British Educators Preventing Terrorism Through ‘Safeguarding’ the ‘Vulnerable’

ABSTRACT

Educators are central to the implementation of Britain’s Prevent Strategy, through the ‘Prevent duty’. This mandatory reporting responsibility, shared with professional practitioners in health and welfare, requires educators to spot and refer individual students potentially ‘vulnerable to’ or ‘at risk’ of radicalisation. The Prevent duty explicitly instructs educators and educational institutions to understand this responsibility as ‘safeguarding’ and to operationalise it through existing safeguarding paradigms and mechanisms, an approach mirrored by other Western countries. This framing of terrorism prevention as ‘safeguarding’ within education, health and welfare has come under strong criticism from scholars who see it both as a perversion and as a securitisation of ‘traditional’ safeguarding. There has been too little consideration of what ‘safeguarding’ represents within modern education and how coherently, therefore, terrorism prevention approaches such as the Prevent duty fit. The article contributes to addressing this deficit, arguing that safeguarding within modern education is a form of anticipatory security, an approach of ‘new public management’, which sees anticipating and preventing risk to students as a core responsibility for all professionals. In this way, the article argues that counter-terrorism prevention responsibilities for educators, such as Britain’s Prevent duty, are entirely consistent with broader, pre-existing safeguarding paradigms within education.

Keywords:

• terrorism
• prevention
• safeguarding
• education

1. Introduction

Frontline educators in schools, colleges and universities are central to the implementation of Britain’s preventative counter-terrorism policy approach, the Prevent Strategy, through the ‘Prevent duty’, which was first introduced within the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (CTSA). This mandatory reporting responsibility for educational practitioners, shared with professional practitioners in health and social work, requires individual educationalists to identify and refer students regarded as potentially ‘vulnerable’ to, or ‘at risk’ of, radicalisation. This mandatory Prevent duty explicitly instructs educators and their educational institutions to understand this counter-terrorism responsibility as ‘safeguarding’ and to operationalise it through their pre-existing safeguarding paradigms, mechanisms and practitioner training approaches already used to address other forms of potential social harm, such as youth violence, abuse and sexual exploitation, a policy approach (and language) mirrored by increasing numbers of other Western countries.

For example, Skleoporis and Knudsen (2020) portray Britain’s Prevent Strategy as an international ‘norm producer’ for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) practice, whilst Heath-Kelly and Shanaah (2022, p. 14) identify that, ‘European Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) programmes all frame their pre-criminal interventions as “safeguarding” the potential offender from harm’ (their emphasis). Christodoulou (2020), in an analysis of how the European Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) of national and local policy practitioners has shared and adopted ‘good practice’ policy models, identifies the overt adoption of ‘safeguarding’ language within P/CVE approaches in individual member states, often drawing explicitly on Britain’s Prevent. RAN (2015, p. 1) itself identifies the crucial importance in terrorism prevention of educators, as they are ‘on the front line to help identify and safeguard youngsters at risk of radicalisation and to partner preventative efforts’.

This British policy framing of terrorism prevention as ‘safeguarding’ within education, health, and social work as part of the 2015 Prevent duty was challenged from the outset, both by teacher unions (Busher et al., 2017) and by some academic critics who portrayed the Prevent duty in Britain as a ‘securitisation’ of educational practices and of educator–student relationships (O’Donnell, 2016). A consistent criticism of Prevent and similar national preventative counter-terrorism measures enacted through education and welfare is that they operate in an apparently problematic ‘pre-crime space’ (Heath-Kelly, 2013). A 2016 special issue of the British Journal of Educational Studies engaged with the question of whether educational safeguarding would indeed be securitised and altered towards ‘surveillance’ (Davies, 2016), or rather whether pre-existing safeguarding approaches and cultures would instead influence and limit any securitisation of education (Durodie, 2016).

The overt positioning and operationalisation of the Prevent duty as part of pre-existing safeguarding approaches in education, health and social work has continued to come under strong criticism, both from some terrorism studies scholars (e.g., Walker and Cawley, 2022) and from some academic critics in relation to health (e.g., Aked, 2020; Heath-Kelly and Strausz, 2019) and social work (e.g., Finch et al., 2022). Some social work academic critics argue that the ‘Prevent as safeguarding’ is both a securitisation and a perversion of ‘traditional’ safeguarding (which they see as largely their professional domain), in this way now focussing safeguarding on potential, future harm rather than factual harm which is already occurring, and also as seeing the young person as a risk to others, rather than being at risk themselves, so arguably shifting the locus of concern within safeguarding practice.

