Empty Britain? Hegemony and ambiguity in British education policy

Abstract

The role of schools in developing a sense of common British identity has taken centre stage in the face of ‘racialised’ accounts of violence during the twenty first century. In this paper, we argue that certain British education policy documents can be understood as hegemonic interventions seeking to resolve ambiguities surrounding constructions of British identity. We do so by examining the Department for Education (DfE) ‘Fundamental British Values’ (FBV) guidance within the context of its relationship to the Prevent Duty anti-terrorism programme as well as the ‘Political impartiality in schools’ guidance released by the DfE in 2022. Utilising Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and applying Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) conception of hegemony with Hall’s (2021/2000) claim that ‘Britishness’ is an empty signifier, this paper argues that the ambiguities of ‘Britishness’ present a number of opportunities for power to be exercised and consolidated. Finally, we explore the possible implications for demands to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ within schools’ existing duties and propose possible structural limits placed upon these demands by said duties.

Keywords:

• British identity
• extremism
• hegemony
• Prevent Duty
• Fundamental British Values
• political impartiality

Introduction

Schools are vitally important sites of national identity formation, the establishment of which coincided with nationalism’s modern emergence. As institutions of civic learning, schools have long been and remain central to conveying national cultures (Gellner 1983; Sand, 2009). But schools, like nations, exist in relation to each other and the cultures surrounding them and are increasingly spaces where local national identities are influenced by an array of global issues. In Britain, as elsewhere, the last few years have seen the politics of ‘race’, ethnicity, and identity come to the fore in a number of ways including the resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain and its subsequent rearticulation drawing upon British history.

Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement saw millions of people mobilised in solidarity against anti-Black racism and police violence. Across several weeks in Britain, over two-hundred thousand people joined marches, vigils and other demonstrations to protest anti-Black racism globally and locally (BBC 2020; Dearden 2020), drawing upon local experiences of police brutality and victimisation (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021; Gilroy 2002/1987); Britain’s past as a central node and benefactor of the North Atlantic Slave Trade (Anievas and Nişancıog˘lu 2015; Fryer 2021/1988; Rodney 2018/1972) and unresolved ‘racial’ inequalities stemming from the administration of the British Empire (Hall, 2021/1978; Sanghera 2021). Moreover, in the following months, the effects of ethnic and ‘racial’ disparities particularly in housing, employment and access to health services were underscored by the Coronavirus Pandemic which affected Black and Asian communities disproportionately (Public Health England 2020). Together this brought ‘race’ and ethnicity to the forefront of many debates regarding British identity with wide ranging implications across many cultural institutions including schooling.

The wider context of Brexit, including the politicisation of EU migration as antithetical to national sovereignty, further contributed to the increased salience of ‘a Hobbesian notion of sovereignty [which] reasserted its power to “name”: to normatively classify, identity and delimit the “true” British population and those “foreign” to it’ (Favell and Barbulescu 2018). Drawing on ‘deep reservoirs of imperial longing in the majority population’ (Virdee and McGeever 2018, 1805), attempts to reinscribe ‘Britishness’ as an implicitly ‘racialised’ project partly rely on the states’ ‘monopoly of legitimate education’ (Gellner, 1983, 34) regulated by policies such as the policies explored here.

These events were the latest episode of a much longer struggle to define British identity following the nominal ‘end’ of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century¹. This article is concerned primarily with educational policies developed within the two most recent periods of this struggle—first, the cultural paradigm shift inaugurated by New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from the mid-1990s and 2000s; and, second, the rise of global right-wing populism and successful Brexit campaigning which characterised the 2010s following the global financial crisis of 2008 (Davies 2021). During the first decade of the twenty first century, the conceptual and social policy framework of ‘social cohesion’ gained prominence as the preferred panacea to inter-ethnic violence and terrorism (Ratcliffe 2012; Rowe et al. 2012; Sturgis et al. 2014). This framework sought to provide a ‘culturalist approach to a structural problem’ (Sharma 2016, 117) of deteriorating public infrastructure and social services as well as experiences of racism in housing and employment (Kundnani 2001). In the decade that followed, attempts to develop, or as some argued return, to a singular and coherent sense of ‘Britishness’ mobilised calls to reconsider the boundaries of existing British approaches to multiculturalism which were seen as weakening collective identification with Britain (Cameron 2011; Meer and Modood 2009). Throughout these periods, schools in particular have remained key sites of contestation and articulation of ‘Britishness’ (Shain 2013; Sharma 2016).

