely to take things literally' (p. 5 of the teacher toolkit). By contrast, No Love for Hate is almost exclusively concerned with far-right extremism and portrays such people as directly comparable to Nazis. A quiz includes this question:


None of these responses acknowledge the boy's perceptions, and as Busher's (2015) research into the EDL has shown, such sentiments are complex but very real among people who endorse such organisations. These approaches seem to fail to provide space to consider the different perspectives of people and how their views develop, which students in our research said they wanted. In their place there are sometimes rather stereotypical or caricatured images of people identified as extremist.

#### **Do These Resources Engage Directly with the Problem of Terrorism and Extremism, or Do They Skirt Around the Issues?**

As noted above, some resources, such as Democracy Challenge, are framed on the EAH website as linked to the FBVs, but in reality they do not engage with the broader debates about the nature of democracy or the threats to it. Others which appear as though they will tackle the Prevent agenda more directly often seem to skirt around the core issues of terrorism, extremism and the dilemmas that arise. Getting on Together includes some distinctive elements; for example, it represents a range of positive voices about Islam (to counteract negative images in mainstream culture) and it suggests that there are different types of extremism. We supplemented our review by looking at the primary lesson on extremism, to assess how the authors explored this issue, and here the story of Rosa Parks is presented for discussion, presumably as an example of positive extremism. As is all too typical, the Rosa Parks story is invoked as an individual story of bravery, rather than as a collective story of political action (Schmitz, 2015), but here it seems compounded by the suggestion that it might also be considered an example of extremism.

The citizenship lessons in Miriam's Vision similarly hint at a topic that appears to be at the core of the Prevent agenda, but then veer away. These lessons start with a focus on the Human Rights Act and prompt students to think about what level of surveillance is compatible with our right to privacy. These opening activities encourage students to consider how rights must be balanced, but the lessons then move on to consider how one can achieve non-violent change (through the case study of the third runway at Heathrow) and therefore fail to explore the big issue hinted at initially. A third example is evident in the Democracy Challenge where teachers are urged to engage in 'hot potato' debates, such as around immigration, but there are no resources or guidance to help with this (beyond logistical advice around putting students into groups, handing out sticky notes, etc.), and no clear objective about the purpose of such a discussion.

## **Conclusion**

The data considered in this chapter indicate that young people are generally supportive of the FBVs but that the translation of them into the curriculum may lead to new problems of marginalisation or 'othering'. This is not to imply that an educational response is not potentially helpful, and we have outlined some of the ways that students feel schools could help them develop their understanding. Their requests seem fairly obvious—they want to build their understanding of terrorism and extremism so they can develop a better understanding of what is happening around them, and in this they find specific information valuable, such as different types of terrorism, the perspectives of those involved, and the way the media and social media operates in relation to recruitment and reporting. Yet the materials on offer to teachers to help them address this demand largely fall short. In the second part of this chapter, we have demonstrated that some of the resources risk reproducing negative or simplistic ideas that are evident in popular cultural tropes around terrorism and extremism. Starting with a focus on young people leads us to be concerned that the Prevent Duty may well be contributing to problems with the policy rather than equipping young people with the capacity to make sense of the post-9/11 world in which they live.

#### **Notes**


### **References**


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# **5**

# **Enacting the Prevent Duty in Early Childhood Education Settings**

**Jenny Robson**

**Abstract** This chapter examines the implementation of the Prevent Duty in early childhood education (ECE) provision in England. Findings from a small-scale empirical study suggest that ECE practitioners simultaneously performed, resisted and embodied the requirements of the Prevent Duty in practice. ECE practitioners were performative in their response to the requirement to promote fundamental British values (FBVs) as they evidenced compliance within an environment of regulation. However, ECE practitioners simultaneously operated a pedagogy rich in values education in which children were positioned as constructors of values. The layering of counter-terrorism within safeguarding policy led to a repositioning of practices of surveillance of children and families, which resonates with some critical readings of counter-terrorism policy in ECE.

Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London, London, UK e-mail: j.robson@uel.ac.uk

J. Robson (\*)

**Keywords** Early childhood education • Counter-terrorism • Values education • Safeguarding • Fundamental British values

## **Chapter Summary**

The Prevent Duty brought providers of publicly funded early childhood education (ECE) provision in England within the scope of the government's counter-terrorism strategy in 2015. Findings from a small-scale empirical study exploring the implementation of this new duty are discussed in this chapter. They show that enactment of the Prevent Duty within ECE provision was complex and multi-layered: practitioners simultaneously performed, resisted and embodied the Prevent Duty in their practice. Following a brief examination of the context, the chapter is structured into three parts: the response to fundamental British values (FBVs), values education in ECE and the implications of the alignment of Prevent with safeguarding policy.

Whilst ECE practitioners in this study were critical of FBVs from the perspective of their emphasis on Britishness, they evidenced compliance in order to meet the requirements of regulation. Visual displays designed by ECE practitioners to communicate FBVs are performative acts; however, the positioning of symbols of Britishness to represent values potentially obscured reflection on the associations such symbols may have with nationalism, colonialism and oppression. Values are central to relationships and the negotiation of knowledge in ECE and they shape everyday pedagogical practice. In this study, findings suggest that values in ECE remained distant from and unconstrained by FBVs. Children constructed and co-constructed values of relevance to their lives and their immediate issues of concern. This reflected a contextual moral pedagogy where children are positioned by ECE practitioners as competent in forming values. The alignment of safeguarding and counter-terrorism within ECE policy led to practices associated with preventing people being drawn into terrorism becoming synonymous with safeguarding children, legitimising new acts of surveillance. This chapter concludes by raising questions about the ways in which values and relationships between children, practitioners and families are governed by counter-terrorism policy. Such debates have the potential to provide a critical reading of counterterrorism strategy in the ECE sector.

### **Context: Prevent and Early Childhood Education**

Policy development and implementation in ECE is not developed outside of 'real life' (Baldock, Fitzgerald, & Kay, 2013) but is shaped by a social cultural context, where there is an increased emphasis on national security as a result of terrorist attacks and the subsequent loss of human life. ECE policy and debates surrounding policy implementation can be viewed as a 'sociocultural mirror' (New, 2009, p. 309). McKendrick and Finch (2016) suggest that there is a prevailing approach of strategies associated with securitisation across a range of child and family policy including, for example, enhanced practices of surveillance and that such policy is situated within a global narrative of a 'war on terror' (p. 3). Early childhood education settings, including childminders and nurseries, as registered early years childcare providers in England, came within the scope of the Prevent Duty if they delivered publicly funded provision for children aged from 2 to 4 (HMG, 2015 updated 2019).

The UK governments' policy response to terrorism had gradually shifted from a reactive to a preventative approach with an increased emphasis on work with communities (Panjwani, 2016). However, the implications and responsibilities arising from this shift for practitioners working with young children and families in communities remained ambiguous until the introduction of the Prevent Duty (Robson, 2019a). Lander (2016) argues that this new duty imposed a political agenda of securitisation onto practitioners working in community contexts and those working directly with children. Significantly, the ECE sector is now harnessed by statute to the government's counter-terrorism strategy (Robson, 2015) and practitioners working within registered early years childcare provision are constituted as both subjects and agents of state counter-terrorism policy (Robson, 2019a).

The Prevent Duty placed two statutory requirements on the ECE sector; first, registered early years providers were required to promote a predetermined set of fundamental British values (FBVs) and, second, to identify those at risk of radicalisation. ECE policy designs lead to structures that promote accountability through regulation (Osgood, 2010). The Prevent Duty was reinforced through the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (Department for Education, 2017). This policy sets out requirements across all aspects of ECE practice and providers are inspected by the state to assess their compliance with it. Similarly, the regulatory framework for education in England requires inspectors of registered early years provision to consider how well FBVs are promoted. Initially, this was part of the judgement on leadership and management (Ofsted, 2015) but in 2019 a revised regulatory framework changed the way the duty to promote FBVs is inspected in two ways. First, FBVs are situated within the judgement evaluating how the provision promotes children's personal development and, specifically, the extent to which the provider develops children's 'understanding of fundamental British values' (Ofsted, 2019a, p. 38).

Second, although FBVs remain a focus in the judgement on leadership and management, the new regulatory framework makes clear that leadership and management is inadequate where 'British values are not actively promoted in practice' (Ofsted, 2019a, p. 41). Furthermore, the 2015 Prevent Duty statutory guidance states that failure to promote FBVs in registered provision may lead to local authorities withdrawing early education funding (HMG, 2015). Through the inspection framework for ECE, the parallel policy agendas of counter-terrorism and safeguarding are aligned. Guidance on the inspection of safeguarding requires inspectors to assess how leaders create a culture of safeguarding; this includes how they keep 'children and learning safe from the dangers of radicalisation and extremism' (Ofsted, 2019b, p. 13). Regulation in this context is a practice of surveillance where inspectors assess compliance with the Prevent Duty and in doing so validate both FBVs and the practice of identifying families or individuals at risk of radicalisation. This raises questions about how ECE practitioners navigate the roles assigned to them by this powerful policy discourse of counter-terrorism, particularly the ways in which they evaluate the implications of the Prevent Duty for their relationship with children and families or question the relevance of FBVs to their pedagogical practice.

#### **Outline of Research Project**

This chapter draws on a small-scale empirical research study reported in Robson (2019a, b). Conducted within the interpretivist paradigm (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005), the study explored the multiple understandings of the Prevent duty operating in a small sample of six ECE providers in an ethnically diverse city in England. ECE settings were registered early years childcare providers subject to the Prevent Duty. There is a diversity of terminology applied in policy, practice and research in the study of the education and care of young children (Lloyd, 2012). The term 'early childhood education' is used here to describe publicly funded early education and care for young children that are provided by registered early years providers who are private enterprises or not for profit organisations. Participants in this study included ECE practitioners with responsibility for leadership of pedagogy and ECE practice and children (aged two to four). Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with practitioners and walking tours of the provision with children and practitioners. During the walking tours, participants shared documentation emerging from their engagement with the curriculum and pedagogy in the setting. As this was a small-scale study the findings arising from the analysis of data are intended to raise questions about, and provide insights into, the implementation of the Prevent Duty within a specific context. The findings, therefore, cannot be generalised across all ECE settings in England. In the discussion that follows, pseudonyms are used for all participants and the ECE settings in order to maintain anonymity.

# **The Performance of Fundamental British Values in Early Childhood**

The emphasis placed on Britishness in FBVs was contested by the ECE practitioners. They questioned the relevance of an instituted form of Britishness to children, their families and the practitioners in the nursery. Specifically, practitioners appeared troubled that the diverse histories, nationalities and ethnic backgrounds of children and families within the ECE provision may not be considered British or that the families may not identify themselves with the specific version of Britishness represented in the policy of FBVs. One ECE practitioner stated:

I don't think some children and families would see themselves as British. If I go home and say to my Mum 'I am British' she would say 'No you are not you are…' We have been given FBV as a tool to work with, but a lot of people would question FBV because they would not see themselves as British. (Sandra, Little House Day Nursery)

Sandra's perspective reflected the complexity of individual identities and histories within the practitioner group and the way this affected their enactment of the policy. The ECE practitioners' questioning of Britishness resonates with the critique of FBVs in the broader literature concerned with primary and secondary education. For example, Lander's (2016) analysis queries whether FBVs can be claimed as uniquely British or whether there is an assumption in the Prevent Duty that FBVs are shared by all citizens.

Representations of FBVs in resources were challenged by ECE practitioners, reflecting recent critical perspectives in the literature where materials used to promote FBVs were found to 'rarely trouble the nature of the values or which present them in ways that are simplistic and formulaic' (Revell & Bryan, 2018, p. 13). In the Grand House Day Nursery practitioners were critical in their approach to resources produced commercially to support ECE providers in implementing FBVs. One ECE practitioner reflected:

A lot of the resources we saw on line were posters that had a British flag on it. Our children are not from a British background and we did not want to display something that did not belong to them. We did not want to display the flag. The posters had the Queen's face and how did that relate to the [young] children? (Rebecca, Grand House Day Nursery)

Symbols such as the Union Flag and the monarchy were considered as patriotic and nationalistic; many practitioners suggested that they were decontextualized from children's lives and therefore irrelevant. The criticality evidenced by the ECE practitioners is significantly different to that Moncrieffe and Moncrieffe found in primary school teachers, who endorsed images to represent FBVs and maintained 'the power of exclusive monocultural white identities and perspectives' (2019, p. 66.). The ECE practitioners identified that FBVs are represented in and by the symbols of civic life in resources available to ECE settings for purchase. Symbols of Britishness, now aligned to national values, are considered by the ECE practitioners as an exclusionary force. An alternative perspective on national values is provided by Soutphommasane (2012 also cited by Vincent, 2019); he proposed that a 'shared national identity' is characterised by 'reciprocity and cooperation' enabling a 'community of shared belief' (pp. 71–72). Within this approach national identity emerges through a shared public culture represented in institutions and values; this is a dynamic process of debate opening possibilities for dialogue and new interpretations of national values. However, FBVs are perceived and experienced by the ECE practitioners as an imposed emblem of Britishness distant from their practice.

While the ECE practitioners challenged the appropriateness of particular and imposed views of Britishness, their responses to FBVs were complex and sometimes contradictory (Robson, 2019a). Despite the criticality evident above, the walking tours with the ECE practitioners in the settings revealed that there were displays about FBVs in the settings. Such displays generally included the names of the four FBVs and the Union Flag together with some information about the practices that realised the value. For example, in Grand House Nursery, the display stated that the practice of role modelling behaviours was linked to the rule of law. Similarly, the practices of children's planning meetings and children's role in setting up their activities were linked to democracy. In Arcade Day Nursery, the display in the reception area included a statement of how the values of the nursery mapped across to FBVs. Vincent (2019) suggested that this approach to the promotion of FBVs takes the form of 'Representing Britain' (p. 23) where displays listing the FBVs have Union Flag decoration and symbols associated with Britain. All the ECE practitioners referred to their displays in the context of regulation and the requirement to provide evidence during the inspection visit that they were promoting FBVs. The ECE practitioners understood this to be important because, at the time of the fieldwork, the degree to which the setting promoted FBVs formed part of the inspection judgement on leadership and management in the provision. Although the displays gave some insight into how the provision was meeting its statutory obligations, they were afforded low status by the ECE practitioners relative to other aspects of the visual environment that reflected the everyday practice with children and children's engagement with learning. Most of the ECE practitioners were apologetic in introducing the displays about FBVs; it was as if they considered them outside of their ECE practice.

The displays formed part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the ECE practitioners to evidence compliance with the requirement to promote FBVs. They can be considered as performative acts by the practitioner (Butler, 1997; Osgood, 2006). The ECE practitioners here are performatively constituted; they are subject to the duty to FBVs, and they perform this duty in order to avoid the negative consequences arising from an inadequate inspection judgement. However, my analysis of the daily practice of values education (discussed later in the chapter) reveals how the ECE practitioners intervene and disrupt the hegemonic discourse of FBVs through the pedagogy in early childhood. FBVs are performed in a specific way for the purpose of inspection and this reflects the power of surveillance through inspection. Farrell (2016) in an analysis of FBVs in the context of schools concluded that teachers are required to 'be surveilled in the truth game of Britishness,' (p. 14) and this highlights the reach of FBVs as a practice of power deployed in early childhood and sustained through all sectors of education. While the practitioners provided a consistent rationale for an explicit public commitment to FBVs, this performativity may have obscured reflection on the ways in which values are communicated within ECE through the material environment (Johansson & Puroila, 2016). For some practitioners, families and children the imagery associated with FBVs, explicitly the Union Flag and the monarchy, may be considered as symbols of nationalism, colonialism, oppression and power. The visual representation of FBVs by the ECE practitioners contrasted with the highly critical perspective they adopted towards the symbols of Britishness in commercially available resources to support the implementation of FBVs in nurseries. The complexity of ECE practitioners' response to FBVs is now explored further by examining the ways in which they deployed pedagogies of values education.

#### **Values Education in Early Childhood and Fundamental British Values**

Values education is a complex concept in early childhood; it can be understood as an education practice through which children are assumed to learn values as well as the norms and skills reflected in those values (Halstead & Taylor, 2000). Values are 'guiding principles in life' (Schwartz, 2012, p. 17) and they are ideals that enable the 'evaluation of beliefs and actions' (Halstead, 1996, p. 5). In this way, they form the basis of moral judgements in determining what is legitimate or unjustifiable and appropriate or inappropriate. Within research, policy and practice the focus on values in ECE pre-dates the introduction of the Prevent Duty and the requirement to promote FBVs.

Supra-national organisations advocating for the development of national policy and practice frameworks in ECE have emphasised the centrality of values. UNESCO (2000) claims that the 'value orientations of children are largely determined by the time they reach the age of formal schooling' (p. 2) and therefore state governments need to create a 'value-based environment' (p. 4) in early childhood provision together with a child-centred values education programme that is free from political, social or religious abuse. Osler (2015) and UNESCO (2015) emphasise the centrality of values, for example fairness, empathy and respect, in developing understandings of citizenship and a sense of belonging to a community. Elsewhere (Robson, 2019a) I have raised the question as to whether the policy of promoting FBVs in ECE can be separated from the political context of measures to address counter-terrorism or indeed whether the promotion of FBVs is considered by the UK government as a values education programme.