This article directly engages with these challenges in relation to the operation of terrorism prevention as safeguarding within educational systems. In the significant body of international academic literature around the operation of terrorism prevention policies within educational domains, there has been too little consideration of what ‘safeguarding’ theory and practice represents within modern education systems and therefore of how coherently terrorism prevention approaches such as the British Prevent Strategy’s mandatory reporting duty fit, or rather contradict, existing educational safeguarding paradigms.

This article contributes to addressing this deficit, arguing that broader safeguarding approaches within modern education systems (Department for Education (DfE), 2023) are a form of anticipatory security (Dresser, 2018), an approach of ‘new public management’ (Munro and France, 2012) which sees anticipating and preventing risk to the vulnerable student as a core responsibility for all educational professionals and institutions (Parton, 2006). The DfE’s safeguarding guidance for English schools and colleges (2023, p. 9) identifies that ‘all school and college staff should be particularly alert to the potential need for early help for a child’. In this way, the article argues that counter-terrorism prevention responsibilities for educators, such as Britain’s Prevent duty, which ask all educators to identify individuals at risk of radicalisation, are consistent with broader, pre-existing safeguarding paradigms within modern education.

The article's theoretical framework for analysing how ‘safeguarding’ in modern education can be understood is first developed through discussion of ‘anticipatory security’ and models of new public management which arguably underpin the theory and practice of safeguarding within education systems in modern society. The article then briefly analyses the British Prevent Strategy’s evolution and the development of ‘safeguarding’ as its key’ operational paradigm, enacted through the Prevent duty, and increasingly used normatively to describe and justify the Prevent duty’s imposition on educators and educational institutions. As identified above, this proposition is contested strongly by some social work academics and medical scholars in relation to the Prevent duty’s coverage of their professions, and these challenges are considered. It goes on to review the growing body of empirical evidence around the enactment of Prevent as safeguarding within different sectors of British education, empirically based literature which demonstrates strong and consistent support amongst educators for the policy proposition that ‘Prevent is safeguarding’. This enables assessment of the relationship between terrorism prevention measures developed within education systems and broader safeguarding requirements and mechanisms and hence the consistency or otherwise between safeguarding and the requirements of the Prevent duty.

2. Understanding Safeguarding in Modern Education

Parton (2006, p. 2) considers how safeguarding can generally be understood in modern British education and welfare practice, asking, ‘what does the term “safeguarding” mean? How has it become the central focus for policy and practice?’. In particular, he considers the paradigmatic shift in the meaning and practice of ‘safeguarding’ that began in the late twentieth century under Britain’s New Labour government (1997–2010). Their policy focus on ‘children in need’ saw, concern shifted from the ‘protection pf children from abuse’ to the ‘safeguarding and promotion of children’s’ welfare‘ (Parton, 2006, p. 101). In their 2004 revision of the watershed 1989 Children Act, New Labour focussed on better outcomes for all children and young people and that child well-being should be a higher priority for all public agencies, including education. Here, there was a focus on the future potential of children. Appleton (2013, p. 75) identifies how the 2004 Children Act placed a statutory duty on all local education authorities and schools and further education college governing bodies to be, ‘safeguarding and promote children’s welfare’, so responsibilising (Thomas, 2017) educational professionals for harm prevention long before the 2015 Prevent duty. Koubel and Johnston (2016, p. 253) identify that the Children’s Act 2004 made safeguarding ‘everybody’s responsibility’ in relation to state practitioners. Peckover (2013), in considering the safeguarding role of health visitors, identifies how this preventative role resultingly grew for professional practitioners, and increasingly involved ‘risk assessment tools’ for potential vulnerability. This preventative approach of identifying risks and vulnerabilities through procedural frameworks and professional collaborating across roles to prevent harm is identified by Munro and France (2012) as a form of ‘new public management’.