Schools play an important role in the ongoing negotiations of British identity as locations in which socio-cultural, civic and political norms are reproduced (Apple 2012; Benn 2012). For much of the history of British schooling, identification with and understanding of ‘Britishness’ in the context of Empire was implicitly connected to ideas of ‘racial’ hierarchy and White Supremacy (Tomlinson 2019). However, mirroring the emergence of New Labour throughout the 1990s, a new discourse of British multiculturalism emerged ‘magnifying racial, cultural and ethnic differences so that a special transgressive pleasure may be found in their spectacular overcoming’ (Gilroy 2002/1987, 22) on a interpersonal but not structural level. As a result of the ongoing conversations regarding structural ‘racisms’ resulting from the Black Lives Matter movement, mainstream attention was turned to the concept of curriculum decolonisation as a means to overcome ‘racial’ and cultural biases in schooling and higher education (Gopal 2021).

In response to the debates prompted by this attention, the Department for Education (DfE) produced a non-statutory guidance which sought to ‘support those working with and in schools to understand the relevant legal duties’ (DfE, 2022) regarding political impartiality and the discussion of controversial or contentious topics in classrooms and extra-curricular settings. The guidance was criticised by teaching unions for creating uncertainty about what constituted ‘impartiality’ or ‘balance’ surrounding topics such as racism, sexism, climate change and world poverty (National Education Union 2022). Indeed, the role of teacher agency within this context, we would argue, is limited not by explicit edict but rather through the paired effects of uncertainty regarding the scope and practice of the advice on the one hand, and the potentially severe professional and legal consequences of failure to perform on the other. Here we are using this response by the DfE as an entry point to explore the dynamics created by the statutory guidance and legal duties which underpin it—school’s’ duty to promote social cohesion; to advance Fundamental British Values (FBV) (DfE, 2014; DfE & Nash, 2014); and to implement the Prevent Duty (HM Government 2015). Taken together these policies demonstrate the British state’s prerogative to extend or contract the boundaries of ‘Britishness’ in moments of identity crisis to reproduce its existing power structures.

Theoretical framework

Schooling’s political nature means that thinking about policy always involves conceptualisation of power. Within this research we mobilise hegemony and ‘Britishness’ as an empty signifier to explore this power. These two concepts are useful because they allow us to think of ‘Britishness’ and British identity as necessarily unfinished projects contested on uneven terms.

Hegemony and intervention

The present article draws upon theoretical insights by Hall (2021/1978) as well as Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) to further explore hegemonic conceptions of ‘Britishness’ in relation to its status as an ‘empty signifier’ (Hall, 2021/2000, 416) and its relationship to education policies. In drawing upon these insights we wish to highlight that although the precise definitions and boundaries of ‘Britishness’ are not ― nor arguably, can ever be ― settled; hegemonic power represents a ‘particular relationship between the dominant and dominated classes (Hall, 2021/1980, 229, emphasis added). In this regard, the current boundaries of ‘Britishness’ and the power relationships that shape them are ‘contingent’: historical and cultural products which are unstable and changeable (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002).

Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) of formulation hegemony has been used. Within this account of hegemonic power is subject to consistent challenge and rearticulation (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). As such, identities such as ‘British’ and concepts such as ‘Britishness’ are not only never completely fixed but can be more easily understood as having never previously been fixed.

