Are Schools Ready for the Prevent Duty?

On 27 July 2015 the London Standard published a front page article on extremism and radicalisation. The article included comments from a broad spectrum of people and some interesting statistics. Whilst the piece was mainly concerned with the government's Channel process it did raise some interesting points about the place of schools in dealing with extremism and radicalisation.

As I have stated before I am in favour of schools adopting a safeguarding approach to all forms of extremism and radicalisation. The most important factor must be prevention of harm to children and young adults. Since the beginning of this year there has been a 58% increase in the referrals to Channel and nearly half of all referrals are for people under 18. In this context schools will increasingly become a focus for preventative action whether or not schools want this to happen. Therefore schools need to equip themselves to first demonstrate compliance with the duty and meet the expectations of their place in their local communities. In order to meet these expectations schools will need to be aware of the issues and process involved in extremism and radicalisation. One aspect of this will be the training of staff to effectively take the appropriate action when the issues of extremism and radicalisation affect their students and staff.

In times of increasing funding restrictions schools will less and less able to call on external support in providing effective training. Therefore it will be increasingly important for schools to find cost effective training that supports them in achieving their own aims with regard to demonstrating what they have and will continue to do with regard to extremism and radicalisation.

If you would like to know more about what we do or the e-learning training we have developed in partnership with Marshall ACM please contact me at [email protected]

If you would like to read the Standard article by David Churchill use the link below;
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-child-aged-three-in-terror-alert-over-radicalisation-10418455.html