For Parton, modern social and technological changes had weakened policy assumptions around the protective power of the family and the need for an increased state focus on prevention of harm, both to and by people (who are both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’). This belief in a much riskier childhood and transition to adulthood, echoing Beck’s conception of the ‘risk society’ (1992), was enshrined in revised British legislation and the ‘Every Child Matters’ policy portfolio during the New Labour government. Underpinning this emergence of the safeguarding ‘preventative state’ was the placing of prevention at the centre of public policy, rather than at the periphery, ‘the development of policies which emphasise safeguarding are particularly protectionist in intent’ (Parton, 2006, p. 7). Heath-Kelly and Shanaah (2022) see this preventative safeguarding approach as consistent with ‘new penology’ approaches to crime prevention, approaches to the identification of and intervention with young people ‘at risk’ of involvement in crime: ‘this approach has characterised juvenile delinquency prevention schemes since the mid-20^th century’ (2022, p. 3). Drawing on the concepts of the ‘pre-delinquent’ and the ‘pre-crime space’ developed first by the United Nations in the 1950s, this preventative focus on ‘at risk’ individuals enables a policy demonstration of commitment to public protection but also to individual rehabilitation and change. Here, ‘vulnerability’ was and is understood by safeguarding and crime prevention practitioners as representing both an individual risk of harm through potential involvement but also as having the potential to be a risk to others and applies no denial of agency for those identified as potential perpetrators of crime or harm. These long-established, preventative and risk-based approaches to crime prevention in many Western states have been the conceptual basis for the development of P/CVE policy approaches across different national domains that operationalise safeguarding understandings and logics (Heath-Kelly and Shanaah, 2022).

This preventative, anticipatory conception of safeguarding also brings an approach of ongoing client record-keeping and surveillance of individual children and young people by all professional practitioners, in case of identified vulnerabilities, with the affordances of electronic technologies enabling easier and quicker sharing of student files within and across professional domains (Parton, 2006), practices long pre-dating P/CVE. The mundanity of surveillance of and record-keeping about students in modern British schools, including the use of electronic swipes and cameras, has already been identified (Taylor, 2013) and empirical research on the operationalisation of the Prevent duty as safeguarding in English schools and colleges showed educationalists utilising pre-existing systems of ongoing electronic logs concerning individual students:

The overlap with existing safeguarding monitoring and surveillance practices was also evident in the basic technologies of surveillance: in the schema used by staff to identify which behaviours and which individuals warrant attention and the techniques through which such behaviours are observed and recorded, such as electronic logs of any concerns about individual students’. (Busher et al., 2023, p. 275)

Koubel (2016, p. 17) concurs with this understanding of safeguarding as protection from potential, future harm: ‘The concept that some people are vulnerable and need protection has now been reconfigured within a more encompassing notion of “safeguarding”. Powell et al. (2020, p. 1168), in their consideration of child safeguarding policies across several national domains, identify that: ‘The perception of children as being vulnerable and needing protection was evident in the documentation from all the countries included in the analysis’.

For Dresser (2018), safeguarding, and hence Prevent through safeguarding, is an approach of ‘anticipatory security’, through its pre-emptive approach of identifying ‘at risk’ individuals and intervening, seeing such individual vulnerability to radicalisation as provisional.

3. Prevent’s Development Towards ‘Safeguarding’

An under-acknowledged reality within the considerable academic and public discussion of Britain’s Prevent Strategy is the extent to which Prevent’s content and operations – what it involves and what it does – has evolved and changed significantly since its initiation in 2006. Thomas (2020) identifies distinct ‘phases’ of the Prevent Strategy’s evolution. In its first phase (2006–11), Prevent was predominantly focussed on community-based activity, largely aimed at young people through youth and community work, and funded via the-then Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to local authorities (DCLG, 2007). The fact that this work was explicitly aimed only at Muslim communities and was targeted at the English and Welsh Local Authority areas with the largest Muslim populations is the origin of the persistent allegation that Britain’s Prevent sees Muslims as an undifferentiated ‘suspect community’ (Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009). Prior to 2011, the Channel scheme of mentoring and counselling for individuals identified and referred to as vulnerable to radicalisation was a small-scale pilot scheme only. The 2011 Prevent Review (HMG, 2011) initiated Prevent’s second phase (2011 onwards), significantly downplaying the scale of community-based work (which continues to steadily decline in its scale and spend: see the Shawcross, 2023, Independent Review of Prevent), and very significantly growing the Channel scheme into a comprehensive national radicalisation referral system.