Central to Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) description of hegemony is the concept of antagonism and, relatedly, frontiers. Antagonisms represent differing political viewpoints and/or projects and are an inevitable aspect of social life (Laclau and Mouffe 2014/1985; Mouffe 2005/1993). Frontiers, on the other hand, represent a specific articulation of the ‘logics of difference and logics of equivalence’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014/1985, xiii) such that one articulatory practice can be seen as meaningfully distinct from another. An example of the frontier established between ‘British’ and ‘extremist’ is operationalised the case of Shamima Begum (Manzoor-Khan 2022), who, at age 15, left Britain to join ISIS and had her British citizenship revoked and was subsequently told to return to her parent’s birth-­nation of Bangladesh. That is to say, once Shamima was found to be an ‘extremist’ rather than a ‘British’ citizen (and child) the frontier separating these two categories of person, constructed as mutually exclusive, was crossed. From there, the extraordinary decision to revoke their citizenship and render them stateless was applied and upheld by the British Supreme Court in 2021. A similar decision was made following the re-Africanisation of Kenya in 1968, the status of newly state-less South Asian British subjects in Kenya was undetermined. In particular, there was an antagonism between the view that, as British subjects, these peoples were entitled to enter Britain to resettle and that, despite being British subjects, the British state no longer had responsibility for these peoples and they should seek refuge in their ethnic homelands (Patel 2021). These illustrative examples are acute manifestations of a larger question of British identity which arguably began taking shape during British colonialism (Gopal 2019; Robinson 2021/1983) and share continuity within the era of globalisation.

In both of the above examples, an ambiguity regarding the duties of the British state towards some of its subjects and/or citizens exposed an antagonism between differing views. A hegemonic intervention was made by the state to, at least temporarily, resolve this ambiguity through the establishment of a frontier. Crucially however, the antagonism remains unresolved. Instead, an interpretation, a side of the antagonism is deemed legitimate by whomever has the power to enforce such an interpretation. In the above examples, the power lies ultimately with the British state and is enforced through the border, border forces, immigration officers and so on.

Schools and their staff are similarly deputised to enforce a specific interpretation of British identity through its relationship to the state and this relationship is mediated by the state’s power to enforce these interpretations. As such, ‘Britishness’ does not describe an essential characteristic but rather a series of interpretations of history, culture and belonging which is inextricably tied to power. This power shows itself in myriad ways: through official historiography, curriculum, funding allocations and media offerings. It seeks to legitimise and, in some instances, universalise particularist experiences of British identity and by extension limit or devalue alternatives - be they national identities or otherwise.

‘Britishness’ as an empty signifier

An empty signifier is filled with ‘cultural meanings, symbols and images, selectively woven together in a dominant national narrative’ (Hall, 2021/2000, 416). National identities, contrary to the claims of nationalists the world over, do not express an essential being but rather a relation between those defined within and without the boundaries of the nation’s ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 2006/1983; Mouffe 2005/1993; Mylonas and Tudor 2021; Valluvan 2021). ‘Britishness’ or ‘British identity’ is constructed as a unifying identity despite the four national identities it subsumes (Jeffery and Wincott 2006). However, the incorporation of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish national identities within ‘Britishness’ represents a long, contested and at times bloody history (Colley 1987). Additionally, the common conflation of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ is indicative of the dominance of the latter within the context of the former (Esler 2021; Kumar 2010).

Schools, as sites in which legitimacy is conferred onto specific cultural and knowledge practices, have shaped the ‘imagined community’ of the nation through modernity (Gellner 1983; Tomlinson 2019). Since the self-consciously cosmopolitan image promoted by New Labour, particularly through Gordon Brown (Jerome and Clemitshaw 2012), British national identity has been rearticulated as a civic identity (Healy 2019; Vincent 2019a & 2019b). This attempt to redraw the boundaries of ‘Britishness’ along the lines of common values was insufficient to dislodge ‘racialised’ understandings of belonging in Britain but rather foregrounded a subtextually ‘racialised’ culturalism within the context of the War on Terror (Kumar 2021; Sheth 2009). The ‘racialised’ aspects of this culturalism became more overt throughout the premierships of David Cameron and Theresa May and particularly through the Brexit campaigns run by groups such as UKIP (Haynes and Passy 2017; Virdee and McGeever 2018), coming to a head during the Black Lives Matter protests in May 2020.