The ECE practitioners in this study were subject to the *Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage* (DFE, 2017); however, this framework for curriculum and pedagogy omits any mention of FBVs or clarification of how FBVs relates to both the 'areas for learning and development' and the 'early learning goals' (p. 10). The framework states that registered providers of ECE are subject to the Prevent Duty. This layering of counter-terrorism policy over the statutory framework for ECE creates ambiguity, tension and complexity for ECE practitioners as they enact policy in practice (Robson & Martin, 2019) and more explicitly the pedagogical relationships that exist in ECE between practitioners and children and between children (Robson, 2019b).

This problem can be situated in broader debates about the nature of values education, which often revolve around the central question as to whether values should be 'instilled' in children or whether children should be taught 'to explore and develop their own values' (Halstead, 1996, p. 9). In practice, such values can be explicit, where it is directed by the state through the curriculum or other policy texts, or implicit within the practices of ECE (Thornberg, 2016). Einarsdottir et al. (2015), researching in a Nordic context, argue that practitioners are commissioned by state governments to mediate values that are formulated in the political arena; however, values are also embedded within the pedagogy of ECE (Emilson & Johansson, 2009). Values education, as a pedagogical practice, mediates moral and political values to children (Thornberg, 2016) and therefore moral pedagogies provide an understanding of how FBVs are navigated in ECE practice in England. Basourakos (1999) proposes a theory for values or moral education that contrasts conventional moral pedagogy and a contextual moral pedagogy. In the former, values are absolute and the role of the ECE practitioner is to transmit a predetermined set of values to children. FBVs as a set of values specified by the state in national policy assume a conventional moral pedagogy (Robson 2019a, b). However, a contextual moral pedagogy leads to a paradigmatic shift where the ECE practitioners engage children in constructing their own understanding of moral values and practices. The ECE practitioners I interviewed stated:

FBV are not asking us to do anything differently but bringing it out more. So, do what you are doing but extending it more. They [values] are really important – what we are teaching the children will have an impact when they are older. (Sandra, Little House Nursery)

The values have always been here. The focus on Fundamental British Values has made us more serious about them. (Farah, Arcade Day Nursery)

Here Sandra reflected that values had always been implicit in the pedagogical practice and her understanding was that FBVs did not bring about a change in practice. However, Farah and Sandra emphasised that the requirement to promote FBVs led to an increased focus on values education; this was a consistent theme emerging from the interview data where the practitioners indicated there was a heightened awareness of the practice of values education.

ECE practitioners named pedagogical practices that enabled a focus on values education, for example, the forums enabling children's participation in the weekly and daily planning of the curriculum and learning activities. Labelled by the practitioners as 'children's planning meetings' such forums were led and documented by children. The visual records of the meeting were displayed as a way of validating and celebrating children's contributions to the planning. In naming the values observed in children's planning meetings practitioners principally focused on those included within the four FBVs. However, my analysis revealed a rich diversity of values operating in children's planning meetings including for example, care, kindness, empathy, solidarity, respect and joy. Practitioners stated that the planning meetings provided opportunities for children to learn about democracy as an FBV and specifically about democratic relationships between children and between children and adults. However, this practice moved beyond a rhetorical commitment to democracy by applying democracy as a principle to guide pedagogical relationships in ECE. Einarsdottir et al. (2015) understand this practice as a 'lived democracy' (p. 104) where children's everyday experience is a democratic process. The practitioners' pedagogy of implicit values education, where values are explored within the everyday practice (Halstead, 1996), enabled children to experience values beyond the four FBVs. Although children's engagement in values education is unconstrained by the narrow focus of FBVs, practitioners appeared constrained by the four FBVs when reflecting on the values implicit in children's planning meetings. In this way the practitioners perform the legitimised FBVs.

Values education was sustained within the everyday practice of the setting. In Big House Day Nursery, relationships between children, families and communities were explored as part of the area of learning 'Understanding the World' within the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (DFE, 2017). The decision to focus on exploring relationships as 'Kindness in the Community' was made by the children and practitioners as it was significant to their relationships; this was evident from the documentation emerging from the children's planning meetings. The ECE practitioners commented that kindness as a concept and value was accessible and meaningful to children. While kindness as a value is not one of the four FBVs it had high relevance to the relationships between children, families and communities and my analysis suggests that it led children to a deeper exploration of other values such as empathy, care, compassion and appreciation of diversity in the community. Children made and subsequently shared tokens of kindness with a range of people in the vicinity of the ECE provision including the homeless people they met every day, people who worked in local shops or in the public transport stations. They visited the Mosque after Friday Prayers to distribute tokens of kindness. Here, children's learning about values is contextualised within the social and cultural environment of the ECE provision and its wider community (Johansson & Puroila, 2016). Children constructed their understanding of kindness through lived experience. My analysis revealed that ECE practitioners lifted to the foreground the four FBVs in their dialogues about pedagogical practice. This resonates with Johansson's (2011) suggestion that values may be communicated consciously in ECE provision. However, the reality of values education went beyond the compliance to and performance of FBVs; the ECE practitioners engaged children in a contextual moral pedagogy where they are constructors of values and unconstrained by the narrow focus of the four FBVs. Viewed through this perspective, values education in early childhood extends beyond the UK government's explicit policy rationale for FBVs of counter-terrorism and national security.

#### **The Securitisation of Safeguarding?**

The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (DFE, 2017) sets out the safeguarding and welfare requirements that providers of ECE must take to 'keep children safe and promote their welfare' (p. 5), including having due regard to the Prevent Duty. Similarly, within the guidance on inspection of safeguarding in early years settings 'radicalisation and/or extremist behaviour' is included as one of the areas of concern where practitioners may need to take safeguarding action (Ofsted, 2019b, pp. 5–6). By positioning counter-terrorism as part of safeguarding policy, the practices associated with preventing people from being drawn into terrorism become aligned with safeguarding. I suggest this is an evolving process of securitisation of safeguarding practice in ECE, where securitisation is the process by which the law requires practitioners to enact the demands of national security (Gearon, 2015). In this way safeguarding policies, as practices of power, produce rules that organise and guide ECE practice (see Chap. 3).

The ECE practitioners revealed a story of their initial encounters with the Prevent Duty. Farah stated that she first became aware of the Prevent Duty when she participated in safeguarding training, which included information about the threat of terrorism and terrorist-related incidents in their locality.

I first heard of it [Prevent] on my safeguarding course and they explained that the characteristics of radicalisation are more common now and they emphasised the dangers. (Farah, Arcade Day Nursery)

This situated the training as dealing with the threat of terrorism rather than the risk to the individual child or families arising from radicalisation. Nargis and Sacha understood and accepted that safeguarding practice had been extended to include a focus on identifying families at risk of radicalisation:

The idea came along in 2015 and we had training. The children love telling you things and you might hear something that rings a bell. Talk to the safeguarding officer. If they are going on holiday – where are they staying? Yes, it is part of safeguarding. (Nargis, Angel Community Nursery)

We had a few trainings about safeguarding – some of the things [observation] we naturally do. (Sacha, Big House Day Nursery)

These practitioners indicated there had not been opportunities to reflect on the implications arising from this extension of safeguarding practice. Whilst I am not questioning the importance of keeping children safe from radicalisation and extremist behaviour, the implications arising from the fusion of these two policy agendas within ECE practice is, I suggest, problematic in two ways and this is explored further below.

First, although ECE practitioners already engage in practices of observation of families as part of safeguarding the welfare of children, the Prevent Duty extends the focus of surveillance to include identification of families or their colleagues at risk of radicalisation. The ECE practitioners, in this study, appear to have an unquestioning acceptance of this shift in practice.

…it is to prevent children from being dragged into terrorism or it can be adults. It is not just with children it is with staff and parents as well. We always have to look out for it. (Farah, Arcade Day Nursery)

We have a duty of care and we have to be aware when we observe children's play or staff and how to raise concerns. We have to be mindful and keep an eye out. I think it comes with knowing the children and noting any changes in their behaviour. Also being confident. (Rosa, Little Castle Community Nursery)

I suggest that the absence of opportunities for reflection on this layering of policy and practice is problematic as there are potential implications for practice, particularly as ECE practitioners enact the demands of national security policy, in pedagogical relationships with families (and this is explored further below). Mary and Sacha actively engaged in surveillance of children, families and colleagues for potential signs of radicalisation and this was embedded in daily practice within the ECE provision.

It is our duty of care to report anything that we may be concerned about with regard to radicalisation or if the child or the family are at risk of radicalisation. If there have been any prolonged absences or any language that the children are using. Trips to certain parts of the world and if they do not return on the date in which they had said. It is our duty to report these concerns. (Mary, Grand House Day Nursery)

In the early years sector it is more about absences and monitoring those absences because with quite young children they are not necessarily going to be drawn into terrorism but their families, their siblings and their wider community. We record all absences and we will contact the parents and ask them where they were and ask them what was happening. If we were informed that they had taken the children away unexpectedly then we would inform the manager and the safeguarding lead for the organisation. If we are observing children as we do every day, we would notice any changes in their behaviour and anything they would be mentioning. (Sacha, Big House Day Nursery)

The ECE practitioners absorbed this new aspect of surveillance into their practice just as Vincent (2019) observed teachers in primary and secondary schools absorb FBVs into the curriculum and pedagogical practice. In these ECE settings the Prevent Duty had established a narrative that positioned all children, families and colleagues as being at risk of radicalisation or as potential terrorists; this narrative was legitimised through its inclusion within the powerful mandate of safeguarding policy and practice.

Second, the way in which the Prevent Duty positions ECE practitioners in relation to children and their families is potentially in conflict with other guidance that governs their practice. One of the stated aims of the Early Years Foundation Stage (DfE, 2017) is to provide 'partnership working between practitioners and with parents/carers' (p. 5) enabled by a statutory requirement for each child to have a key person whose responsibilities include 'to engage and support parents and/or carers in guiding their child's development at home.' (p. 10). Central to this pedagogical relationship between practitioners, children and families is the mutual concern for the learning and care of the child. However, the national priority for counter-terrorism intrudes into this space and further extends the process of securitisation of early childhood practice. The ECE practitioners felt compelled to 'look out for it [signs of radicalisation]' (Farah) or 'keep an eye out [for potential terrorists]'(Rosa) in their work with children and families. Central to this practice of surveillance was to view everyday occurrences, for example, absence from the nursery or children's speech; through the lens of terrorism. In this way counter-terrorism became a focus in the pedagogical relationships between families and the ECE practitioners. My research brings into question the way the Prevent Duty affects the role of ECE provision in the community. Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence (2013) argue that early childhood institutions are forums 'where children and adults may participate together in projects of social, cultural, political and economic significance' (p. 80). They suggest that one such significant project arises 'from its potential for the establishment and strengthening of social networks of relationships between children, between adults (both parents and other adults engaged in the institution) and between children and adults' (pp. 84–85) where ECE providers can contribute to the cohesion of local communities. A focus for further research on the implementation of the Prevent Duty emerges from this perspective; this could explore how social networks operating within and around ECE provision are potentially affected by practices of surveillance whose aim is identify those at risk of radicalisation.

# **Conclusion**

The introduction of the Prevent Duty in ECE has potentially far reaching implications for practice in England. Through the intersection of policies concerned with counter-terrorism, early childhood education and care and safeguarding ECE practitioners are influenced by the powerful discourse surrounding measures to counter-terrorism. The research reported in this chapter brings to the foreground two areas for further debate in the ECE sector: first, the role of values and second, the nature of risk being safeguarded against. FBVs are a pre-determined and explicit set of values and as such they assume values can be transmitted to children (Robson, 2019a). As values formulated in the political arena and at some distance from ECE practice, FBVs may be in tension with the values implicit within the everyday pedagogical practice in ECE. Practitioners in the ECE sector are placed under pressure to comply with the policy of FBVs and this may compromise their beliefs about appropriate values education in early childhood. A consideration of the role of children as constructors or co-constructors of values may lead to a deeper understanding of the richness and diversity of values that are central to children's lives. Through this process alternative narratives about values education may emerge that are not constrained by the narrow focus of FBVs or the performativity associated with evidencing compliance.

Second, the requirement to identify those at risk of radicalisation through practices of surveillance has the potential to affect relationships in ECE. This study has revealed how the focus of practices associated with safeguarding has been extended from a focus on children's welfare to include the identification of families and practitioners at risk of radicalisation. Everyday occurrences within the ECE setting and in relationships with families were viewed through the powerful narrative of counterterrorism. Alternative strategies to prevent people being drawn into terrorism may emerge if there is a focus on how ECE provision may initiate, develop and sustain social networks of relationships that could contribute to cohesion in the local community. Such a reflection may deflect the focus on the individual as an object of risk and refocus on structural issues of inequality and injustice that may be experienced by young children and their families.

This chapter contributes to a growing field of scholarship examining the implications arising from the Prevent Duty for practitioners working with children and their family. Research reported in this chapter makes a small contribution to the field in three ways; first, it gives visibility to the process of securitisation where ECE practitioners are required to enact the requirements of national security policy in their everyday practice. Second, the status and pedagogy of values education as an everyday practice in ECE is revealed as unconstrained by the hegemonic narrative of state specified values in the FBVs. The contextual moral pedagogy that underpinned values education positions children as capable constructors of values which they apply to evaluate actions and events. Applied in this way pedagogy becomes a powerful tool for producing alternative narratives on values to those prescribed in policy. Third, this chapter reveals the complex way in which the ECE practitioners in this study implemented the Prevent Duty; this was simultaneously performed, resisted and embodied in their pedagogy and engagement with colleagues, children and their families.

## **References**


#### **5 Enacting the Prevent Duty in Early Childhood Education…**


uploads/attachment\_data/file/596329/Early\_years\_inspection\_ handbook.pdf


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# **6**

# **Enacting the Prevent Duty in Primary Schools**

**Raquel da Silva, Giuditta Fontana, and Megan A. Armstrong**

**Abstract** This chapter examines the enactment of the Prevent Duty in primary schools since its introduction in July 2015, with a focus on its broad implementation, the raising of Prevent-related concerns, and the

R. da Silva (\*)

University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Centre for International Studies, ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: R.B.P.daSilva@bham.ac.uk

G. Fontana University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: g.fontana@bham.ac.uk

M. A. Armstrong Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: M.A.Armstrong@ljmu.ac.uk

This chapter was supported by the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (pf170092), the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2015-026), and the Quality Outputs Scheme at the College of Social Sciences, University of Birmingham. We thank Hamdi Yasin, Rumaysa Mahmood, and Alice Russell for their research assistance. We thank Dr Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Dr Erzsebet Strausz for allowing us to adapt their questionnaire to this project.

embedding of Prevent into fundamental British values (FBVs). Our findings illustrate how this policy enactment responds to a context determined by the idiosyncrasies of the primary school setting, of the wider community, and of the political and strategic environment. We find that primary school educators display a positive acceptance of the Prevent Duty, largely motivated by its incorporation in a wider professional culture of safeguarding and that, with rare exceptions, they are supportive of embedding Prevent in the teaching of FBVs.

**Keywords** Prevent Duty • Safeguarding • Education • Primary schools • Fundamental British values

In this chapter, we examine how the Prevent Duty has been enacted in primary schools since its introduction in July 2015. We focus on its broad implementation, the raising of Prevent-related concerns, and the embedding of Prevent into fundamental British values (FBVs).

Our findings illustrate how this policy enactment (Ball, McGuire, & Braun, 2013) is dynamic, responding to a context determined by the idiosyncrasies of the primary school setting, as well as by developments in the wider community and political environment. Specifically, we find that the primary school educators who participated in this research displayed a positive acceptance of the Prevent Duty, largely motivated by its incorporation in a wider professional culture of safeguarding, and within existing pedagogical practices around teaching values. We also show how the implementation of the Duty is evolving away from focusing on Islamist extremism, under the pressure of a changing socio-political context. Furthermore, and in contrast with some of the other chapters in this volume, we encountered very few expressed criticisms either of the embedding of Prevent within the teaching of FBVs or indeed of the labelling of these values as 'British'.

Whilst this chapter does not aim to provide an exhaustive account of how the Prevent Duty is enacted in primary schools throughout the UK, the breadth and variety of our data allow us to offer a valuable snapshot of the main approaches adopted in the West Midlands and how educators have assessed the implications of these approaches for their local community.

### **Methods**

We draw on the findings of a larger project examining the operationalisation of the Prevent Duty in primary schools in the West Midlands, carried out in 2018–2019. The West Midlands is a particularly interesting case study of the implementation of the Prevent Duty because, at the time of writing, three of its six local authorities are Prevent priority areas: Birmingham, Coventry, and Walsall. Priority areas are geographic regions considered to have a higher threat level (Mastroe, 2016; Home Office, 2019). As such, they are provided with additional funding, a local Prevent coordinator, and in some cases one or more local Prevent Education Officers (PEOs) (see Chap. 2).

The project included an online survey, sent to all primary schools in the West Midlands. The survey was based on Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Erzsebet Strausz's survey on the Prevent Duty in the National Health Service (Heath-Kelly & Strausz, 2019). Questions were added or rephrased to adapt the survey to the primary school context and to further explore scenarios related to right-wing extremism. Free-text boxes were added to afford participants the opportunity to reflect, comment, and elaborate on their responses. Between February and July 2019, 345 primary school educators answered the survey. This sample included educators at all stages of their career, teaching at all primary stages in state schools, academies, faith schools, and independent schools throughout the six local authorities in the West Midlands. The respondents included teaching assistants, teachers, and Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs) as well as school leaders.