Here, for the first time, formal educational institutions and their staff were required to contribute to Prevent (Phillips et al., 2011; Thomas, 2016), an expectation confirmed by Prevent implementation subsequently being included in the Ofsted Common Inspection Framework for English schools and colleges. The 2015 introduction of the mandatory ‘Prevent duty’ (prompted by the significant number of young people, many of whom were either current school or college students or had only recently completed their education, travelling from Britain to join ISIS in Syria/Iraq), deepened this and created an enhanced Prevent ‘phase 2’ (Thomas, 2017). The mandatory nature of the 2015 Prevent reporting duty makes it internationally unique and it covers all professional practitioners in education (at all levels), health and social work. For example, the duty has seen well over a million professional practitioners receive specific Prevent training; by 2018, over 830,000 National Health Staff (NHS) had received ‘basic Prevent awareness’ training and over 470,000 had attended advanced Prevent training (Aked, 2020). In this way, British educationalists (and other professional practitioners) have been ‘responsibilised’ for terrorism prevention, a departure from Prevent’s first phase which saw British Muslim communities responsibilised (Dresser, 2018; Thomas, 2017). The 2023 Shawcross Independent Review of the Prevent Strategy praised the implementation of the Prevent duty within education, health and social work, saying: ‘I have found the duty to be especially effective in schools, where awareness of radicalisation risk has been successfully embedded within safeguarding work’ (Shawcross, 2023, p. 5). Shawcross also proposed the duty’s extension to cover Border and Immigration staff and to government practitioners working within the welfare benefits system, a proposal accepted by the Conservative Government.

From 2011 onwards, ‘safeguarding’ was thus the explicit frame to explain and justify the development of the Channel system towards the 2015 Prevent duty (HMG, 2011). Here, the 2011 Prevent Review identified that local Channel panels had been developed to work ‘alongside safeguarding partnerships and crime reduction panels…. [Channel] uses processes which also safeguard people at risk from crime, drugs, or gangs’ (HMG, 2011, p. 57). Section 10.45 of the report noted that:

Schools can help to protect children from extremist and violent views in the same ways that they help to safeguard children from drugs, gang violence or alcohol. Schools’ work on Prevent needs to be seen in this context. (HMG, 2011, p. 71)

Department for Education guidance to educational institutions following the 2015 CTSA was clear as to how educational professionals should understand and operationalise the new mandatory reporting duty:

Protecting children from the risk of radicalisation should be seen as part of schools’ and childcare providers’ wider safeguarding duties and is similar in nature to protecting children from other harms (e.g., drugs, gangs, neglect, sexual exploitation), whether these come from within their family or are the product of outside influences. (DfE, 2015 Departmental Advice for Schools and Childcare Providers)

In a speech to the Home Affairs Select Committee Annual Conference during the first academic year of the Prevent duty’s implementation, National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for Prevent, Chief Constable Simon Cole (2016), asserted that Prevent ‘is a non-criminal safeguarding activity … a common-sense diversionary activity preventing the unnecessary criminalisation of vulnerable people’. Cole also drew ‘obvious parallels’ between Prevent and preventative initiatives around youth ‘gang’ violence. This policy position was reiterated in the 2018 refresh of the UK Government’s overarching counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, which stated that: ‘The purpose of Prevent is at its heart to safeguard and support vulnerable people to stop them from becoming terrorist or supporting terrorism’ (HMG, 2018, p. 31). It went on to outline a traditional, three-tier pyramid approach to preventative work, with the Prevent duty and its process of Channel referrals for those ‘at risk’ sitting in the middle tier of ‘early intervention’, and ‘using safeguarding principles, provide multi-agency support to those identified as most at risk of radicalisation’ (ibid, p. 32). Here, the Prevent duty ‘sits alongside long-established duties on professionals to safeguard vulnerable people from exploitation’ (HMG, 2018, p. 35).

The 2015 introduction of the Prevent duty to education did, though, face significant criticism and concern from the start. The leading schoolteacher trade union, the National Union of Teachers (now the National Education Union), warned that teachers would oppose it, human rights groups such as Liberty and Rights Watch UK expressed concern about the ‘securitisation’ of education (O’Donnell, 2016) and national representative body the Muslim Council of Britain worried that it would replicate the disproportionate focus on young Muslims of Prevent’s first phase (Busher et al., 2017). Some of these fears focussed on the duty’s requirement for educationalists to ‘promote Fundamental British Values’ (FBV) (Revell and Bryan, 2018) but many focussed on the other main requirement to enact Prevent as safeguarding and to operationalise reporting and referral systems within broader safeguarding mechanisms. These fears were heightened by an initial surge in referrals with inappropriate examples featuring in media coverage (all concerning Muslim students, some factually inaccurate). This placed the educational operation of Prevent as safeguarding at the forefront of national debates around the appropriacy of terrorism prevention measures.

