Securitising education: an exploration of teachers’ attitudes and experiences regarding the implementation of the Prevent duty in sixth form colleges

Abstract

The government's counter-terrorism policy, known as CONTEST, has four components, Pursue, Protect, Prepare and Prevent. The counter terrorism and security act in 2015 led to changes to Prevent by placing a legal duty on frontline staff, such as teachers, to enact Prevent in schools and colleges. Currently, the impact of these changes is not well understood, and the present study explores the attitudes and experiences of college teachers regarding the implementation of the Prevent duty. Fourteen participants, across three London colleges, took part in semi-structured interviews regarding their training experiences, the implementation of the Prevent duty, knowledge about radicalisation and extremism, and teaching British values. Thematic analysis of the interview transcripts revealed five main themes: training experiences; reporting students; confidence; the association of Islam with Prevent; and protecting students. This study discusses possible changes to Prevent's implementation in educational settings and the development of community out-reach programmes. In addition, it suggests future research directions, such as empirical research on the effectiveness of de-radicalisation programmes.

Recognising and responding to radicalisation at the ‘frontline’: Assessing the capability of school teachers to recognise and respond to radicalisation

“…Several studies explicitly address the difficulties teachers face in recognising radicalisation. Moffat and Gerard (2019, p. 3) emphasise that radicalisation is not well understood and suggest that this makes it ‘a near impossible task for teachers’ to identify risk of radicalisation. Indeed, their interviews with London‐based college teachers identify concerns about ‘judging the signs of radicalisation’, which was deemed ‘difficult to assess’ (Moffat and Gerard, 2019, p. 11).…”

“…Moffat and Gerard (2019, p. 3) emphasise that radicalisation is not well understood and suggest that this makes it ‘a near impossible task for teachers’ to identify risk of radicalisation. Indeed, their interviews with London‐based college teachers identify concerns about ‘judging the signs of radicalisation’, which was deemed ‘difficult to assess’ (Moffat and Gerard, 2019, p. 11). Similarly, Bryan (2017) found that teachers struggled to articulate a process of radicalisation.…”

“…(2019) identify teachers as key ‘gatekeepers’ who are able to recognise potential signs of radicalisation. Finally, in interviews with 14 teachers, Moffat and Gerrard (2019), despite highlighting serious concerns, find that most recognise radicalisation prevention as an extension of their safeguarding duty and are committed to protecting students from being drawn into terrorism (see also Revell, 2019, pp. 28–29).…”

“…Taylor and Soni (2017) suggest a new cautiousness to discuss controversial topics and criticise the definition and application of British values. Similarly, Dudenhoefer (2018) and Moffat and Gerard (2019) suggest that concerns about being referred have undermined freedom of expression.…”

The Prevent Duty in UK higher education: Insights from freedom of information requests

“…2 For examples of research exploring the duty within education that utilise interviews as method see, Authors, 2018;Revell, 2019;Moffat and Gerard, 2020. For similarly inclined studies focused on health see, Heath-Kelly and Strausz (2019) and Younis and Jadhav's two ethnographic studies (2019a;. Upon receiving replies we began inputting our data by institution into a spreadsheet and then started the process of surveying the entire dataset for initial codes, themes and features.…”