The survey data was complemented by 32 semi-structured interviews with primary school educators in the West Midlands and five interviews with PEOs from the region. Questions focused on how primary school educators understood the Prevent Duty; how they enacted the Duty; and how they perceived the impact and implications of the Duty in their own sector of work. Throughout this chapter, we use both the free-text comments by survey respondents and excerpts from interview transcripts.

## **Implementing the Prevent Duty in Primary Education in the West Midlands**

The statutory guidance for keeping children safe in education (DfE, 2019) presents the Prevent Duty as part and parcel of wider safeguarding practices. Thus, schools, like all sectors affected (e.g., health, social services), are expected to integrate Prevent into existing safeguarding policies and procedures (Home Office, 2019). Primary and secondary schools specifically,

need to demonstrate that they are protecting children and young people from being drawn into terrorism by having robust safeguarding policies in place to identify children at risk, and intervening as appropriate. (Home Office, 2019)

Despite the controversy generated by the introduction of the Prevent Duty in sectors like education, and criticisms from some observers that the Duty leads to the 'blurring of social and security policy' (Ragazzi, 2017, p. 168), 74.8% of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that 'The Prevent Duty belongs within education'. Some explained this view with reference to the belief that they are ideally positioned to notice and to deal with any behavioural changes, including signs of radicalisation:

teachers often get to know children very well and be able to see the changes in them to prevent radicalisation before it becomes too late. (Anonymous survey respondent)

In line with the existing literature on Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) and education (Davies, 2016; Bryan, 2017; Busher, Choudhury, & Thomas, 2019; Elwick & Jerome, 2019), we found that the Prevent Duty, in the primary school context, has been broadly accepted as part and parcel of safeguarding. Indeed, the majority of survey respondents (71%) agreed or strongly agreed with the statement 'The Prevent Duty is just safeguarding. It is the same as safeguarding pupils from domestic abuse and sexual abuse'. However, their responses to the Duty were not limited to a position of 'pragmatic acceptance' (Busher et al., 2019). Rather, some of the respondents adopted more positive attitudes, fuelled partly by the way that the Duty resonated with existing perceptions of young children as victims, as individuals at risk of abuse. One PEO elaborated on this point in an interview:

Actually, saying just like any other issue FGM, honour based violence, domestic abuse, all these different issues that can affect people, you see Prevent the same. So, what I say to them [primary school educators] is: when you are dealing with a CSE [child sexual exploitation] case you see the young people as victims, when you're dealing with a Prevent case you are doing the same thing, they're victims of radicalisation or grooming. (PEO1)

In the same line of thought, one survey respondent stated in the free-text comments:

As a school we must protect children from all forms of harm and radicalisation is a form of harm. (Anonymous survey respondent)

Some interviewees also underscored that aligning Prevent with safeguarding has helped educators come to terms with the policy as an instrument to protect rather than to police children and their families. As a headteacher put it, when seen in this light the Prevent Duty becomes:

just part of normal safeguarding, I don't want the big hysteria about it […] I think it is just another part of safeguarding, in the same way that if you saw a child with a bruise, or if a child disclosed something to you. (E18, headteacher, Birmingham)

Similarly, another headteacher noted:

[if] there are still some headteachers that believe that Prevent is too invasive, erm, I'm not one of those I'm afraid. (E23, headteacher, Birmingham)

Only one survey respondent contemplated the potentially detrimental consequences of the Prevent Duty, in general, and of a Channel referral in particular, which he considered to be more than 'just safeguarding' as it 'can label people as terrorists' and 'lead to dreadful consequences that affect many people in the community'.

This overall confidence in the Prevent Duty and in its implementation is, as already mentioned, fuelled by its conflation with existing safeguarding policies and practices. According to our survey data, the quality of the Prevent-related training provided to educators has also played an important role here. The Department for Education requires that all staff undertake this type of training. The Home Office offers WRAP (Workshop to Raise Awareness about Prevent) training and a variety of external organisations have also developed Prevent-related training tailored to schools. This training should, according to the statutory guidance, give teachers 'the knowledge and confidence' to identify at-risk pupils, as well as how to refer pupils for further support (Home Office, 2019, paragraph 70). Among our survey respondents, 96% stated that the training they had received explained the signs of radicalisation well or very well. This contributed to the overwhelming majority of survey respondents stating that they were confident or very confident in referring a query about radicalisation (90.9%). As one of the respondents reported, they felt confident because they felt well equipped 'with the information needed to identify signs of radicalisation'.

The data collected through interviews was however less positive regarding the quality of the training received, particularly the WRAP training. In contrast to survey respondents, some interviewees emphasised that the Prevent training they attended was not suitable for the primary school context. Reflecting on the WRAP training, one interviewee stated:

I find it difficult to relate a lot of the training materials to this [primary school] environment because it is very much secondary based and teenager based and because of how the vulnerable groups are identified. In that respect you can't just walk away with the training materials and apply what you have learned. (E2, Assistant Head, Walsall)

In this sense, most interviewees suggested that the training ought to be better tailored to the age group they deal with by clearly presenting the risks and signs of radicalisation for primary school children, as they did not believe that they are the same as for secondary school pupils. Most of our primary school respondents saw children as potential victims rather than perpetrators when it came to Prevent-related issues. For example,

Generally [because of] the age of our children they probably are less susceptible to Prevent issues so we're not… if we get a trigger about a worry there is usually something else behind it. (E2, Assistant Head, Walsall)

This was not, however, the opinion of one of the PEOs interviewed, who considered that years 5 and 6 are 'crucial times when children could be radicalised' (PEO5), which justifies raising awareness, in the training context, of case studies of older children who are at risk of radicalisation.

In sum, the data collected through both surveys and interviews displayed a rather positive acceptance of the Prevent Duty, rooted in the incorporation of Prevent in a wider culture of safeguarding. Whilst survey respondents considered Prevent-related training had boosted their confidence in implementing the Duty, interviewees pointed out that training materials need to be better tailored to the primary school context.

## **Raising Prevent-Related Safeguarding Concerns**

Despite their positive acceptance of the Prevent Duty, respondents were not passive in its implementation. In fact, we found that the enactment of the Duty was dynamic and responded to its wider environment. Respondent's reflections on the scenarios that would lead them to raise a Prevent-related safeguarding concern, illustrated how they navigate such dynamic interaction between the Prevent Duty and the socio-political context in which it is implemented.

In keeping with the incorporation of the Prevent Duty in a broader professional culture of safeguarding, the vast majority of respondents reported that they would pass on to their DSL anything they were unsure or uncomfortable about. For example, 86.9% of survey respondents stated they were likely or very likely to make a safeguarding query if a student draws or writes about weapons:

It depends on the child, but I would be concerned if they were obsessing over something like that [weapons]. I would raise it, even if it turned out to be nothing. (Anonymous survey respondent)

Although mentioning the need to observe children's behaviours over time and to be sensitive to the context of specific actions and statements, survey respondents reported that, in practice, they most often side-lined concerns, doubts, and ambiguities, in favour of referring:

It could be something or nothing but it is better to report and it be nothing that to ignore and it cause harm to someone. (Anonymous survey respondent)

In this context, time and again, falling back on wider safeguarding practices and policies, respondents reported that they would flag up any potential problems to allow the DSL to make the decision. Indeed, most of our respondents expressed trust in their schools' procedures, with 93.1% of survey respondents trusting their school to make sensible and appropriate decisions about referring pupils and staff to the Local Authority through the Prevent Duty. As a survey respondent put it:

I know I am well supported in school and I would report to DSL confidently, even if my concerns turned out to be wrong. (Anonymous survey respondent)

There was also broad agreement among survey respondents about the kinds of actions or behaviours that would prompt them to make a referral. Despite the fact that the majority had received training specific to this area, several survey respondents and interviewees mentioned 'common sense' as the main determinant for a referral. For example, when asked 'If you saw a student or staff member watching video clips of beheadings, would you make a safeguarding query?', the overwhelming majority of survey respondents (87.5%) answered yes. They explained their choice by using emphatic exclamations such as: 'Does this need an explanation??!!! Of course!!', 'It is immoral!'; 'Definitely!', and 'Most definitely! That is completely unacceptable.' Only a handful of respondents shared more in-depth reflections on this issue, such as:

This is certainly a cause for concern but again does not instantly mean a student has been radicalised or has any intention of causing harm. It is important to find out why they sort [sic] out those videos and by who they had been told about the videos. It could be something as innocent as they had heard about it on social media and were curious about what people were talking about rather than seeking it out because they agreed with the video. (Anonymous survey respondent)

Most survey respondents (88%) similarly described themselves as likely or very likely to make a safeguarding query if a student or staff member made hateful statements against an ethnic, sexual, or another minority group. In addition, 73.8% of survey respondents said that they were likely or very likely to make a safeguarding query if they heard a student or staff member express anger about immigration and non-British cultures. As one survey respondent put it:

this is most likely a racism concern and would need to be spoken to with DSL as it is very serious. (Anonymous survey respondent)

However, many pointed out that hateful statements and anger about immigration are possibly not a safeguarding concern, nor are they directly linked to radicalisation towards extremism. In this context, several survey respondents referred to different protocols when faced with potential instances of far-right extremism as compared with the red flags of Islamist extremism. In this vein, anti-immigration and hateful statements, in their views, would not result in referrals under the Prevent Duty:

I would think the person was racist and ignorant, but this doesn't necessarily mean they would be radicalised by a far-right group. (Anonymous survey respondent)

Rather, these actions would be addressed through the school's equality and behaviour policy:

It would be dealt with following our behaviour policy. Parents would also be contacted and possibly invited in to discuss pupil monitored family early help. (Anonymous survey respondent)

The fact that the respondents were more likely to resort to Prevent in the case of actions commonly associated with Islamist extremism may be partly explained by the content of the training. Some interviewees reported that the training that they had attended had placed undue weight on Islamist extremism. As one respondent put it:

[the training] was way too orientated around so-called 'Muslim extremists' and it just had a little bit about white supremacy at the end, and it just was quite… perhaps biased? (E16, Assistant Headteacher, Birmingham)

In this context, one headteacher in Birmingham recounted a negative experience with training delivered by the police:

The initial training that we had was via the police… I invited a number of my parent governors, all the staff and I have quite a lot of staff that are from Muslim faith Muslim background and I asked everybody in school to attend really for this special training. I thought it was really important and we really [made] a big deal out of it and after the training it didn't go down as well as I would have liked. It was very instructional there was no debate there was no questions… The presentation we had was very one sided about we need to be aware that this could be happening within our schools and we need to look out for these signs and things like that. Actually there were parts of it that made me feel really uncomfortable with the audience that were sitting there. So I went away from that session and I went away wanting to do the WRAP training myself because I thought I'll get better informed and I'll do it myself in school. (E13, headteacher, Birmingham)

The Deputy Head in this same school also mentioned this event, observing that it 'made some members of the community feel uncomfortable' and 'was potentially a little bit inflammatory for some members of our team and community' (E15, Deputy Head, Birmingham).

However, as mentioned at the beginning of this section, the enactment of the Prevent Duty in primary schools is dynamic and influenced by the wider socio-political context. In this sense, survey respondents were largely aware of the increasing threat from right-wing extremism in the UK. 73.9% of them agreed or strongly agreed with the statement 'I worry that right-wing terrorist attacks will become more frequent'. In the free text comments, several respondents pointed at the rise of populist politics around Brexit, which were seen to have legitimised anti-immigration and hateful statements:

Islamophobia coupled with issues around immigration have to lead to a rise in right wing parties lashing out against communities that perceive to be less British /English than them. (Anonymous survey respondent)

One survey respondent also added that the changing political context may trigger right-wing extremism:

The popularity of parties such as Brexit and the emergence of right-wing groups in Europe give credence to right wing ideologies of a more extreme nature. (Anonymous survey respondent)

Thus, research participants pointed out that the changing political context affected the content of Prevent training and the enactment of the Duty at large. As one interviewee reflected:

Initially with Prevent, because of some of the things in the media and because it was more to do with Daesh and all of that, that's the only aspect schools focused on. What we didn't do is the far right, we didn't do any of those things. Now, I think sort of a year or two on we are broadening and looking at it in a wider view than perhaps initially. It was just because we had had significant things in the news and it was all around those sorts of things. (E3, Deputy DSL, Walsall)

Another headteacher echoed this perspective in pointing out that the training 'has changed over the years so the first time it did seem to fall more on Islamic terrorism, but we feel that it is far more balanced now' (E6, Headteacher, Walsall).

When reflecting on raising a Prevent-related safeguarding query, research participants largely adopted a better-safe-than-sorry attitude, consistent with a wider professional culture of safeguarding. However, they also highlighted that the Prevent Duty was being enacted dynamically, responding to the wider socio-political context in the UK. As a consequence of this changing political landscape, for example, it was reported that Prevent training is placing more emphasis on right-wing extremism.

## **Embedding the Prevent Duty into the Promotion of Fundamental British Values**

As already mentioned, most of our respondents did not problematise the incorporation of Prevent into wider safeguarding practices and, in fact, appeared to welcome Prevent as an extension of their duty of care. In the evidence collected through surveys and interviews, participants also spontaneously expressed support for the teaching of values in primary schools and for the embedding of Prevent into FBVs.

DfE guidelines state that 'schools and childcare providers can also build pupils' resilience to radicalisation by promoting fundamental British values' (DfE, 2015, p.5). Primary school educators in our study appear to have accepted these guidelines and incorporated them into their practice. During the interviews, when asked if the Prevent Duty is embedded in the curriculum, most interviewees brought up their school's commitment to FBVs:

In terms of the Prevent Duty as such, I mean, for us the document itself is only about three or four pages. So we looked at it and thought about what do we do already and what do we need to look at. You know, we knew that British values have to be taught, we were already doing some of it but, I mean, we just needed to make it much more clearer [sic]. I think there is a lot more of a sharper focus on what's being done now because of the Prevent Duty. I think people feel a responsibility. (E13, Headteacher, Birmingham)

Another interviewee provided a similar response:

So, the way that we kind of take it, is so much to the British values route. We at my school have this specific curriculum for our school called the Three Bs, erm, and it's about our school, and then Birmingham and Britain, so it's about being part of those three communities…when we looked at, erm, you know, different types of extremism and, erm, people, young people being drawn to that, we thought a lot about the isolation and actually we want our children to feel that they are part of our community so that they are not vulnerable to that kind of, erm, coercion as it were. (E16, Assistant Headteacher, Birmingham)

However, to make the most of their educational potential, some respondents believed that Prevent-related issues (as well as other issues such as FGM) should be tackled in a child-friendly way, being sensitive to the children's needs, and using age-appropriate terminology:

In terms of the curriculum we tend to do it in terms of how to keep safe as oppose to Prevent itself because of the age of the children. (E6, Headteacher, Walsall)

As a consequence, they reported embedding Prevent in the curriculum in subjects like religious education (RE) and Personal Social Health Education (PSHE), through topics such as 'relationship coercion', 'prejudice and discrimination', 'understanding different religions', 'be respectful of one another's beliefs', which are also discussed in school assemblies. As a headteacher described:

We don't stand in front of our children going 'right, today we're doing about Prevent and how you stop something that doesn't look right'. (E23, Headteacher, Birmingham)

Embedding Prevent into other subjects also helped solve practical challenges related with time and resources for the primary school curriculum: there are so many things at the moment that I feel particularly with the tight curriculum and particularly with the pressures placed on schools, particularly within inner city areas where let's be honest a lot of these problems do arise, you've got the same high expectations required, expected of these children and the teachers, so for example you know you've got to get a pass rate of 75% which is the same in my area of Birmingham as it is in leafy home counties you know it just seems a bit absurd. You've got this intensity of curriculum alongside a plethora of other problems, you know you've got social issues. So what I'd say is that whilst there's definitely will I just don't think there's the support or the time, the curriculum is incredibly tight and I feel as if you would need such a long time to address certain issues class by class and we just don't have that time and this is probably a well-trod point made by a lot of teachers but unfortunately this is the case. (E26, Teacher, Birmingham)

Throughout their interviews, participants displayed a positive acceptance of teaching values in primary education. Only one educator problematized the notion of FBVs, and the fact that at present it encompasses Prevent:

even calling it British values annoys me a little because surely some values are values to everybody. […] You can almost alienate people by saying they're British but we talk about our values and what we hold dear here. (E13, Headteacher, Birmingham)

This positive acceptance of teaching values and normalisation of the label of FBVs contrasts with the findings of research in the early childhood context (Chap. 5), where educators are broadly supportive of teaching values, but critical of labelling them as 'British'.

# **Conclusion**

In this chapter, we have examined the enactment of the Prevent Duty in primary schools in the West Midlands, focusing on the implementation of the Duty, the raising of Prevent-related safeguarding concerns, and on the embedding of Prevent into FBVs. We have reported three main findings.

First, we find that primary school educators display a positive acceptance of the Prevent Duty. One survey respondent summarised that Prevent is 'doing a great job and helping to educate people'. Similarly to secondary school teachers (see Chap. 7), primary school teachers in our study reported that Prevent has been successfully incorporated into wider safeguarding practices. Thus, despite being conscious of the need to observe children's behaviours over time and to be sensitive to the context of specific actions and statements, our respondents reported that they would rather be safe than sorry. This attitude is wholly consistent with wider safeguarding procedures and leads to educators raising safeguarding concerns and trusting that the school leadership will deal with them appropriately. In this context, very few respondents reflected on the potentially detrimental consequences of a Prevent referral for the children, their families, and the wider community.