This foregrounding of Prevent as safeguarding was reiterated in the later (highly controversial: Holmwood and Ailthadj, 2022) Shawcross (2023) Independent Review of Prevent:

I was encouraged by the ways in which institutions, particularly after the introduction of the duty, absorbed Prevent within existing safeguarding processes and recognised the need to encompass risk of radicalisation alongside forms of exploitation and abuse. (Shawcross, 2023, p. 89)

One form of apparent consistency between the Prevent duty and wider safeguarding approaches can be seen in the attrition rate of Prevent referrals by front-line practitioners – the proportion of initial referrals from practitioners leading to no further action by the multi-agency local Channel panel. The high attrition rate for Prevent referrals is identified by the annual publication of data on this issue for a number of years now, part of a progressive ‘juridification’ of Prevent (Walker and Cawley, 2022), with only around 10% of the referrals being ‘adopted’ by a Channel panel following an assessment that they have met the evidential threshold for an intervention package of counter-radicalisation mentoring and counselling to be offered, should the referred individual voluntarily accept this. The attrition rate has long been a key focus for strong criticism of Prevent, taken as apparent proof of its ineffectiveness. This aspect of the Prevent model was acknowledged but justified in the Shawcross review:

Prevent’s current model results in a high volume of referrals being triaged out prior to Channel, classified as requiring no further action (NFA). This is comparable to other safeguarding referral systems. (Shawcross, 2023, p. 45)

The report highlights that only about 10% of referrals about a ‘child in need’ in the social care sector in 2021 met the threshold for needing a child protection plan, whilst 11% of Prevent referrals were adopted for a Channel intervention package in the same period.

Whilst praising this implementation of Prevent as safeguarding within the education system, Shawcross does question the use of the concept and term of ‘vulnerability’ within this approach, suggesting that its use ‘bestows a status of victimhood on all who come into contact with Prevent, negating individual risk and agency’ (Shawcross, 2023, p. 42). Here, Shawcross juxtaposes this focus on vulnerability with a claimed under-concern with ideology within Prevent’s operations, supposedly leading to ‘medicised’ practice. The Shawcross Review’s concern with the use of ‘vulnerability’ as a concept within Prevent (and more broadly within P/CVE internationally) echoes themes in extant literature around Britain’s Prevent Strategy. Walker and Cawley (2022, p. 1011) echo the broader concerns with the volume of ‘false positives’ within the Prevent system and assert that ‘terminology which derives from proceedings relating to the care of vulnerable children and adults should be resisted as infantilising and misrepresenting the common nature of terrorism and extremism’. Durodie (2016) worries that P/CVE approaches such as the Prevent duty could contribute to a broader policy tendency to project individuals as ‘fragile’ rather than as agentic actors. Similarly, McGlynn and McDaid (2019), in their study of the Prevent duty’s enactment in the UK Higher Education sector, express concern that a policy focus on ‘vulnerability’ infantilises potential extremists and strips them of their personal agency. They acknowledge, though, that this approach both fits pre-existing safeguarding and ‘wellbeing’ paradigms within the sector and avoids stigmatising particular categories of students.

This assertion by the Shawcross Review around ‘vulnerability’ can be understood in relation to the wider claims in the report of a current ‘threat disparity’ within Prevent, including the claim that ‘the data has become politicised’ (2023, p. 50). Reflecting the Islamist-obsessed focus of right-of-centre lobbyists such as Policy Exchange (Jenkins et al., 2022), who contest the current make-up of British Prevent referrals as under-representing the threat from violent Islamism, the Review impugns the professional practitioners implementing the duty by suggesting that they are scared to refer British Muslims for fear of being labelled ‘racist’. In her swift acceptance of all the Review’s recommendations, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman echoed back this sentiment by saying, ‘I will rid Prevent of any cultural timidity’ (HMG, 2023). The Shawcross Review proposal to replace ‘vulnerability’ with susceptibility’, so repeating a similar questioning of ‘vulnerability’ within the Inquiry Report following the 2017 Manchester Arena attack (Anderson, 2017), arguably misunderstands the professional understanding and usage of ‘vulnerability’ in relation to the pre-existing safeguarding practices within education that are praised as being the successful vehicle for Prevent’s implementation, as discussed above.

