A moral education? British Values, colour-blindness, and preventing terrorism

Abstract

The Prevent Strategy tasks the British education sector with preventing radicalisation and extremism. It defines extremism as opposition to fundamental British Values and requires schools to promote these values and refer students and staff believed to be vulnerable to radicalisation. Little research examining the enactment of the Prevent and British Values curriculum has included students. To fill this gap, we investigated how students, teachers and Prevent/British Values trainers engage with this curriculum by conducting individual interviews in two multicultural secondary schools in England, framing the study in recent work on colour-blindness. We found that whilst multiculturalism was celebrated, discussion about everyday structural racism was avoided. Critical thinking was performed strategically, and classrooms were securitised as sites for identifying potential safeguarding referrals. Moral education, colour-blindness and safeguarding intersected to negate racialised experiences, whilst exposing students and teachers to racialised Prevent referrals.

Satisfaction with HyFlex Teaching and Law-abiding Leadership Education in Hong Kong University Students Under COVID-19

“…For example, Singapore covers national security under national education, such as understanding the vulnerabilities and constraints of the country (Chia, 2015 ). In Britain, policy-makers have used the strategy of promoting “British values” to reduce radicalization in students (Winter et al, 2021 ). In the United States, there are even high schools implementing Homeland Security programs to provide vocational training for socially deprived students looking for jobs in national security (Nguyen, 2017 ).…”

Prevent, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus: Analysing Terrorism Prevention Policies Using Althusser’s Framework

“…But issues such as structural racism which might implicate the current system are ignored. 86 This increases the possibility that minorities might feel alienated, with their negative experiences being subsumed into a more palatable narrative where racists are simply the "bad apples", and the British state a fundamentally good actor with the interests of all citizens in mind. 87 Crawford argues that this positions teachers as defenders of a 'white hegemonic order'.…”

“The past is the past”: linear temporality, memory, and empire

“…I was told by one Channel practitioner -in a comment echoed by other officials -that despite criticisms of the contested Prevent strategy "people should just get on with it, get on board." Whilst substantive critique of Prevent exists because of its proclivity to mobilise racialised prejudice (see for example: Younis and Jadhav 2020;Heath-Kelly et al 2021), this practitioner's framing delegitimises criticism that remembers histories of unequal power relations, inciting us to look only forward. (How we remember and remake) the past is foundationally important in the making of the present and the future.…”