Second, we found that the Prevent Duty is enacted dynamically, responding to the context of primary education but also to the changing wider socio-political context. For example, respondents reflected that, initially, the Prevent Duty was broadly perceived as focusing on instances of Islamist extremism. Our data shows that this emphasis has shifted and that educators and those responsible for training have started to pay more attention to right-wing extremism. This shift may reflect local circumstances: in 2018, the largest proportion of individuals 'who received Channel support for concerns related to right-wing extremism […] was from the West Midlands' (Home Office, 2018, p.15). It is also likely to be a response to national efforts by the Home Office to underscore that Prevent addresses all forms of violent extremism. Perhaps most importantly, a large part of our data collection was carried out in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings of March 2019, which placed right-wing political violence high on the news agenda.

Third, similarly to other practitioners, primary school educators in our study were broadly supportive of conveying values in their classrooms. In keeping with official guidance, the Prevent Duty is embedded in the primary school curriculum primarily through the teaching of FBVs. Educators reported that talking about FBVs helps tackle Prevent-related issues in a child-friendly way. Many interviewees expressed support for teaching values such as democracy and tolerance and viewed schools as best placed to do so. As a survey respondent summarised: 'In education we can educate pupils about the correct values for everyone without prejudice'. In fact, only one interviewee reflected on the potentially detrimental and alienating impact of labelling values as 'British'. The scarcity of such critical attitudes is in contrast to the findings reported in other chapters in this volume (see Chaps. 3, 5, and 8).

Finally, there is a clear need for more multi-method and multi-level research to test these findings in regions other than the West Midlands. However, one message emerged consistently from the survey and interviews: educators repeated time and again that if the Prevent Duty is to work in the interests of children and the wider community, the specific requirements and context of primary schools should be considered at all stages of its enactment—from training, to operationalisation, to referral.

## **References**


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# **7**

# **Enacting the Prevent Duty in Secondary Schools**

**James Lewis**

**Abstract** This chapter explores the ways that context shapes the enactment of the Prevent Duty in secondary schools. Drawing on interviews with educators and Prevent practitioners, it argues that the practice of counter-radicalisation in secondary schools is shaped by regional, professional and institutional contexts, and that a greater focus on contextual factors, which are often neglected in the existing literature, might better explain how counter-radicalisation is practised at the local and institutional levels. Through this discussion, it highlights that it is such factors that ultimately determine whether secondary schools are able to enact Prevent in ways likely to be effective, or that enable them to avoid any potentially harmful impacts.

Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: j.lewis8@lancaster.ac.uk

This work was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council PhD studentship through the North West Doctoral Training Centre [grant number ES/J500094/1].

J. Lewis (\*)

**Keywords** Prevent Duty • Radicalisation • British values • Secondary schools • Safeguarding

## **Introduction**

Whilst all educational institutions are now subject to the Prevent Duty, secondary schools have faced particular public scrutiny in the wake of what has become *the* exemplar of radicalisation for many (Lundie, 2019, p. 329): the case of three schoolgirls from a Bethnal Green secondary school who travelled to Syria in 2015. Extensive media coverage around this case served to frame secondary school students as particularly vulnerable to radicalisation. And today, this age-group appears to face particular scrutiny given that the median age of all individuals referred to Channel from the education sector in 2018/2019 was 14 (Home Office, 2019, p. 9).

Secondary schools face distinct challenges in enacting the Prevent Duty. Prevent is underpinned by the disputed assumption that radicalisation is a product of 'vulnerability' (see Chap. 2), yet this concept becomes increasingly problematic as secondary school students progress into adolescence and increasingly come to be seen as actors in their own right. It is widely agreed that secondary schools should be fostering the political agency of their students, but signs of growing political agency, when viewed through a lens of vulnerability, can potentially come to be seen as indicators of risk (see Coppock & McGovern, 2014, p. 250).

Primary school pupils are undeniably children, whilst students in colleges have many of the legal rights of adults, and some are legally adults, having turned 18. However, many secondary school students exist somewhere between childhood and adulthood. In serving those who are neither 'villains' nor 'victims' (see Sieckelinck, Kaulingfreks, & De Winter, 2015) secondary schools must balance questions of vulnerability and agency in specific ways, whilst being subject to a public discourse framing their students as particularly 'vulnerable' adolescents.

This chapter argues that these discourses of vulnerability go some way towards shaping Prevent work across secondary schools. However, it also contends that educators are able to exercise agency to shape Prevent work in their own institutional contexts. To illustrate these processes, the chapter draws on the framework of 'policy enactment' to explore how four contextual dimensions shape Prevent work in secondary schools: *Situated Contexts; Professional Cultures*; *Material Contexts*; and *External Contexts* (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012, p. 21). Building on previous research using the enactment framework (e.g. Busher, Choudhury, & Thomas, 2019; Vincent, 2019a), it argues that context is an 'active force' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 24) that shapes the practice of counter-radicalisation in secondary schools.

In making this argument, I take a different position to those who view the Prevent Duty as evidence of a 'securitisation' of education (see Chap. 2). For such authors, the risk of childhood radicalisation has been 'securitised' and thus removed 'from the realm of "normal" politics' (see Lister, 2019, p. 419). Yet, whilst these analyses are extremely valuable, Durodie (2016, p. 22) suggests the Prevent Duty may be equally emblematic of the reverse process, whereby a 'therapeutic culture' in education that has long treated students as 'vulnerable' has shaped security policy. My research suggests that for many educators who have long viewed their students as vulnerable, the Duty is far less exceptional than some have argued.

As Lister (2019) writes, one consequence of treating any policy as exceptional is the neglect of 'broader debates about the content and direction of public policy as a whole' (p. 419). I contend that the Prevent Duty is a continuation of longer-term political trends, and like Lister (2019, p. 426) I draw links between counter-terrorism policy and neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is a practice of governance that 'seeks to create selfregulating, autonomous and responsible citizens' (Elshimi, 2017, p. 95). Education has long been seen as instrumental in creating such citizens, (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2016, p. 31). As a result, the history of neo-liberal education policy has been a series of 'problematisations' (Ball, 2013, p. 28), whereby schools have been tasked with tackling an increasing range of societal 'problems' seen as detrimental to this goal.

Most educators interviewed as part of my doctoral research understood radicalisation to be the latest in a long line of problems that they had been asked to tackle under the logic of 'safeguarding'. This meant that many were unopposed to the Duty. Of course, depending on one's position, this non-problematisation of Prevent could be seen as either a positive or negative finding. If we take educators at their word, it may be analytically useful to view radicalisation as the latest problem that has been designated to them by the neo-liberal state.

Whilst I disagree with the notion that radicalisation is no different to other harms, the role of the neo-liberal educator has expanded in recent years to what one interviewee termed a 'lower-level social worker'. I therefore argue that non-opposition to the Duty may be emblematic of what has already changed in education, not of how Prevent itself has transformed education (see Sukarieh & Tannock, 2016, p. 31). Revell and Bryan (2016) argue that education is now marked by 'impermanence', and have highlighted how schools that are now used to responding to new policies might pragmatically respond to growing workloads by '[taking] the same approach to every policy' (p. 351). Within this context we might expect educators to deliver the Prevent Duty with the same pragmatic acceptance that Busher et al. (2019) identify. In this chapter, I explore how such pragmatism specifically shapes the enactment of the Prevent Duty in secondary schools.

## **Methods**

This chapter draws on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 32 educators from nine secondary schools, and 14 local Prevent practitioners conducted between October 2017 and September 2019, as part of the author's ESRC-funded doctoral research. It also draws on supplementary interviews with six academics. The schools were a mix of local authority-maintained and academy schools, including one alternative provision for those not in mainstream education. Most were non-faith, with one a Catholic faith school. Six were located across three Prevent priority areas (PPAs), those deemed to have higher levels of local radicalisation risk, with the others based across two non-priority areas.

Prevent practitioners included Prevent Co-ordinators and Education Officers or their equivalents, as well as those for whom Prevent was only part of their function. All were based across eight PPAs, but a handful also supported institutions in non-priority areas in their role.

Interviews were analysed using 'thematic analysis' (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss four themes that capture 'something important about the data in relation to the research question, and represent some level of patterned response or meaning' (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 82). Drawing directly on the words of educators and Prevent practitioners, I use each theme to outline how 'context' shaped Prevent work in secondary schools. To guide the reader, where a respondent is quoted in the main text, a respondent number is shown in brackets, 'E' delineating an educator, and 'P' a Prevent practitioner.

#### **Understanding Prevent in 'Context'**

In the analysis that follows I discuss how each of the four contextual dimensions identified by Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012) shaped the enactment of Prevent. I first discuss each dimension in turn, before pointing to important intersections between them.

#### **Situated Context**

The 'situated context' refers to the specific locational and historical context of schools (Ball et al., 2012, p. 21). In this section I discuss three situational features that were important in shaping Prevent work: local 'risk'; institutional histories; and student cohorts.

Educators operating in PPAs often noted how they worked in *'highrisk' areas*, or contextualised non-opposition to the Duty by discussing local cases of radicalisation reported in the media or highlighted during Prevent training. Non-opposition to the Duty was thus often rooted in an internalised view of the local area constructed by external forces. This effect was also evident in one non-priority area where respondents from two schools discussed media reports of a local case of radicalisation. And as many respondents came to believe that radicalisation was a real and local risk, Prevent work came to be shaped to address risks that were specific to the physical location of each school. For example, one educator had included the threat of far-right activity at a nearby local landmark in a Prevent risk assessment.

Whilst many 'risks' discussed in interviews were hypothetical, every school had a distinct *institutional history* of risk. Most schools had either made a Prevent referral or asked for external advice around Prevent concerns. In a minority of schools, students had received support through Prevent. This institutional history often shaped perceptions of Prevent in one of two ways. Most respondents saw incorrect referrals as having had no ill-effects, whilst rare instances where students had gone on to receive support through Prevent had, as one respondent (E22) put it, 'woke us up' to the issue. In this way, having some kind of direct or indirect experience of referrals often seemed to shape respondents' non-opposition to the Duty.

At the same time, most respondents had never personally raised a Prevent concern, nor had any concerns about a student being radicalised. Many therefore felt the Duty had little impact on their practice. For these respondents, Prevent had faded into the background. They may now do what the Duty asks of them, but they may not see this as 'Prevent' work. As one respondent (E21) noted then, 'on a day-to-day basis', the 'name Prevent doesn't really come into it'.

However, just as Robson (Chap. 5) finds in early years settings, some educators now interpreted certain behaviours differently as they came to view students through 'the lens of terrorism'. For example, one respondent (E27) spoke of an interest in Hitler having gone from being seen as 'weird' to 'weird and worrying'. This reflected a broader trend of respondents becoming increasingly aware of the threat from far-right extremism, something that is important in the current climate. However, some respondents had come to view behaviours in more alarmist or problematic ways.

For example, one respondent (E6) had been concerned about the potential radicalisation of 'a semi-school refuser' on the back of their training, even though they recognised that this interpretation of such behaviour was 'putting two and two together and coming back with five'. And most problematically, a handful of respondents discussed referrals made by colleagues that appeared to reflect biases in broader discourses around radicalisation (see Chap. 2). For example, one respondent spoke of a colleague raising a concern with safeguarding staff about a Muslim student praying in the common room given that this was uncharacteristic behaviour for that student. Such incidents were rare, and were predominantly confined to the early days of the Duty. Nevertheless, this case demonstrated how discourses on radicalisation might sometimes shape educators' perceptions in problematic ways (see O'Donnell, 2017, p. 179).

Finally, respondents also spoke about shaping Prevent to *school cohorts* or to 'the community you serve' (E3). For example, one respondent contrasted their work with an overwhelmingly White British cohort to another local school whose students predominantly came from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and which had a much larger Muslim cohort:

Their approach will be very different in terms of how they discuss it with their pupils, as to how we discuss it with our pupils, just in the sense of the type of people, so we will concentrate on people that they can relate to, so community leaders within their own communities … at the [other] school it will be Imams from the local Mosque. (Educator 21)

There was much agency in how educators shaped Prevent work to their cohorts. However, in some cases, this creativity was seemingly constrained by a tendency to view specific communities as vulnerable (see O'Donnell, 2017, p. 184) or segments of local communities as in specific need of intervention (see Vincent, 2019b, p. 27). For example, one respondent clearly saw intolerance to be a specific feature of 'our cohort' which, they had noted earlier, was a predominantly White British cohort with 'significant' levels of deprivation:

[W]e feel that with our cohort that come to our school, maybe beyond our gates, some of the attitudes are not quite what we want them to be, and if they weren't managed properly they could ultimately not meet British values. (Educator 27)

This respondent had recently updated their PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic education) curriculum to tackle an increase in students using intolerant language. There was clear value in this work. However, this response demonstrated how even valuable work might be underpinned by what Vincent (2019b) terms 'blunt categorizations, assumptions and generalizations' of cohorts (p. 26) as concerns arising from a small number of students had shaped a perception that the entire student body needed to be taught in a different way. As Vincent (2019b, pp. 26–27) argues, assumptions can sometimes be indicative of underlying biases. However, whilst my earlier discussion of referrals suggests that some educators were not immune to bias, this respondent was not only able to identify and discuss a range of biases that exist in society, they, like many others in my sample, saw it as their role to tackle bias wherever they saw it—a point I return to below. This belief suggested that Prevent work was underpinned by a specific understanding that respondents had of their role.

#### **Professional Cultures**

The 'professional culture' refers to 'less tangible' features of the educational context, namely 'ethos [and] teachers' values and commitments within schools' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 26). In this section I discuss how institutional, professional and departmental cultures all served to 'inflect policy responses in particular ways' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 27).

Distinct *institutional cultures* drove varying responses. For example, whilst many schools adopted the language of 'British values' unproblematically, one school had repositioned them as school values on the back of concerns about the 'British' label (see Vincent, 2019b, p. 24). This school also took a distinct approach to teaching students about British values, with one respondent (E18) noting how they drew on an existing ethos of 'critical pedagogy' to challenge students to think critically about notions of 'British' values, and of 'Britishness' more broadly.

Three respondents invoked school cultures to argue that the Duty itself was not needed, on the basis that existing safeguarding procedures were effective. In making this argument, two pointed to media reports of alarmist referrals made by other schools, but both clearly felt that their internal procedures would prevent similar referrals being made by their school. Notably, one of these respondents (E8) did argue that being asked to refer students 'compromises teachers'. This was not based on any personal or institutional experience, but on concerns raised, not only in the media, but also by trade union colleagues. The role of the trade union was interesting here as it highlighted how perceptions of policy might be shaped by external as well as internal institutional contexts (see Ball et al., 2012, p. 62).

However, opposition to the Duty was extremely rare, with school values often seen as being aligned with Prevent. Educators often invoked a culture of safeguarding and a 'duty of care' when discussing referrals. In doing so, they pointed to a *professional culture* of safeguarding that had clearly shaped educators, as they came to see their role as more than simply teaching:

[T]eaching in the classroom is a small, small part of what teachers are expected [to do] these days, you know, you're a social worker, you're a Prevent Officer, there's so many things that you have to put in place, but that's the role of the teacher. (Educator 20)

This professional identity had been shaped by the recent history of national education policy. One respondent (E21) noted how the government had regularly 'add[ed] more of a burden to the job role' by introducing 'reactive' policies asking schools to tackle a range of issues. Junior staff had never worked in a context where Prevent was not part of their role. However, more experienced staff often felt that, rather than schools being changed by the Duty, the 'world's changed' around schools (E30). Several respondents viewed the threat of terrorism as unprecedented, and in turn the latest in a long line of issues they had been tasked with tackling.

Interestingly, one respondent (E6) who saw the current threat to be more pronounced reflected that perceived terrorist threats had previously been addressed in a different way. They noted that, in the case of the IRA, 'we never really thought of that as a Prevent issue'. This spoke to how radicalisation is framed differently to 'older' terrorism (Elshimi, 2017, pp. 30–31), but also to the changing function of schools, as one academic interviewed for this study explained:

[T]he professional identity of teachers is a fundamentally different beast now than it was 20 years ago, or 30 years ago even. You couldn't have had Prevent in 1988. And, remember in 1988, you had actually a real terrorist threat, through the IRA. (Academic 6)

Many respondents had come to see safeguarding as one of the defining features of their role, making their non-opposition to what many saw as an extension of safeguarding unsurprising. One teacher (E20) even argued that 'anybody can teach' and suggested that the real skill of an educator was in dealing with safeguarding concerns. This seemingly undermined the traditional view of teachers as holding specialist knowledge (see Bryan, 2017, p. 224) which raised some interesting questions about the role that expertise played in the enactment of the Prevent Duty.

Respondents valued specialist expertise on radicalisation, with many schools using external 'experts' to deliver sessions to students. However, most did not problematise their *own* lack of expertise on the topic (see Bryan, 2017, p. 224). For example, one respondent (E21) argued the 'idea of having a Prevent specialist [on the staff] would be a bit much'. Some respondents identified colleagues with specific knowledges that might deliver Prevent work—a point I return to below. However, for most, the role was 'to report, and it ends there' (E9). As a result, many did not feel as though they needed any specialist knowledge on radicalisation as they had always passed safeguarding concerns of any kind to those that *did* have the relevant expertise.