4. Prevent as Safeguarding in British Education

In response to the initial professional and public concerns identified above, a growing body of empirical research (e.g., Busher and Jerome, 2020; Lakhani and James, 2021) around British educationalists’ understanding of acceptance and enactment of the Prevent as safeguarding requirement since 2015 has now developed. The first national, mixed methods study of educationalists’ implementation of Prevent in English schools and further education colleges found that:

The overwhelming majority of respondents had engaged with and accepted the core government message that Prevent should be understood as part of school/college safeguarding responsibilities. (Busher et al., 2017, p. 6)

The strength and consistency of this finding underpinned what this study identified as ‘narratives of continuity’, the manner in which the Prevent duty has been understood and incorporated within or grafted onto the existing ways that the individual educational institution organises and practices its safeguarding responsibilities to fit within their own institutional circumstances, often through processes of ground-level ‘policy enactment’ (Ball et al., 2012). This process of Prevent enactment includes clear evidence of educators attempting to ensure that the operation of Prevent does not stigmatise their British Muslim students (Busher et al., 2017) and may well underpin the lack of increased practitioner referrals of Islamist-based extremism, despite overt political pressure to do so (Shawcross, 2023). Here, ‘responsibilisation’ for terrorism prevention does not strike educationalists as something new or alien as they are already responsibilised for preventatively safeguarding students from all types of potential social harm (Busher et al., 2017). This includes referring substantial concerns outwards to a multiagency panel, albeit one separate to the local multiagency safeguarding panel. This educationalist recognition and acceptance of Prevent as safeguarding even extended to those professionals sceptical of broader elements of the duty, such as the FBV. Unprompted, practitioners identified parallels between the risk of radicalisation and other forms of social harm safeguarding in education is concerned with, such as child sexual exploitation, youth violence involvement, and female genital mutilation (Busher et al., 2017, p. 23). Integral to this acceptance was the training received and the role of the institution’s ‘Designated Safeguarding Lead’ (DSL). Educators do, as an overwhelmingly White workforce, identify concerns about their ability to distinguish correctly between Islamist extremism and devout Muslim beliefs and practices, which may well underpin the higher attrition rate for Islamist-focussed referrals from the education sector (Busher et al., 2023).

This finding that educationalists accept ‘Prevent as safeguarding’ has been confirmed by further empirical studies across the range of Early Years provision through to primary and secondary schools and in further education colleges (Busher and Jerome, 2020). The mandatory nature of the Prevent duty did initially stoke fears that it would lead educators to significantly over-report, often inappropriately. A large scale, online survey experiment amongst English school teachers (with a mandatory reporting duty) and Danish teachers (without such a duty) (Parker et al., 2020) found that the duty-associated training that teachers in England had received had not led them to over-report but rather helped them to identify appropriate thresholds for individual referrals. In contrast, Danish teachers, who had received less training, were likely to underreport individual risk situations that justified referral. A study of Higher Education practitioners using a similar methodology found a positive association between higher levels of Prevent training and practitioner ability to make appropriate student referrals (Pearce, 2022). An earlier study of the Prevent duty within Higher Education and had found practitioner ‘mundane compliance’ with the duty, rather than alteration of boundaries of free speech or of student rights (McGlynn and McDaid, 2019).

Online survey data from professional practitioners across the professions currently covered by the Prevent duty (ICM, 2019) highlighted practitioner acceptance of and support for the ‘Prevent is safeguarding’ thesis: ‘Two thirds of teachers (66%) and around seven in ten healthcare professionals (72%) agreed that “Prevent is a safeguarding process against radicalisation”’ (2019, p. 20). The research (with 502 teachers and 250 healthcare staff) also showed that the professionals who had received Prevent training felt more confident around when and how to make a referral than those not trained, supporting the research studies cited above. It concluded that,

Both teachers and healthcare professionals were more liable to see the act of making a referral as part of their professional safeguarding responsibilities (70% and 88% respectively). (ICM, 2019, p. 26)