Classroom staff would raise issues with safeguarding teams, who would ultimately decide on whether to pass concerns onto external bodies. This process was often underpinned by a risk-averse logic, with one safeguarding lead (E17) arguing that 'there's no grey areas, there's no opinions, if a child presents in that way we pass that information on'. Interestingly, whilst this respondent saw such an approach to be common sense, they recognised that those who don't work in schools might argue that such a risk-averse approach to referrals is 'not really helping anyone'. This comment suggested that there might be something distinctive about the safeguarding culture of schooling that shaped how educators engaged with the Prevent Duty.

Two potentially distinctive features stood out in my interviews. First, whilst the notion of educators monitoring students for signs of radicalisation is contentious (see Chap. 1), schooling has increasingly been marked by a growing culture of surveillance (see Chap. 3). This surveillance has been enabled by a growth in technology—a point I return to shortly and by legislation that has increased educators' powers to, among other things, search students' belongings (Ball et al., 2012, pp. 100–101). Interviews suggested that surveillance in the name of 'safeguarding' had largely been normalised, with one respondent unproblematically discussing having searched a student's phone, for example. To a non-educator like myself, such surveillance was unexpected. However, it was perhaps unsurprising that educators working in an existing culture of surveillance would deliver Prevent in this way.

Second, one safeguarding lead (E7) argued that educators are generally less opposed to Prevent than the general public 'because the nature of our bubble in which we operate is that young people are vulnerable'. This suggested that support for the Duty was underpinned by a pre-existing 'therapeutic culture' that, as discussed earlier, fundamentally viewed young people as vulnerable. Respondents regularly used a language of vulnerability to express concerns about students being exploited, and of a need to build 'resilience' through the curriculum (see also Chap. 8). As one respondent remarked, aside from core skills, 'the one thing I want [students] to have when they leave is awareness and resilience' (E26). For them, this meant using PSHE to build students' resilience to a range of potential vulnerabilities, again demonstrating how radicalisation came to be treated in much the same way as other issues.

In many schools, curriculum work of this kind would be tailored to different year groups. Younger students would often focus on British values, whilst older year groups might learn more explicitly about radicalisation or Prevent itself. Sixth-form students might also be asked to lead assemblies for younger year groups. This highlighted how adolescents came to be asked to play a role in enacting Prevent, with some schools even teaching students the indicators of radicalisation so that they could recognise if they, or their peers, were being radicalised. Notably, I heard of one Prevent referral where students had alerted staff to content a classmate had posted online. As students progressed into adolescence then, building resilience seemed to increasingly rest on using the curriculum to foster students' agency to keep themselves safe.

This work often took place in PSHE lessons, which meant nonspecialists often delivered work around Prevent. However, subject specialists were tasked with leading this curriculum work in some schools, demonstrating how individual roles were often shaped by *departmental contexts* (see Ball et al., 2012, pp. 28–29). For example, several schools had come to deliver Prevent work through the Religious Education (RE) curriculum.

In many schools, extremism was already being discussed in RE classrooms before 2015. For example, one Head of RE (E29) spoke of historically being asked to 'drop everything' in the wake of terrorist attacks so that they could lead discussions on terrorism with students. Prior to the Duty, they had been the only teacher expected to do so. However, they noted that the Prevent Duty had forced other teachers to discuss a topic they had previously avoided. Where they saw colleagues as feeling pressurised by the Duty, they now personally felt more freedom. Where before they would have discussed incidents in a 'reactive' way, discussions of extremism were now more formally embedded in their curriculum and in other subjects on the back of the Duty. This meant they now felt as though they could refuse to 'drop everything' in the wake of a future incident, as the topic was now more routinely discussed across the school.

The fact that a Head of RE had been specifically asked to 'drop everything' highlighted how specific subjects were often perceived to lend themselves to Prevent. This is not without controversy, with some authors opposed to any attempt to 'politicise' Religious Education (see Jackson, 2015). However, many respondents felt that RE, and other subjects such as History or English, were appropriate for Prevent work. This might be because they saw an overlap between Prevent and topics such as Nazi Germany, or because they felt that discussion-based lessons were most appropriate for this work. In such classes, discussions related to Prevent would sometimes be planned, but they were more often ad hoc (see Vincent, 2019b, p. 25):

And some of our subjects lend themselves to it as well, like English, you discuss everything […] openly a pupil said, 'Well, this kind of people, duh de duh de duh', and I would have done what I would usually do, I stopped, and I dealt, and I addressed that. (Educator 14)

Several respondents discussed challenging students who espouse biased views in this same way, with many seeing it as their role as an educator to tackle intolerant views. Interestingly, this role often extended beyond challenging biases that students might hold, as shown by one respondent working with local Prevent practitioners, to address what they and several colleagues had seen to be biases in original Prevent training materials.

Respondents were willing to tackle biased opinions regardless of the subject they taught. However, some subjects were not seen to lend themselves to formal Prevent curriculum work. Prevent Practitioners noted this might be down to a lack of confidence that some teachers have around this topic. However, the professional role of teachers might also vary across departments. For example, the aforementioned Head of RE recounted how a colleague had asked them to speak to a student holding concerning views long before the Duty existed:

[T]his was a Science teacher talking to me, and they saw their job was to get through their Science GCSE, whereas the job of the RE teacher was to be a little bit more [about] building relationships. (Educator 29)

This exchange suggested that departmental context might shape how educators perceived of their own, and their colleagues', potential role in Prevent. Many educators were willing to perform the roles set forth for them. However, their ability to do so was shaped by the material realities of the setting, which at different times might enable or constrain Prevent work.

#### **Material Context**

Material features such as 'buildings and budgets … levels of staffing, information technologies and infrastructure' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 29) shape the conditions in which policies are enacted. In this section I point to three such factors: infrastructure, finances, and time.

First, Prevent was able to draw on pre-existing *technological infrastructures*. For example, one respondent (E18) spoke of installing a Prevent 'add-on' to existing Internet filtering and monitoring software, and another (E21) of a Prevent 'tick-box' being added to software used for reporting safeguarding concerns. The use of such pre-existing technology highlighted how enactment often rested on simply adapting existing tools (see Chap. 3) that enabled Prevent in different ways. The use of the former was further evidence that surveillance had already been normalised before the Duty, whilst the latter literally eased the process of enacting the Prevent Duty as reporting concerns of any type had become 'literally a two-minute job' (E23).

Second, schools had varying levels of resources. Prevent work was shaped by *financial constraints*, which are 'the most "material" of all the contextual factors' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 34). Budgets for Prevent work varied. One Prevent practitioner (P14) spoke of an institution that was 'fortunate' to have the funds to pay a private contractor to deliver workshops every year, yet noted that most schools would not have the funds to do so. Some respondents sourced external providers in a similar way. However, respondents often relied on providers funded by local authorities, noting how they would 'jump at the chance' (E30), or try to 'seize the opportunity' (E31) whenever such sessions were offered to them.

However, respondents were not always able to take up such offers as they lacked the *time* to do so. Prevent had to fit into existing time-spaces, which inevitably varied across schools:

[E]verybody's got different restrictions on them in terms of time, and how things can be delivered, so it's all about just, adapting things so we can get the best results … (Educator 31)

Subjects often cited as useful for Prevent are often given little curriculum time (see Vincent, 2019a, p. 57). In my sample, standalone Citizenship lessons were rare, RE was often taught for as little as one hour per week, whilst PSHE was mainly delivered in form time, and in wide-ranging dropdown days. Several practitioners noted that the structure of the curriculum and levels of contact time with students left more time for Prevent work than in colleges. However, this space remained limited as schools predominantly came to deliver Prevent through the PSHE curriculum which is, as Vincent (2019a) notes, a 'baggy holdall of topics' (p. 45).

This limitation was perhaps especially true in the early days of the Duty, with one Prevent practitioner (P13) noting that 'most schools delivered [Prevent] as standalone modules' as their PSHE curriculums had already been finalised when the Duty became law. Yet, even as Prevent had been formally embedded in the PSHE curriculum over time, it came to be treated as just one issue among many that had to compete for attention. In some schools, there were more spaces for Prevent. Some schools had Prevent-related drop-down days, whilst one respondent (E26) kept the PSHE curriculum 'malleable' to leave space to discuss emerging issues, or take advantage of any sessions offered by the local authority. However, even in this malleable curriculum, Prevent was but one of over a dozen topics to be discussed throughout the year.

Some schools had developed their approach over time by 'taking ownership' of Prevent and producing their own resources (P4). However, not all schools had time to do this. For example, one safeguarding lead (E7) hoped curriculum work would become more embedded, but wanted the government to drive this by producing a dedicated curriculum since 'schools don't have the time or capacity' to do so. In this way then, even respondents who may wish to do more Prevent work did not always have the resources to do so. These resources may be further reduced over time as secondary schools adapt to an ever-changing external context.

#### **External Context**

The final set of factors was pressures from '*wider* local and national policy frameworks' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 36). Here, I draw attention to three particularly important external factors: local authority delivery structures; Ofsted; and wider policy requirements.

First, *Prevent delivery structures* varied across regions. Schools in PPAs had access to local authority Prevent practitioners and Prevent-funded projects that were less common in non-priority areas. These practitioners performed the role of 'mid-level policy enactor' (Vincent, 2019a, p. 17), with local authorities interpreting the Duty and in turn shaping their support for schools in different ways (see Chap. 2). Enactment was marked by 'interpretations of interpretations' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 3), as the resources available to schools varied according to the approaches adopted at local authority level. For example, whilst the educator above wanted national government to produce a Prevent-related curriculum, local authority Prevent practitioners in other PPAs had already developed similar resources.

The landscape was different in non-priority areas, with the Police often taking a more central role in training (particularly in the early days of the Prevent Duty), and as the first port-of-call for concerns. It was interesting that one local authority Prevent practitioner (P6), who now led on training schools, described the previous approach of the Police training schools in their area as a 'securitised model' of delivery. This raises the possibility that concerns about 'securitisation' are more applicable to those nonpriority areas in which the Police retain a role similar to that during the much-criticised 'Prevent 1' phase (see Chap. 2).

As touched on above, a range of private and third-sector providers also delivered Prevent work in schools, with the Duty providing a 'market opportunity' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 106) for 'expert' providers wishing to commercially create resources or offer guidance (see Vincent, 2019a, p. 54). In this way then, Prevent work relied on a network of different actors.

However, the most significant external actor was the school inspectorate, *Ofsted*. A need to prove compliance to Ofsted was a core driver of Prevent work for many respondents. In turn, there were clear signs of 'performativity' as described by Ball (2003) as some schools adopted a tick-box approach to enacting the Duty (see also Chap. 5). Some respondents explicitly used a language of 'box-ticking' (see McGlynn & McDaid, 2019, pp. 134–140) to describe Prevent training or mapping British values across the curriculum. Moreover, one educator's (E29) discussion of potentially introducing a British values display despite noting 'I don't know how useful it is' was the essence of Ball's understanding of performativity.

#### **7 Enacting the Prevent Duty in Secondary Schools**

Performativity was even evident in how some educators discussed Prevent work that they clearly felt *was* useful. For example, one respondent (E26) had adopted an approach of 'repetition and re-enforcement'. This meant discussing individual topics, including Prevent, across multiple PSHE lessons throughout the year. They did so both because it was seen to be an effective approach for ensuring that key messages 'sink in', but also so they could demonstrate to Ofsted that students would learn about a topic, even if they missed one session.

External pressure was clearly important (see Vincent, 2019a, p. 137). In the immediate aftermath of the Duty's introduction, Prevent had been a priority for many respondents as they arranged whole-school training, or mapped Prevent across the curriculum to prove compliance. However, respondents did not find it unusual to be asked to tackle new issues in this way:

I mean to be honest there's so many different legislations and acts coming into place that you can't remember what you're doing, you just know you're doing it, [laughs] you don't know what it's called. (Educator 22)

Prevent came to be seen as part of a *broader policy ensemble*. In some schools it was even introduced alongside other responsibilities, with one respondent (E6) noting how the Duty was presented as one of 'two new balls up in the air' alongside new training on LGBTQ equality. To borrow an analogy from earlier, the Duty entered a 'baggy holdall' of policies competing for attention. Prevent may have been a priority back in 2015, but as with many other policies, it had faded into the background, only to be thrust into the foreground again at certain times.

Priorities were often determined by events outside of the school. The attention schools gave to a specific issue would often be dictated by external agencies, with one respondent (E17) noting how different topics would be 'fashionable' to local authorities at different times. More directly, respondents often noted how classroom Prevent work, and in some cases their own concerns about radicalisation, might increase in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. It was therefore unsurprising to hear one Prevent practitioner (P5) remark that in some months they receive no Channel referrals, but in others 'there are spikes around major incidents'.

In discussing this trend, this practitioner remarked that Prevent had 'an advantage' given the disproportionate media coverage that terrorism receives. Educators were clearly aware of this media discourse, with one respondent framing the Duty as evidence that 'the front pages have jumped into my classroom' (E30). In turn, several respondents remarked that schools could not shy away from Prevent work given that many students would be equally aware of media coverage of terrorism, and would want to discuss it in their lessons (see Chap. 4). In this way then, events outside of the school had the power to impact the day-to-day work of educators.

Prevent was therefore enacted within a specific and ever-changing external context (see Vincent, 2019a, p. 137). As this external context evolves, new priorities will emerge. Already, in the wake of growing public concerns about rising knife crime, the government has announced plans for a new 'Public Health Duty' requiring schools to report young people at risk of such violence (Hymas, 2019). Just as radicalisation was not the first problematisation of education, it will not be the last. And perhaps as new responsibilities emerge, the widespread perception amongst educators that the Prevent Duty is unexceptional might continue to grow.

# **Conclusion**

This chapter has shown how a range of contextual factors shaped Prevent work in the secondary schools that participated in this research. First, educators tailored Prevent to risks they saw as specific to the historical and geographic locales in which they worked. Second, a professional culture of safeguarding contributed to a widespread acceptance of Prevent, whilst distinct institutional and departmental cultures shaped practical responses to the Duty. Thirdly, Prevent work was shaped by material considerations such as time, money, and technology. And finally, local and national government policy shaped how schools engaged with Prevent.

None of these dimensions operated in isolation. Many respondents internalised external discourses framing students as vulnerable to radicalisation. This meant there were fleeting signs of alarmism, and even bias. However, educators retained the scope to mediate these discourses as they were filtered through distinct professional and institutional contexts. As many came to understand radicalisation as but one of many local issues emerging in distinct situated contexts, respondents came to enact Prevent in much the same way as any number of earlier policies, tailoring it according to the institutions and departments in which they worked. And whilst many of the approaches schools adopted in 2015 had seemingly remained unchanged, Prevent work did not remain entirely static, as it constantly had to respond to emerging external events. Taken together then, the precise form that Prevent work took was shaped by how multiple contextual factors intersected in specific institutions at specific times.

Such a conclusion mirrors many of the findings from the other studies in this volume. However, the realities of secondary education afforded particular opportunities and constraints for Prevent. This suggests that the impact of the Prevent Duty can only truly be understood by exploring how Prevent is enacted in specific contexts. Ultimately then, 'taking context seriously' (Ball et al., 2012, p. 19) seems essential if we are to truly advance our understanding of how counter-radicalisation is practised at the local and institutional levels.

#### **References**


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# **8**

# **Enacting the Prevent Duty in Further Education**

**Natalie James**

**Abstract** This chapter explores staff and student experiences of the classroom implementation of the Prevent Duty within further education. It focuses on two key dimensions of the Duty: the teaching of Prevent and its role as a safeguarding mechanism. It highlights the malleable nature of the Duty, whereby educators have tailored their enactment of it in ways that they believe can help overcome some of the problems the Duty was perceived to have raised. It also highlights however that the ability of staff and students to enact the Duty in this way was constrained by the processes of governance which surround the Duty and the dominant public narratives of prejudice which inform and are informed by it.

**Keywords** Prevent Duty • Further education • Malleability • British values • Safeguarding • Students • Staff agency

N. James (\*)

School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: ptnj@leeds.ac.uk

## **Chapter Summary**

Annual Prevent statistics have continuously placed the education sector as the leading area from which Prevent referrals emerge. Moreover, the age range most likely to be referred has consistently been the 15–20 category since the Duty's inception (see Chap. 1). This would suggest that the further education (FE) sector has been under an enormous pressure to comply with the Prevent Duty, yet there has been little research undertaken regarding the only education sector dealing with predominantly 16–18-year-olds (see Beighton & Revell, 2018; Moffat & Gerard, 2020). This chapter presents an insight into some of the key findings which emerged from a three-year study into experiences of the Prevent Duty within Greater Manchester's (GM) FE sector.

Focusing on the practicalities of implementation within the classroom, this chapter explores how FE teaching staff sought to embed the Prevent Duty within their institutions. It does so by revealing two dominant spaces through which staff translated the legislation into practice: through their teaching practices and their institutional safeguarding processes. Moreover, it also highlights the role students played at these sites of implementation, exploring the extent of both their involvement in and their acceptance of such measures.

Like other chapters in this volume, this chapter also utilises Ball, Maguire, and Braun's (2012; see also Braun, Ball, Maguire, & Hoskins, 2011) concept of enactment and consideration of context to explore how the implementation of the Duty by staff and their students within the classrooms of FE institutions occurred and the limitations which surrounded their approaches. In doing so, this chapter argues that such experiences highlighted a malleable nature to the Prevent Duty, whereby educators were able to tailor their enactments to the needs of their institution and those within it. Moreover, in viewing the Duty as malleable, this enabled educators to use their implementation to overcome some of the perceived problems which Chap. 2 of this volume explores. Yet, in revealing these sites where the Duty could be interpreted through the eyes of educators, this chapter also highlights the contextual factors which limited them, such as the processes of governance which surround the Duty and the dominant public narratives of prejudice which inform and are informed by it.

### **The FE Context**

Critical to reading the following findings is an understanding of the context in which these actions were taken. The year 2015 was momentous for the FE sector. Not only did it face the introduction of the Prevent Duty, but the school-leaving age was also increased from sixteen to eighteen. Therefore, from 2015, anyone up to the age of eighteen was required to be in either education or training, and thus subject to the Prevent Duty—a key part of this then became the management of adult learners who were still subject to the same safeguarding procedures as children within secondary or primary schools. For the FE sector, this meant not only an increased demand for services but also an increased demand on staff to deliver a variety of curriculums to a diverse student body. It also created a new space within which staff simultaneously had the responsibility to protect students from extremism and terrorism under their safeguarding responsibilities, whilst also transferring this responsibility of protection over to students in their passage from childhood to adulthood. This was further complicated by the inclusion of mature students within this realm, blurring the boundaries further of where responsibility lay for preventing oneself and those around them from becoming vulnerable to radicalisation (James, forthcoming). Moreover, it also brought training providers, often in the form of private companies, squarely into the mix for being subject to the same inspections and regulations that academic providers were, through their inclusion to the FE sector.

#### **Research Basis**

This chapter draws on a three-year study engaged with both staff (13 participants) and students (45) across five institutions within Greater Manchester (GM), which comprised two training and three academic providers. Representatives from local councils, the Department for Education, independent training providers, the North West Counter-Terrorism Unit and Ofsted also participated. The study was undertaken through focus groups (9), semi-structured interviews (21), participant observation (9) and an online questionnaire (49). Respondents have been anonymised in the extracts that follow and participants in the student focus groups selected their own pseudonyms (see James [forthcoming] for further methodological detail). Although seven of the ten GM boroughs were included in the research, such small-scale research cannot claim to produce generalisable results about the whole of the FE sector, or even FE provision in GM. Rather the research generates insights into processes of policy enactment in FE institutions, and in doing so helps to illustrate how the Prevent Duty comes to have impacts on staff and students.

The Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 also occurred as access for fieldwork was being negotiated (fieldwork was undertaken between October 2017 and November 2018). Whilst there is no available measurement of the impact this had on the data, it is likely that this event had a bearing on some of the experiences obtained. Indeed, it was referenced by several participants—both staff and students—as bringing these issues to the forefront of their minds when implementing Prevent.

# **Teaching Prevent**

For the vast majority of teaching staff who took part in this research, their training on Prevent had been delivered to them by their designated safeguarding lead (DSL). The session was an adapted version of the government's Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP) training, which enabled a tailored approach from the generic public sector training into one suitable for their particular institution. Respondents involved in the delivery of such training indicated that this had been the general approach to training for some time and highlighted the malleability in the Duty to go through such adaptations. Though the nature and content of the training varied, this institutional level of training was designed to enable teaching staff to gain the knowledge and access to resources necessary to embed the Prevent Duty into their classroom. Teaching staff would then further adapt this training for their own pedagogical needs. Thus, prior to the Duty being enacted within the classroom, there already existed two sites of transformation within the institutions through which the Prevent Duty became implemented: at DSL level and at teaching staff level.

It is the second process with which this chapter is concerned. For teaching staff, the Prevent Duty meant ensuring students were resilient to the ideologies of extremism and terrorism through two key means—via pedagogical practices around what extremism and terrorism might look like, and promoting fundamental British values within the classroom, the latter of which I deal with first. The experiences highlight the ways in which educators were able to tailor their enactments within the classroom as a result of the Duty's malleability, but also how the governance processes surrounding this, and in particular inspection regimes, placed constraints on this malleability.

#### **Teaching Fundamental British Values**

British values are defined by the UK government as democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs (Department for Education, 2014). Though, as an agenda, they have been within political discourse since the premiership of Gordon Brown, they became cemented in the education system through the Prevent Duty in their presentation as the antithesis to the values of extremist and terrorist ideologies (James, 2018). Here, embodying British values was presented as a means of resilience against becoming radicalised (McGhee & Zhang, 2017). Thus, teaching staff were tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that British values were embedded within their classroom delivery: the education system acting as a site of citizenship development (see Jerome & Clemitshaw, 2012). For many of the teaching staff who participated, encouraging good citizenry was nothing new, nor was the utilisation of a values agenda in the promotion of this. The provision of Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural (SMSC) development within pedagogic practices was, for them, a longstanding values agenda that was already central to their classroom delivery. Thus, it was not the idea of a values agenda, nor the values themselves, which were perceived as problematic, as both were seen as a continuation of the existing SMSC agenda. Rather, it was the labelling of these values as distinctly 'British' which created a number of potential issues.

A number of the participants raised concerns around the extent to which 'British values' could encompass all students, particularly those who did not perceive themselves as being British or of a primarily British identity. Both teaching staff and students questioned the usefulness in labelling the values as 'British' when, for them, they were 'human' or 'universal' values and thus applicable to people outside of Britain too. For many there was nothing distinctly British about the values; rather, they were values to which anyone could adhere; though some conceded this was anyone *within the West*, noting the Western-centric narratives at the heart of the values themselves (Winter & Mills, 2020; Miah, 2017; Revell & Bryan, 2018)*.* Some respondents viewed the British label as problematic as it was perceived to place Britain, and those easily identifiable as 'British', as being superior to Others. These sentiments were particularly strong amongst some of the students, with this excerpt reflecting a number of the fieldwork conversations that took place:


For these students, and for a number of their peers who participated in the research, the fundamental British values agenda was interpreted through this lens of hierarchical *goodness* (who could be a *good* citizen or not) and gave rise to concerns around the potential exclusion which could occur as a result of the Us versus Them narrative they perceived this British label to have (Smith, 2016).

Many staff and student participants expressed fears that in defining the values as British, the agenda would further exclude or alienate those students who did not identify as British, who were often more visible by their ethnic, cultural, religious or linguistic identity anyway, further emphasising their difference. As one teacher noted:

They're British values, but they're everyday values, they're all about respect and tolerance, treating people how you want to be treated, and a lot of our clientele, ninety percent are non-British, or don't identify as being British, so we go through British values, and they're like 'well I'm not British, do they not apply to me?' (Counselling, Psychology and Mental Health Educator, Training Institute 2)

This also raised concern about those who had such visible markers of difference whilst also considering themselves as British. For both staff and student participants, there was a grey area in how these students would manage their multiple identity structures. For a number of staff and student participants, markers of difference became, or had the potential to become, hyper-visible. Many of the staff participants who raised concerns around this suggested that whilst students knew they were 'British values', staff instead referred to the values as 'human', 'our', 'college' or 'universal' values to both minimise these fears and the potential for those who did not identify as British from being excluded from the notion of good citizenship in an attempt to actively include them within discussions around this (see Busher, Choudhury, Thomas, & Harris, 2017).

It is important to note that there were, however, some respondents who did not express concerns around British values. For some, British values were viewed as unproblematic.

I think the British values stuff is just like the basics of what makes our society work erm and what creates sort of like cohesion within us all. (Politics Educator, Academic Institute 1)

Moreover, for some, 'British values' were not only something that were felt to be central to upholding the way of life in Britain, they should also be celebrated.

I fully appreciate British values, I totally understand democracy, the rule of law, I can see the difference between what happens in the UK and what happens in my country, for example, I'm from South America. (Social Care Educator, Training Institute 2)

Thus, for some of the respondents, British values were a positive addition to the education sector which gave the opportunity for a 'multiplicity of voices' to be united (Politics Educator, Academic Institute 1) both inside and outside of the classroom.

Nonetheless, even amongst those who advocated for the language of Britishness, there remained an overwhelming sense that the labelling of the values as British had not been because they could only be seen through such a framework, but because this had become a directive from Ofsted through the common inspection framework. In this sense, the performativity of their enactments as noted in Chaps. 5 and 7 of this volume are also visible in the further education sector:

I think we do British values every lesson regardless of whether we were told to do British values or not you know what I mean? […] so you know it's just about signposting it you know […] but we've got a poster on the wall about it […] cos obviously when British values came in, we had to evidence to Ofsted that you know it's within our classrooms at all times […] it would be about the signposting around the college and if Ofsted popped into your lesson, to mention the word British values and that should tick the boxes. (Politics Educator, Academic Institute 1)

Though this Politics educator had not problematised the British framing of the values agenda, evident in an earlier excerpt, she simultaneously labelled its integration into the classroom as an exercise to 'tick the boxes' for Ofsted. Embedding British values then became about staff performing their duty (Ball, 2003). This performativity, however, was more problematic in the classroom for some. For example, another educator who did not reject the fundamental British values label altogether, nonetheless, suggested that Ofsted's requirement for the British label to be visible within their enactments of the Duty had made teaching these values more onerous. She suggested that without extra time and effort taken to explore the relevance and necessity of the agenda, and its position within British society, the label of the values as British created a barrier for students to meaningfully engage: 'they'd be like "ugh, British values, ugh" and look at you' (Business Access to HE Educator, Training Institute 2). For this educator, the agenda itself was not problematic, but its governance was. In Ofsted's requirement for it to be explicitly referred to as a fundamental British values agenda, her ability to tailor her enactment of the Duty became limited. Where the agenda was labelled as just values, there were fewer issues which arose from students, she suggested, but where the framing of it as British became required for Ofsted inspections, the rejection or reluctance visible in students (see also above) resulted in her having to deconstruct its value and worth within her classroom. Thus, her ability to utilise the malleability of the Duty became limited once the perceived requirements of Ofsted governed her enactment of it within the classroom.

Whilst the extent to which staff accepted the values being labelled British varied, this performative nature of British values, as a result of Ofsted's requirement, remained constant throughout their experiences. This limitation arose out of staff members concerns that a failure to make these visible would result in a potential sanction for them and their institution. The pressure to perform during inspections and the stakes for not doing so acted as a deterrent to completely omit the language from the classroom. Though Andrew Cooke, North West Head of Ofsted, stated there was no requirement to see British values referred to explicitly, the following admission suggested that its absence would be flagged as something which required investigation:

If it wasn't called British values then, I don't think you know, well we would ask perhaps why, I suppose sometimes the question is if people deliberately don't use the word British, you then ask the question why, and what's driving that?

The experiences highlight the nuances, or grey areas, which surrounded the implementation of the fundamental British values agenda. Moreover, these perceptions of the common inspection framework and its requirements of staff also reveal the ways in which the Duty intersected with wider systems of governance and the pressure which staff, in particular, felt as a result.

### **Teaching About Extremism and Terrorism**

A second area in which Prevent shaped pedagogical practice was in staff provision of the knowledge around what extremism and terrorism might look like. Some participant staff suggested that this was embedded within their day-to-day curriculum, through the encouragement of critical thinking skills but almost all placed the primary focus in teaching Prevent on specific sessions which sought to educate students around the signs and risks of radicalisation. For most, this came in the form of tutorial sessions in which broader citizenship agendas were delivered, with one or two weeks per year dedicated specifically to Prevent. These were labelled 'raising awareness' sessions which were about 'building learner resilience' (Teacher Trainer, Training Institute) through providing them with the knowledge and skills to identify and subsequently reject extremist or terrorist narratives. Sessions provided examples, which I shortly discuss, of the processes of radicalisation and students being asked to explore what signs were shown, how these could have been stopped, and informed of what support might be put in place. These sessions were supplemented by posters which were visible in each room in each institution participating in the research that stated who to speak to should a student, or staff member, be concerned that they or someone they know is or might be being radicalised. As with the perceived expectations around the regulation of British values, teaching staff also perceived their engagement with Prevent in the classroom to be inspected and thus requiring evidencing. Sessions solely devoted to this gave them a clear-cut means of doing so. For a number of staff members, external resources provided an avenue for them to obtain the evidence they perceived necessary to pass an inspection:

[The students] have to do a test at the end [of the workshop] and they get a certificate which they send to me (…) it's one more thing that I can say if Ofsted come and go "how does X, Y, and Z know that" it's just one more thing to back me up. (Business Administration and Customer Service Educator, Training Institute 2)

The emphasis this educator placed on being able to provide evidence for Ofsted was replicated by the majority of teaching staff who participated. I suggest this was largely due to the context of compliance and regulation within which the Prevent Duty was placed and which was already shaped through these modes of governance (Ball et al., 2012). Yet, despite their familiarity with the requirements to evidence their compliance, this was still viewed by many of the staff members to be a limit upon their enactments, because of the power that Ofsted was perceived to exert through their requirements to pass inspections. Whilst many of the DSLs voiced a preference for Prevent being brought in through 'naturally' occurring conversations, many of the teaching staff did not feel this to be enough to demonstrate their teaching of Prevent. As a result, whilst staff adopted their own approach to the pedagogy of Prevent, their scope for interpretation was constrained by the perceived need to utilise approaches which would provide tangible evidence that they could have on 'standby' should they be asked for it by Ofsted.

The utilisation of external resources to conduct these sessions was commonplace across the institutions, whether in the form of videos, infographics, online sessions or a combination. A number of these educators, and in some cases their DSLs, would seek out a variety of external resources to create packages of learning in order to direct and aid their delivery of content which was largely unfamiliar to them. The capacity to use external resources allowed staff to bridge knowledge and confidence gaps, enabling them to distance themselves from the content and instead provide pedagogic support around the skills that would require students to navigate the knowledge that had been supplied from elsewhere.

Moreover, most staff utilised these external sources in their attempts to avoid presenting simplistic or one-sided accounts of radicalisation by carefully selecting or developing their own resources. For these staff members, there remained an over-emphasis on Islamist-related concerns within the materials which were provided as learning resources. As a result, a number of staff who participated saw many of the generic resources associating radicalisation with Islam and thus Muslim students being seen as the target of the agenda (also see Dudenhoefer, 2018; Kyriacou, Szczepek Reed, Said, & Davies, 2017; Saeed, 2017). Though many of the DSLs had sought to provide resources that did not propagate such stereotypes, a number of teaching staff felt such adaptions had not gone far enough and therefore sought to further minimise the risk of stigmatising Muslim students by supplementing these resources with their own. This commonly included the use of what staff referred to as examples of different forms of extremism, with focus predominantly placed on far-right inspired extremism as well as Islamist examples. Staff saw these efforts as their attempts to move Prevent away from being focused primarily on Muslims (see Chap. 2). Whilst several of the staff observed that it was problematic that these adaptions were necessary, their ability to enact the Duty through their own resources highlighted the malleability of the Duty and thus the capacity of those on the ground to shape it.

A significant proportion of the staff suggested, however, that the dominance of wider public narratives of prejudice which placed Islam as a security threat limited the effectiveness of their efforts to shift perceptions about the focus of the Prevent Duty. These narratives were seen as constraining such efforts in two ways. Firstly, some staff recognised that ongoing exposure to prejudicial depictions of Islam within the media and government rhetoric was likely to give rise to bias within their own thinking and professional judgement. Secondly, some staff at least expressed the view that within a context of entrenched public discourses that positioned Islam as the primary terrorist threat, their attempts to challenge these depictions were likely to have limited effect.

Students recognised the attempts by staff to bring in non-Islamist forms of extremism and terrorism to their sessions, but also referenced the same problematic narratives of prejudice which conceptualised Islam, and therefore Muslims, as the terrorist threat*.* Almost all of the students who participated believed that it was the media who created this narrative of the terrorist as 'the Asian guy with the beard' (Rio, Student, Mixed Focus Group, Training Institute 2):

Like any brown person that you see on the street, they get labelled instantly don't they. (Henry, Student, Mixed Focus Group, Academic Institute 2)

This sentiment was echoed by a number of students who suggested that white perpetrators of violence were often depicted, in contrast, as mentally unstable. Therefore, for many of the students, racial, cultural and religious signifiers had become central markers for understanding who could be seen as threatening and thus the target of programmes like the Prevent Duty—namely Muslims, and those who looked Muslim. Efforts by their teachers to challenge this were welcomed but not perceived as enough to break such narratives down.

Many of the staff participants similarly recognised the barrage of media images and rhetoric that had been in place since 9/11 and had played an important role in shaping these young people's perceptions of terrorism (See also Jerome & Elwick, 2019). For the majority of their students, Islamist-inspired terrorism had been all they had ever known. Moreover, for a number of staff and students, there was a feeling that by the point of further education, attempts to break down these perceptions were too little too late for individuals for whom these narratives had been accepted and normalised. For these staff members, their students pre-learned perceptions meant their job to break down these narratives became even more challenging at an age where their views were already formed as they were entering into adulthood. As a result, for staff members, their efforts to minimise the problematic conceptions surrounding threat(s), and thus Prevent, rested not only on their capacities to shift away from a simplistic and one-sided presentation of radicalisation in their resources but also on their abilities to break down entrenched perceptions of who was likely to become radicalised. Thus whilst the Duty provided the space for other forms of extremism to be explored, and for previous claims around its targeting to be minimised, staff enactments to fulfil these adaptations through ground-level implementation were limited by such deeply engrained narratives of prejudice within the wider public discourse.