Despite the strong acceptance of Prevent as safeguarding within Britain’s education sector and in the broader practitioner data (ICM, 2019), this policy paradigm has been challenged by some researchers analysing the other policy sectors covered by the Prevent duty, including health and social work. Research by Heath-Kelly and Strausz (2019) utilised an online, survey experiment approach and a small number of interviews with healthcare staff supporting adults in the Midlands health trusts. The survey identified that ‘NHS staff are comfortable with the Prevent training provided and feel confident to detect radicalisation’ (2019, p. 3) but that ‘safeguarding professionals’ felt that ‘significant differences exist between Prevent duty safeguarding and normal safeguarding’ (ibid), suggesting some divergence between Prevent safeguarding and safeguarding’s definition in the 2014 Care Act regarding adults. The survey also found that ‘only 47% of respondents agree that Prevent is a genuine safeguarding procedure’ (ibid). The small-scale nature of research amongst health practitioners by Aked (2020) did not prevent it claiming that perceptions that Prevent is Islamophobic ‘are widespread among health workers’ (p. 27).

More specifically, Aked’s research similarly challenged the ‘Prevent as safeguarding’ paradigm in healthcare, suggesting that Prevent’s use of ‘vulnerability’ was broader and less tangible than the term’s use in the 2014 Care Act (Aked, 2020, p. 48). Both these research studies are at odds with ICM’s (2019) findings from surveying healthcare staff, as discussed above. Aked (2020, p. 48) also asserts that ‘Prevent subjects are predominantly viewed as dangerous rather than in danger’ , claiming that it represents public protection masked as safeguarding. Here, it is asserted that Prevent as safeguarding is operating in a ‘pre-criminal’ mode relating to potential events, ‘whereas most safeguarding deals with criminal acts which either have occurred or are occurring (or are believed to be)’ (Aked, 2020, p. 49). This is rather undermined by the acknowledgement that ’many healthcare workers in our focus groups believed that preventing people being drawn into terrorism is, or at least can be, a form of safeguarding’ (Aked, 2020, p. 48; their emphasis).

These themes of Prevent as a safeguarding measure that arguably distorts safeguarding itself through a focus on the individual as ‘risky’, rather than ‘at risk’ (see Heath-Kelly, 2013), and that it extends safeguarding into ‘pre-crime’ rather than dealing with factual harm, are both echoed in critiques by some social work academics. Even before the introduction of the Prevent duty, Coppock and McGovern (2014, p. 243) identified that Prevent was, in their view, expropriating child protection concepts of ‘safeguarding’, ‘grooming’ and ‘vulnerability’, asserting that:

dominant administrative discourses of ‘child protection’ are securitised and deployed to underpin this interventionist ethos and state surveillance practice to produce the ‘young British Muslim’ as both ‘suspect’ and in need of being ‘saved’.

McKendrick and Finch (2017) suggest that a focus on ‘pre-crime’ prevention through Prevent is a ‘re-orientation of “safeguarding”’ (2017, p. 313) and questionably claim that safeguarding has ‘traditionally been the domain of social workers’ (2017, p. 313), going onto express concern around ‘securitised safeguarding’ (2019, p. 127) and question whether implementing Prevent can be understood as ‘normal’ social work practice. Stanley et al. (2018, p. 131) highlight that harm and abuse reported to social workers is usually accompanied by ‘material or physical evidence or observations’, but that harm from radicalisation is harder to identify and that the ‘harm done is primarily concerned with that done to others, rather than to the “vulnerable” individual’ (p. 132). In an earlier contribution, Stanley and Guru (2015) asserted that:

by emphasising the ‘vulnerability’ of individuals, these processes of risk assessment and prevention give primacy to a ‘deficit-thinking’ risk model – that the population in question is deficient and in need of improvement/treatment. (2015, p. 359)

This theme is echoed by Finch et al. (2022, p. 125) claim that Prevent ‘deploys a classic neoliberal approach of individualising’ a complex social phenomenon. Stanley et al. (2018, p. 144) do acknowledge, though, both that Prevent’s Channel processes operate in line with child protection protocols and that ‘new forms of abuse and harm emerge from time to time and “radicalisation risk” is the latest’.