#### **The 'Safeguarding' Dimension of Prevent**

Existing scholarship indicates broad acceptance within the education sector of the framing of Prevent as a safeguarding mechanism (Bryan, 2017; Busher, Choudhury, & Thomas, 2019; Jerome, Elwick, & Kazim, 2019). This was also found among the staff who participated in this research. Many did see the introduction of the Prevent Duty as an extension of their existing responsibilities around safeguarding their students from potential harms, with radicalisation seen in the same vein as child sexual exploitation, abuse or substance misuse. Although some respondents made reference to the Counter-Terrorism Unit becoming involved in discussions around referrals for DSLs, once external support was felt to be required (James, forthcoming), internal referral processes relating to concerns over potential radicalisation issues followed normal safeguarding procedures for teaching staff.

Where concerns were raised, teaching staff would disclose the matter to safeguarding teams, whether through a paperwork trail or an online system, and their DSL would then investigate the concern. In this sense, referrals under the Prevent Duty were no different than any other form of safeguarding. Whilst many online participants described this referral process, face-to-face participants revealed a further layer of deliberation. This comprised informal conversations with colleagues *prior* to informing their safeguarding teams to gain further reassurance that their concerns were valid. Of note, respondents described these conversations as being more likely to take place in cases related to radicalisation than other forms of harm. Such discussions, often outside of the safeguarding team, were described as providing staff themselves with a safeguard against making the wrong call. This, in many cases, related to when staff had a *gut feeling* but wanted to affirm this with others. As one member of staff noted, this was partly a result of trying to manage their own possible unconscious bias. As she explained, when concerned about a Muslim student, she used these informal conversations with colleagues as a means of reducing the risk that she was over-interpreting the situation because of her religion:

I talked to other members of staff who said, 'no, refer it', so that was nice: that we could discuss it without kind of breaking data protection or anything like that, I could discuss it with other people and that reassured me that I could report it. (Fine Art Educator, Academic Institute 1)

For this staff member, it was the fear of 'interfering with that student's right to be religious' by viewing her increased religiosity as a central reason for referral which led them to seek reassurance from colleagues that it was not their bias which was guiding their referral but a shift in behaviour. Student discussions also noted concerns around potential unconscious bias from staff members in their referrals:

I'm not saying I'm a terrorist (laughs) but I might show the same traits or warning signs or something but as like a small white girl I don't think it'd be picked up as like 'she might be a terrorist' like I don't think I'd have that problem whereas say, this college is very diverse, and I think if some other, like if a lad was like that and he was from a different ethnicity, from a different background, I think he would be more likely to be picked out as 'ooh what's this about' rather than, like me. (Ava, Student, Academic Institute 1)

This extract from Ava's dialogue demonstrates the perception visible within a number of students' experiences, that a perceived *Muslimness* was central to whether or not someone could be viewed as being potentially radicalised. Cultural, ethnic and religious markers of difference were seen by students who shared Ava's concerns as markers of 'risk' (Heath-Kelly, 2013) which became hyper-visible in their perceived association with terrorism. For a number of students, fellow students with these 'traits' were perceived to therefore be hyper-visible to those deciding who was 'at risk' of radicalisation. Yet, despite their reservations, almost all of the students thought that those deemed 'at risk' of radicalisation should be referred to the relevant authorities.

The notion of *better to be safe than sorry* was evident in many of the experiences—of both staff and students—where the potential fallout from a *wrong call* was seen to be a far lesser burden to carry than that of missing an opportunity to stop an attack(er). As in McGlynn and McDaid's (2018) study of university students' perceptions of Prevent then, the student participants in this study also appeared to accept and to have internalised the idea that Prevent comprised a legitimate form of safeguarding:

It's safeguarding isn't it? […] you're [as a teacher] in place of the parents […] so if you suspect somebody you're not only protecting them like trying to get them out of that scenario, you're protecting everybody else involved because if something was to happen, it's not just them being affected, it's the entire community. (Ashleigh, Student, Mixed Focus Group One, Training Institute 1)

Though students understood they were being asked to be aware of the signs of radicalisation, the vast majority suggested that this was not something they felt was required of them, nor would it be something they would anticipate ever having to do. For most of the students in the research, though the threat of radicalisation was real, it was not something that was familiar or close to them or their peers. It was only after an attack had happened that students felt their awareness around terrorism and extremism became heightened; outside of these, this was something that felt distant. For students who suggested that the Manchester Arena attack did bring concerns around terrorism to their attention, their focus was placed on those impacted by the events, rather than the perpetrator. The likelihood that they or those they knew would be impacted by a terrorist attack, even after the arena bombing, was low, but the likelihood that they or their friends might be the ones to perpetrate such an act was even lower. Instead, students' concern over their friends would be put down to mental health, family problems, stress or other well-being issues; putting a concern down to potential radicalisation would be 'a last resort' (Rachel, Student, Mixed Focus Group, Academic Institute 1). For students in the research, the visibility of attacks reified the presence of threat within wider society, but the perception that this was something they or their friends might be involved with was distanced.

These experiences highlighted an internalisation of the Prevent Duty as a safeguarding mechanism. For both staff and students, the Duty's enactment through those existing platforms of safeguarding was simply a continuation of the practices and principles of their institutions to protect students from harm. The concerns felt by some were largely seen as not being a result of the Duty itself, but as resulting from the problematic narratives of prejudice which surrounded perceptions of who the Duty was most likely to be *preventing.*

# **Conclusion**

Through this exploration of staff and student experiences, two narratives have emerged which, together, enable us to tell this story of the implementation of the Prevent Duty within these further education institutes.

Firstly, the experiences highlighted the way in which the malleability of the Duty enabled staff to utilise existing practices and processes as a means of embedding the Duty into their current pedagogical practices. Whether through its embedding of a values agenda or its requirement to refer those vulnerable to radicalisation, the Prevent Duty became something which was accepted and integrated into existing mechanisms. In this sense, the Duty simply *extended* responsibilities and actions that had already been expected of staff.

Secondly, there is a story of the limitations surrounding these enactments. The limitations emerged from two key places: the processes of governance which regulate the Duty, and the wider public narratives of prejudice which inform and are informed by it. The malleability of the Duty enabled staff to minimise the perceived stigmatisations and divisions which were felt to inform Prevent as a counter-terrorism agenda. This occurred through a shift away from an isolated focus on Islamistinspired terrorism, a distancing from values as distinctly British and a recognition of internal bias regarding potential referrers. For educators and their students, these actions enabled them to challenge and seek to minimise the potential negative effects of the Prevent Duty that they perceived. However, staff members often perceived that their attempts to shift the focus of the Duty away from Muslims, or those who looked Muslim, were ultimately rendered fairly ineffective by the power of the public discourse which continued to perpetuate the idea that Prevent work did and ought to focus on Muslims.

The second place in which these limitations became apparent was in the processes of governance which surrounded the Duty. Staff perceived the Duty's malleability to be limited by the requirements of Ofsted. Whilst external resources helped teachers bridge knowledge and confidence gaps, they were also used to obtain documented evidence of teaching Prevent; whilst 'Our' values were advocated, 'British' values were on posters or dropped in during inspections to ensure compliance. For many of the staff then, the Duty's malleability opened up possibilities for varied enactments, but only so long as they could provide evidence of meeting the expectations of Ofsted.

It seems then that in FE, as in other parts of the education sector (Chaps. 5, 6, and 7), staff made use of significant malleability within the Prevent Duty to enact it in ways that they saw as fitting with their wider professional practice and commitment to the education and well-being of their students, and that arguably challenge some of the popular critiques of the Prevent agenda. Yet at the same time, the scope of educators and their students to interpret the Prevent Duty as they wanted was constrained by the environment in which they were operating, both in terms of the wider public discourses inscribed with significant and persistent anti-Muslim prejudice, and in terms of the processes of governance that often undermined the willingness or confidence of educators to exercise their professional judgement.

## **References**


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# **9**

# **Conclusion: Reflections on the First Five Years of the Prevent Duty in Early Years, Primary, Secondary and Further Education**

**Lee Jerome, Joel Busher, Megan A. Armstrong, Tufyal Choudhury, Raquel da Silva, Alex Elwick, Giuditta Fontana, Natalie James, James Lewis, Jenny Robson, Hans Svennevig, and Paul Thomas**

**Abstract** This chapter reflects on the key conclusions from across the previous chapters. First, it discusses how the Prevent Duty has become normalised in schools, colleges and early years provision, as professionals incorporated it into existing structures and processes—both in the curriculum and through safeguarding. Second, it discusses how, whilst some professionals might have unconsciously reproduced potentially harmful stereotypes and simplistic assumptions about terrorism and extremism, others have consciously worked to mitigate the possible negative effects of the Duty, and have used the curriculum to further develop values education and opportunities for critical discussion. Third, the chapter reflects on the implications of the apparent banalisation of Prevent within education, and how this may or may not intersect with processes of securitisation.

L. Jerome (\*)

Department of Education, Middlesex University, London, UK e-mail: l.jerome@mdx.ac.uk

**Keywords** Prevent Duty • Normalisation • Banalisation • Securitisation • Safeguarding

J. Busher

Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, Coventry, UK e-mail: joel.busher@coventry.ac.uk

M. A. Armstrong Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: M.A.Armstrong@ljmu.ac.uk

T. Choudhury Durham Law School, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: t.a.choudhury@durham.ac.uk

R. da Silva University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Centre for International Studies, ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: R.B.P.daSilva@bham.ac.uk

A. Elwick • H. Svennevig UCL Institute of Education, London, UK e-mail: a.elwick@ucl.ac.uk; h.svennevig@ucl.ac.uk

G. Fontana University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: g.fontana@bham.ac.uk

N. James School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: ptnj@leeds.ac.uk

J. Lewis Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: j.lewis8@lancaster.ac.uk

J. Robson Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London, London, UK e-mail: j.robson@uel.ac.uk

Our decision to write this book was motivated by the belief that if we as a society are to have a meaningful conversation about the Prevent Duty and the wider Prevent strategy, then we need to be better informed about how the Duty has played out on the ground since it was introduced in 2015. In order to develop such an understanding, it is important to get beyond, although not to discard or overlook, high-level policy and theoretical analysis, and to explore the experiences of the educators, students and other actors whose lives are being influenced directly by the Duty. In this final short chapter we draw out some of the main insights from across the preceding chapters. We organise this discussion around the three basic focal points for analysis that run throughout the book: the enactment, impacts and implications of the Prevent Duty.

#### **The Enactment of the Prevent Duty**

Perhaps the most striking theme here concerns the Duty's rapid normalisation within education. Throughout the volume, the picture that emerges is, for the most part, one of the Duty quickly coming to be seen as just another of the many requirements placed on educators. While it initially caused considerable anxiety, in general the Duty appears to have become a 'non-exceptional' area of practice for many education professionals (see especially Chap. 7).

All of the chapters indicate that the UK government's framing of the Duty as a straightforward extension of existing safeguarding responsibilities has largely been accepted by educators, despite criticisms by a number of academics that the extension of this concept potentially pathologises and closes down dissent, and is likely to focus disproportionately on Muslim students (see Chap. 2). Nevertheless, occasional disruptions to this policy frame in the course of educators' own reflective practice indicate there are still some unresolved tensions in this 'Prevent-as-safeguarding' narrative (see Chaps. 3 and 8). Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 also illustrate how the

P. Thomas

Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society (HudCRES), University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK e-mail: d.p.thomas@hud.ac.uk

common framing of the Duty as 'safeguarding' obscures the very different implications for each age-related phase of education. In practice, safeguarding in the early years context is rather different from the further education sector and so, therefore, the Prevent Duty leads to quite distinctive practices related to surveillance and reporting. For example, among early years practitioners, particular emphasis appears to have been placed on increased surveillance of the families of children in their care (Chap. 5).

What the chapters also reveal is how quickly staff moved from feelings of anxiety about the Duty to the type of policy problem solving typical of 'street-level bureaucrats' (Lipsky, 2010). They examined the new requirements, 'mapped' how these requirements fitted with their existing practice, identified where their existing practices would require adaptation in order ensure compliance, and some explored opportunities the Duty might offer to pursue new projects or priorities. In other words, and at risk of over-simplification, while this rapid normalisation of the Prevent Duty has partly been a product of 'top-down' policy processes, it has also been a product of the way educators themselves have integrated it into existing professional practices and organisational cultures.

This rapid normalisation of the Duty has had important implications for how it has played out in practice. Most obviously, it has contributed to soften professional reticence about, or opposition to, the Duty. There has not been the widespread resistance to the Duty that one might have expected given the breadth and intensity of the criticism expressed prior to its introduction. Indeed, the chapters in this volume report that there has even been some positive acceptance. However, there is evidence of some continued professional wariness about, and resistance to, the Duty. This is particularly concentrated around the requirements to promote fundamental British values. Here, despite significant continuity with an existing pedagogical and organisational focus on values, the emphasis placed on the supposed *Britishness* of these values was often, although not unanimously, seen as being problematic, and quite possibly counter-productive—whether in terms of fostering potentially toxic in-group and out-group categories, or producing a narrow and somewhat impoverished discourse and understanding about positive values (see especially Chap. 5). There is also some evidence that concerns about the Duty are more prevalent among black and minority ethnic educators who, perhaps, might be more attuned to the Duty's potential to reinforce forms of structural racism (see Chap. 3).

#### **The Impacts of the Prevent Duty**

It is important to note how challenging it is to identify and demonstrate with confidence the impacts of the Prevent Duty per se, without reaching well beyond the data. In particular, it is often difficult to disentangle the effects of the Duty from those of wider developments both within the education sector and within society more broadly (see especially Chaps. 7 and 8). Nonetheless, the kind of 'low-hovering research' (Anderson, 2007) presented in this volume offers a number of insights that are likely to be of interest to researchers, policymakers, civil society groups and educators alike.

What these accounts of the Prevent Duty really have in common is that they all paint a picture of considerable ambivalence: seemingly defying easy summarisation. In terms of the impact of the Duty on professional practice, the evidence indicates that most educators perceive the Duty to have had relatively little impact, either because they perceived it to be broadly commensurate with existing practices, or due to subtle forms of resistance, such as continuing to talk about 'our values' or 'school values' rather than 'fundamental British values'. Yet as discussed in Chap. 1, there was, at least initially, a marked increase in Prevent referrals after the Duty came into force; approximately a third of Prevent referrals have continued to come from the education sector, and despite the general narratives of continuity, across the chapters there is also evidence of considerable professional adaptation and innovation.

In terms of whether the Duty has had a 'chilling effect' on the voices of children and young people, there is a fairly consistent finding that staff are broadly confident in their ability to mitigate its possible negative effects. Indeed, there is evidence that some educators have seen the Duty as an opportunity to encourage greater dialogue around issues previously considered too sensitive or contentious, and to reprioritise areas of work that, until recently, would broadly have fallen under citizenship education. Some of the data raise questions about the extent to which such perceptions among staff resonate with the lived experience of children and young people, and particularly those of Muslim and other minority ethnic or religious backgrounds (see especially Chap. 8).

What does seem to be clear from the evidence from secondary students (Chap. 4) is that young people want their teachers to create the space for open and critical investigation of issues related to terrorism and extremism. However, the resources endorsed by government for use in the classroom (reviewed in Chap. 4) fall considerably short of the kind of education requested by the students, which underlines the challenge for teachers in selecting, supplementing and interpreting such material (see Chap. 8). This raises important questions about whether it might be preferable for the UK government simply to re-emphasise such areas of work (e.g., learning about terrorism, extremism and the fundamental British values, but also about positive citizenship and democratic processes and values) within national curricula, rather than covering them separately under the rubric of Prevent. Bajaj (2012) has noted that curriculum content can be transformed by the context in which it is encountered, and so it may well be significant if concepts such as democracy, liberty and toleration are largely learned through British values and Prevent, rather than a broader form of critical citizenship education (Vincent, 2019).

The evidence about the possible link between the Prevent Duty and the stigmatisation of Muslim children and young people is also difficult to decipher. There appear to be fairly widespread perceptions that this risk exists, and both adults and young people recognise that their relationships and experiences are influenced by a wider context of substantial and persistent anti-Muslim racism and prejudice. The data discussed in this book demonstrate the potential for staff risk-assessments and referrals to be shaped by unconscious bias. They also indicate important variation in terms of the degree to which educators are confident that such risks can be effectively managed.

## **The Wider Implications of the Prevent Duty and of Our Research**

In turning to consider the implications of our research we have to move beyond the data and assert our own interpretations of what they might mean. We suggest this research raises two points of particular importance for thinking about the Prevent Duty. First, the descriptions of the Duty set out in this volume lend considerable support to the idea that it should be understood within the context of ongoing processes of professional responsibilisation that are central to the expansion of neo-liberal forms of governance (Garland, 1996; Thomas, 2017). While policymakers might well argue that the Duty places legal responsibility on institutions rather than individuals, it would suggest a rather naïve understanding of systems of power and accountability within contemporary professions to argue that the Duty has not placed greater responsibility and pressure on individuals. While responsibility for the Duty is felt particularly keenly by members of staff with specific safeguarding responsibilities (Chap. 3), it seems clear that these responsibilities have been internalised by educators more broadly, and that this has had a significant bearing on their lived experience. There is also evidence that educators often locate responsibility for the apparent failures of the Duty—whether in terms of missing 'genuine cases' or inappropriate referrals or other practices—with the individuals and institutions that have 'done it badly' (Chap. 3), rather than with higher-level processes of policy design and implementation. It seems reasonable to expect that this has had a major bearing on professional evaluations of the Duty.

The second point is about how the introduction of the Duty is shaping wider policy and public debates about Prevent and the UK's Counter-Terrorism Strategy (CONTEST). If the broad accommodation of the Prevent Duty by a substantial majority of the educators in this volume reflects a general phenomenon across the half a million educators in Britain, this would appear to lend considerable weight to Heath-Kelly and Strausz's (2019) argument that we might be witnessing a 'banalisation' of counter-terrorism (see also Awan, Spiller, & Whiting, 2018; McGlynn & McDaid, 2019).

It remains unclear however what the implications of this banalisation will be. As Heath-Kelly and Strausz argue, if those responsibilised under the Duty internalise its logic and become less inclined to critically engage with this and similar legislation it might be seen as a source of concern. On this view we might expect that they will become more likely to slip into practices that both exacerbate structural racism and expand surveillance in ways that could seriously constrain free speech and undermine human rights. Yet it seems that other effects of this banalisation are also possible. This is because, at the same time as the counter-terrorism logics inscribed in the Prevent Duty come to permeate other areas of practice, including those related to education and childcare, prior practices and logics operating in these other spaces might also begin to shape the practice of the Prevent Duty and Prevent policy more generally. As Prevent becomes something banal, direct opposition might diminish, but so too might the accompanying sense of intimidation, anxiety and insecurity among professionals that is likely to distort their professional judgement and foster discriminatory practices. The banalisation of Prevent might also result in education and childcare professionals feeling increasingly emboldened to develop their own take on the Duty and to mould it around their own existing professional and institutional cultures and ethos, in the context of their wider relationships with families and communities. As this happens in early years provision, schools and colleges across the country, it is possible that grassroots policy enactment by education and childcare professionals could not only significantly reconfigure what the Prevent Duty looks like in educational settings, but might also give rise to important 'bottom-up' policy innovations that have wider implications for how societies seek to respond to issues such as polarisation, terrorism and political violence.

## **Final Thoughts**

The picture that we have traced of the Prevent Duty in early years, primary, secondary and further education is one characterised by significant ambivalence. These findings do not lend themselves easily to claims that, as some critics of Prevent would have it, the Duty is a major threat to a cohesive, democratic and fair society. Yet neither do they lend themselves to claims that the problems that the Prevent Duty throws up can simply be addressed through a little more training and support. Such findings do not translate easily into policy recommendations. What they do, however, is provide an important reminder, should one be needed, that policy plays out in complex and often surprising ways as it travels from initial intention into practice (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2013). Policies concerned with countering and preventing violent extremism are no different. If we are serious about wanting to understand the effects of such policies, we must get as close as possible to where they are being put into practice, and we must be willing to grapple with a messy reality that might not fit comfortably, if at all, with our expectations.

We would argue that the accounts of this messy reality set out in this book also indicate that the educational debate about Prevent might usefully be expanded beyond the issues of securitisation, responsibilisation and the erosion of professional boundaries that have tended to dominate discussion to date, important though these remain. The first distinctively educational issue to emerge concerns what children and young people need to learn about terrorism and extremism, in order to feel that they understand the issues (including the threats and the policies designed to counter those threats). Teachers and other professionals are well-placed as trusted adults to play a role in building this level of critical understanding and to engage children and young people in various forms of values education, but it seems that policy could do more to empower them to undertake this fundamental educational role. Some of the educators in this research across all age-phases continue to question whether the framing of such knowledge as the 'promotion' of 'fundamental British values' is the most useful way to articulate what children and young people should learn. In practical terms, such framing seems to be alienating (at least some) professionals from the policy, even when they are generally well-disposed to the Prevent Duty as a whole.

The second educational issue relates to the nature of safeguarding. Here staff seem to have taken steps to integrate the Prevent Duty into existing safeguarding practices, and yet they also report concerns that the surveillance and monitoring of Muslim and minority ethnic students might reflect unconscious bias and prejudice. There is also evidence that some referrals are motivated by fears of being judged to have missed something, rather than being solely rooted in individual safeguarding concerns for children and young people. We note that the number and profile of referrals is shifting over time, and so this is an open question about whether the Duty encourages over-reporting, especially of some groups, or whether this is settling down as the policy becomes normalised. However, our research indicates that, even where the Prevent Duty has been absorbed into existing safeguarding practices, there are on-going concerns that such practices continue to be disproportionately focused on children and young people from specific ethnic or religious minorities, even where staff actively seek to mitigate against such effects. We believe therefore that some sort of equality impact review might be a useful next step in the policy's development.

As Chap. 2 indicated, the Prevent policy has evolved over time and responded to government priorities, external events, and public perceptions and fears about those events. As the policy continues to evolve, we hope that this book, and the kind of research it offers, will encourage policy-makers to take account of the way the policy is enacted and of the multiple effects it has on educators, children and young people and others. The conclusions we have outlined in this chapter indicate some of the insights that can be gleaned from attending to the voices of those in the education sector affected by the Prevent Duty, and suggest aspects of the policy that can be improved. This does not ignore the debates about whether the Duty is the right kind of policy in the first place, but it does suggest that, if the Duty continues, there are some pragmatic steps that should be taken to avoid or minimise unintended harm. We hope such pragmatic suggestions will inform the next steps of those leading the development of policy at national level, as well as those enacting policy through their roles in the education system.

## **References**


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# **Index1**

**A** Absences as a cause of suspicion, 36, 90–92, 147 Adult learners, 141 Agency of staff, 5, 6, 38, 47, 63, 68–70, 83, 108, 119, 122–124, 134, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151, 156, 161 of young people, 5, 57 Al Qaeda, 44 Animal rights, 45, 46, 60 Anti-apartheid activists, 62 Anti-racism, 25, 38, 45, 49, 51 Anxiety, 35, 42, 44, 46, 47, 61, 161, 162, 166

Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT), 57, 59, 62, 63, 73n1, 73n3 Attrition rate, 23 Austerity, 18

#### **B**

Ball, Stephen, 6, 41, 68, 100, 119, 121, 124, 125, 127–132, 135, 140, 146, 149 Banalisation, 165, 166 Bethnal Green school girls, 118 Black and minority ethnic (BME) teachers, 162 Blears, Hazel, 20 Brexit, 109

1Note: Page numbers followed by 'n' refer to notes.

Britishness identity, 82 marginalisation/exclusion from, 61, 64, 145 symbols of Britishness, 78, 83, 85 Brown, Gordon, 143 Bryan, Hazel, 38, 58, 82, 102, 120, 126, 144, 151

#### **C**

Channel panel, 3, 18 referral, 23, 24, 44, 56, 103, 133 Childminders, 79 Children's planning meetings, 83, 87, 88 Child sexual expolitation (CSE), 39, 40, 103, 152 Chilling effect, 25, 26, 34, 48–51, 163 Citizenship, 5, 25, 38, 51, 57, 67, 69, 72, 86, 130, 143, 145, 148, 163, 164 Civil liberties, 15, 22 Clarke, Michael, 21, 121 Climate of suspicion, 39 Coalition government, 12, 19 Community cohesion, 15, 17, 18, 27, 92, 93 CONTEST, *see* Counter-terrorism strategy Context, 4, 6, 7, 26, 35, 45, 64, 66, 71, 78–81, 84, 86, 100–102, 104–110, 112–114, 119–135, 140, 141, 149, 150, 162, 164–166 Conveyer belt, 18 Cooker bomb/cucumber case, Luton, 22

Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (CTSA), 2015, 2, 19, 21 Counter-terrorism strategy (CONTEST), 12, 13, 78, 79, 165 Cox, Jo, 37 Curriculum, 25, 41, 48, 49, 56, 57, 59, 67, 72, 81, 86, 87, 91, 110–113, 123, 127–133, 141, 148, 164

#### **D**

Debating, 49, 56 Democracy, 41, 51, 59–61, 64, 68–71, 84, 87, 114, 143, 146, 164 Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), 12, 17 House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry 2009–10, 15, 17 Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs), 36–38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 101, 105–107, 109, 142, 143, 149, 152 Display boards, 78, 83, 84, 87, 113, 132 Drop-down days, 130, 131

#### **E**

Early childhood, 78–94, 112 Early learning goals, 86 Early years education, 2, 4, 21, 26, 161–168 Educate Against Hate (EAH) website, 66, 67, 71

Enactment of policy, 6, 44, 51, 57, 82, 100, 119, 142, 166 English Defence League (EDL), 20, 64, 71 Equality, 25, 49–51, 108, 133, 168 Ethos, 51, 124, 166 External speakers, 48 Extra-curricular activities, 49 Extreme right, 37, 45, 73n2 Extremism, 3, 15–17, 20–23, 25, 26, 40, 44–46, 49, 50, 57–59, 62–66, 68–73, 80, 100, 101, 107–111, 113, 122, 128, 141, 143, 148–151, 154, 164, 167

#### **F**

Families as partners, 91 as the object of surveillance, 39, 79, 80, 90, 91, 162 Female genital mutilation (FGM), 40, 43, 103, 111 Five eyes network, 13 Form time, 49, 130 Foundation Stage, Statutory Framework for the Early Years, 80, 86, 88, 89, 91 Free speech, 3, 12, 15, 26, 165 Fundamental British values teachers' and early years professionals' views about, 126 young people's support for, 58–60 young people's views about, 56, 58, 167 Funding national funding, 18 school funding, 80 Further education (FE), 2, 4, 21, 24, 27, 34, 68, 161–168

**G** Good citizen, 144 Gove, Michael, 21 Governance processes, 143

**H**

Hate, 37, 68, 69, 71 Heath-Kelly, Charlotte, 24, 101, 153, 165 History, 21, 41, 45, 82, 119, 121, 122, 125, 128 Holidays as cause for suspicion, 90 Home Office, 3, 18, 21, 23, 56, 66, 101, 102, 104, 113, 118 Human rights, 22, 25, 166

#### **I**

Independent Review of Prevent, 23 Indicators of risk/radicalisation, 2, 25, 26, 47, 80, 90–93, 104, 105, 118–121, 148, 153 Inequality, 50, 93 Inspection framework, 80, 146, 147 Internet filters, 130 Interventions, 14, 18, 21, 23, 60, 64, 123 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 62, 125, 126 ISIS/Islamic State, 20, 37, 44–46, 64 Islamist terrorism, 15, 62 Islamophobia, 42, 61, 63, 67, 68, 109

#### **K**

Knowledge teachers, 126, 142 young people, 58 Kundnani, Arun, 15, 18

#### **L**

Lander, Vini, 79, 82 Learning, 64, 70, 80, 84, 86–88, 92, 149, 164 students' views about what they want to learn, 57–59, 62–65 Local context, 121, 135 Local government, 14, 16, 18, 22 London bombings 2005, 14 Lundie, David, 68, 118

#### **M**

Malleability, 142, 143, 147, 150, 155 Manchester Manchester Arena bombing, 2017, 142 Mapping exercises, 41 Media, 15, 19, 20, 22, 58, 62–65, 67, 70, 73, 73n2, 107, 109, 118, 121, 124, 125, 134, 150, 151 Mentoring, 3, 18, 23, 44 MI5, 15 Midlands, 100–105, 112–114 Moderate Islam, 14 Moral pedagogy contextual moral pedagogy, 78, 86, 87, 89, 94 conventional moral pedagogy, 86 Muslim civil society, 14 Muslim students experiences of Prevent in schools, 61 feelings of exclusion, 61–62 stigmatisation, 23, 27, 34, 35, 44–47, 51, 164

#### **N**

National Health Service, 21, 101 Nationalism, 78, 85 Neo-liberalism, 119 Neo-Nazis, 64 9/11, 58, 63, 68, 151 Normalisation, 112, 161, 162 Northern Ireland, 14, 16, 45 Nursery, 79, 82, 84, 85, 92

#### **O**

Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), 20, 42, 80, 89, 131–133, 141, 146–149, 155 Operation Dovetail, 19 Opposition from staff, 35–38

#### **P**

Pedagogy, 78, 81, 84–89, 94, 149 Performativity, 84, 93, 132, 133, 146 Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), 41, 67, 111, 123, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133 Police, 14, 15, 17, 21, 24, 27, 103, 108, 132 Policy entrepreneurs, 6, 68 Posters, 83, 146, 148, 155 Pragmatic acceptance, 36, 37, 103, 120 Prejudice, 114, 140, 150, 151, 154–156, 164, 167 Prevent 1, 12–17, 20–22, 25–27, 132 Prevent 2, 12, 14, 16–22, 26, 27

Prevent Duty, 2–7, 12–15, 19–27, 34–51, 58, 59, 61, 65–68, 73, 78–94, 100–114, 118–135, 140–156, 161–168 Prevent Education Officers (PEOs), 101, 103, 105 Prevent Engagement Officers, 15 Prevent priority areas (PPAs), 18, 21, 68, 101, 120, 121, 131, 132 Prevent Review 2011, 12, 16, 19, 21, 22 Primary education, 102–105, 112, 113 Professional identity, 125, 126 Propaganda, 70 Public narratives, 140, 150, 155

#### **R**

Radicalisation, 2, 12, 13, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26, 27, 42, 45, 47, 56, 58, 64, 66, 80, 89–93, 102–105, 107, 110, 118–123, 125–127, 133–135, 141, 148, 149, 151–155 Referendum, 37 Referrals of children and young people Home Office statistics, 3, 23 formal referrals, 3, 22–24, 40, 43, 44, 56, 103, 106, 107, 113, 114, 122, 124–127, 133, 140, 152, 163–165, 167 informal conversations (prereferral), 152 Religious Education (RE), 5, 14, 67, 111, 128–130 Reputational risk, 42

Resilience, 2, 16, 17, 25, 56, 58, 59, 110, 127, 128, 143 Resistance, 38, 162, 163 Resources for teaching, 149 Responsibilisation, 15, 21, 165, 167 Revell, Lynn, 38, 58, 82, 144 Rigby, Lee, 19, 20 Right-wing extremism, 23, 45, 46, 68, 101, 109, 110, 113 Risk, 3, 5, 12, 18, 24, 26, 35, 36, 39, 42–44, 47, 50, 51, 73, 80, 89–93, 102–105, 118–122, 134, 148, 149, 152, 153, 162, 164 Risk aversion, 126 Rule of law, 59, 60, 83, 143, 146

#### **S**

Safeguarding continuity, 34, 39–44, 51 prevent-as-safeguarding policy frame, 24, 27, 40, 44, 51 School-leaving age, 141 Secondary education, 2, 4, 82, 135, 161–168 Secrecy, 43 Securitisation, 5, 12, 15, 24, 27, 79, 89–93, 119, 132, 167 Self-censorship, 50, 61 7/7 bombing, 14 Signposting, 146 Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural (SMSC) education, 2, 56 Social work, 23, 39 Spotting signs, 25 Stereotyping, 61

Stigmatisation, 3, 15, 16, 22, 23, 27, 34, 35, 44–47, 51, 155, 164 Student perspectives on Prevent in FE, 68 in secondary schools, 57, 65, 118–135 Student voice, 34, 48–50, 67 Surveillance, 26, 39, 40, 42, 43, 72, 78–80, 84, 90–93, 127, 130, 162, 165, 167 Suspect communities, 14, 23 Syria, 20, 23, 24, 36, 46, 118

Training, 21, 24, 25, 36, 37, 40, 41, 45, 89, 90, 104–106, 108–110, 113, 114, 121, 122, 129, 132, 133, 141, 142, 166 Trojan Horse, 20, 21 Trust in teachers, 58, 70 Tutorial time, 148 2001 northern riots, 15

#### **U**

Unconscious bias, 46, 70, 152, 164, 167

#### **T**

Task Force on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism, 2013, 20 Teacher views fundamental British values, 56, 58, 61, 63, 120, 126 resources, 149 training, 109, 121, 129 Terrorism public attitudes towards, 17, 21, 57, 62, 64 young people's understanding of, 62, 68, 72 Terrorist/Terraced house investigation, Blackburn, 22 Tick box compliance, 26 Time, 3, 7, 8, 14, 15, 20, 36, 37, 46, 47, 49, 66, 71, 84, 85, 101, 106, 110–114, 122, 130, 131, 134, 142, 146, 156, 166–168 Tolerance, 5, 41, 60, 114, 143, 145

#### **V**

Values education early years as a value-based environment, 85 values clarification, 86 values other than British, 2, 78, 85–89, 167 Vincent, Carol, 5, 62, 83, 84, 91, 119, 123, 124, 128, 130–134, 164 Violent extremism, 16, 21, 113 Vulnerability, 3, 18, 36, 40, 118, 127 Vulnerability Assessment Framework (VAF), 19

#### **W**

Warsi, Sayeeda, 16, 21

Workload, 44, 120

Workshop to Raise Awareness about Prevent (WRAP), 104, 108, 142