Yet claims that Prevent within social work is a distortion to the meaning and practice of safeguarding are challenged by empirical evidence from practitioners. In reporting small-scale empirical research with social work and family support practitioners, Chivers (2018, p. 81) identifies that Prevent, ‘was narrated as largely consonant with other types of risk work’ within practice built on narratives of risk work:

practitioners described managing a broad spectrum of risks in their day-to-day work… in this way, the inclusion of radicalisation within their role remit did not itself cause disruption to participant lifeworlds. (Chiver, 2018, p. 93)

Echoing findings from school-based research (Busher and Jerome, 2020; Busher et al., 2017), Chivers (2018) found that radicalisation was just one of the several new social harms and risks that social work practitioners were being asked to incorporate. Research amongst social work departments in 10 local government areas of England after the Prevent duty was introduced (Chisholm and Coulter, 2017, p. 14) found that in ‘Prevent priority areas’ (which have dedicated Prevent staff to provide training and support for practitioners), staff ‘had a very clear conception of radicalisation as either a safeguarding or child protection risk’. In less supported geographical areas, social work staff were less clear around Prevent but accepted parallels with other forms of social harm, such as child sexual exploitation. Some of these social work respondents expressed concerns about too much contact with the police in the name of Prevent and that this might damage pre-existing relationships with families and communities. Cowden and Picken (2018) challenge hostility to Prevent as safeguarding within social work practice, identifying that:

Prevent and Channel panels do not involve counterterrorism police being embedded with social workers, rather social workers work alongside the police and partner agencies, as they do in safeguarding work already. (2018, p. 108)

They also identify that concerns that social workers are ‘policing families’ are not new or specific to Prevent. In identifying how social workers missed radicalisation risks in families that later saw travel to join ISIS, Cowden and Picken identify that social work is:

concerned with preventing young people being drawn into Salafi-Jihadist networks where they may be killed or raped, be required to carry out murders and rapes and, if they are caught, spend their lives in prison. (2018, p. 119)

5. Conclusion

Britain’s Prevent duty has placed educational professional practitioners at the forefront of policy attempts to prevent violent extremism. They have been asked to understand the Prevent mandatory reporting duty as ‘safeguarding’ and to operationalise it through their existing safeguarding mechanisms and practices. This approach of terrorism prevention as safeguarding, and the normative policy presentation of it as such, is replicated within the educational systems of many other national Western domains. A growing and consistent body of empirical British research evidence suggests that British educators accept and support the proposal that Prevent is consistent with and can be implemented through their pre-existing safeguarding mechanisms, but this paradigm is challenged by some academic critics from health and social work fields. Their critique argues that P/CVE approaches such as Britain’s Prevent duty are both a securitisation and a perversion of safeguarding principles and practice. Here, they suggest that Prevent problematically focuses on ‘pre-crime’ – what students may do in the future – and that it primarily sees students as ‘risky’ – as potential perpetrators, and not as potentially ‘at risk’ and vulnerable, and that this so represents a significant disjuncture with existing safeguarding. Such perspectives are challenged by other analysts and by practitioner empirical research from these same professional domains, but these conceptual challenges do need to be addressed.

This article has argued that safeguarding of children and young people within modern education and welfare systems has long been about all practitioners having responsibility for the protection of students and for the early prevention of social harm or abuse, an approach of anticipatory security. Critics of the Prevent duty have highlighted its place in the supposedly contentious ‘pre-crime space’, but it is precisely that anticipatory space that modern safeguarding is concerned about and occupies. This preventative and anticipatory nature of safeguarding necessarily involves continual surveillance of and record-keeping of students, the sharing of data and concerns around individuals both within professional institutions and across other professional domains and the usage of risk and vulnerability factor lists and tools to support practitioner training and action. Prevent is thus consistent with broader safeguarding approaches but is, of course, related to a significantly contentious form of social harm, thus emphasising the need for training and support for practitioners. All these approaches and practices within British educational operationalisation of the Prevent duty, and within other P/CVE approaches internationally, pre-existed, and are central to broader safeguarding systems and processes. When the Prevent duty was introduced, many warned that this was the securitisation and perversion of educational safeguarding but Durodie (2016, p. 22) suggested that ‘rather than the securitisation of education that some presume, it may rather be the therapeutisation of security that we are really observing’. The body of empirical evidence on the Prevent duty’s subsequent implementation by professional practitioners in different sectors of Britain’s educational system supports this analysis (Busher and Jerome, 2020; Busher et al., 2017; Lakhani and James, 2021). This evidence highlights practitioner recognition and acceptance of the anticipatory nature of Prevent’s requirement to identify and report potential vulnerability to future violent extremist involvement and harm, with the vulnerable understood by practitioners as being ‘risky’ and ‘at risk’.

6. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).