Despite attempts to rearticulate British national identity through civic values, it is still commonly tied to Whiteness (Crawford 2017; Smith 2016). ‘Britishness’ came to be White through a process of negation of the ‘racialised’ Other (Hall 2018/1992; Said 1994) and in direct confrontation with ‘racialised’ populations (Gopal 2019; Virdee 2014). Therefore, the context of colonialism and imperialism is integral to the ‘racialisation’ of ‘Britishness’ as White and as part of ‘a politico-economic system committed to white supremacy’ (Mills 1997, 106). Rather than being understood singularly as a ‘racial’ categorisation, Ahmed (2007) argues that Whiteness is ‘an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space’ (p.150). That is to say that associations between ‘Britishness’ and Whiteness are not reducible to phenotypical features but rather exist as a system of behaviours, signs and attitudes which ‘racialises’ and orientates people within British society. This process, it needs be stressed, is not undifferentiated across time and space but susceptible to a range of political and economic stressors at both the local and global level (Patel 2021; Shain 2013; Wolfe 2016).

The contexts in which ‘Britishness’ has been most sharply articulated and contested have been in conflicts both domestic and geopolitical (Davies, 2020; Esler 2021). In the twenty first century, two key overlapping and interrelated yet distinct junctures require attention with regards to ‘Britishness’: the global War on Terror and Brexit. Both junctures led to an increased focus on and extension of Britain’s borders. While the War on Terror, and the subsequent regional destabalisation it produced, facilitated the expansion of the role of border officer to include health and social workers (Butler 2020; Goodfellow, 2020); the often openly xenophobic rhetoric deployed during the Brexit referendum campaign (Stewart and Mason 2022) saw the violence of the British border regime unofficially deputised to emboldened reactionary citizens (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021; Haynes and Passy 2017; Virdee and McGeever 2018). Importantly, both junctures further elaborated the theme of ‘Britishness’ as unifying in opposition to a perceived external threat inside Britain which needed to be excised and found expression in the figure of the ‘racialised’ Other (Appadurai, 2017; Davies, 2020; Ford and Goodwin 2014; Smith 2016).

It is the tension between visions of ‘Britishness’ as a ‘racially’ and ethnically inclusive civic national identity and ‘racialised’ culturalism that characterises its hegemonic usage. The term tension has been chosen here instead of contradiction to highlight that civic and ethnic nationalism are not so easily disentangled (Fine, 1999; Malešević 2011; Valluvan 2021). Whereas ethnic nationalism posits national identity drawing from cultural, linguistic and/or ‘racial’ grounds; civic nationalism on the other hand relies on the language of shared values and reinforces the state’s role in conferring or withholding national identity (Brubaker 2017; Hall, 2000/2021; Sand, 2009; Valluvan, 2021; Vulluvan & Karla, 2019). Attempts to navigate this tension, in the words of Stuart Hall (2021/2000) require us to understand that

Britishness is deeply embedded in the dense integument of a complex tissue of cultural meanings, symbols and images, selectively woven together in a dominant national narrative. It is this alone which fills Britishness, which is otherwise an empty signifier, with specific social content (p.416).

Key to Hall’s reading of the nature of ‘Britishness’ is the uneven power and authority to describe implied by hegemony (Hall, 2021/1980; Laclau and Mouffe 2014/1985). Additionally, the discourse of ‘radicalisation’ which ascribes vulnerability to extremism particularly to Muslim Britons presupposes an inauthenticity to claims of ‘Britishness’ due to their faith (Fricker 1998). As such, the remedy to this inauthenticity, and thus to the problem of ‘radicalisation’, is to ascribe the meaning and contents of ‘Britishness’ from an authoritative and authentic source. It is within this framework that schools become a key site of this process.

Reproducing the nation: centering schooling

Schools are a vitally important location for the reproduction of national identities (Gellner 1983). Schools confer legitimacy upon specific knowledges and behaviours (Apple 2004; Giroux 2020) therefore developing the imaginative domains through which ‘people come to know, understand and experience themselves as members of a community and citizens of a nation state’ (Kanu 2006, p.68). As previously noted, the ‘filling’ of the empty signifier of ‘Britishness’ occurs within the context of shifting and contested authority and state education has played a significant role in this process. In particular, schools have been called upon to act to facilitate ‘myth-busting’ between cultural and ethnic groups (Habib 2017; Kiwan 2012) in the hopes of further developing social cohesion.

Schools are one of many public institutions called upon to develop social cohesion in British society. Despite its importance and ubiquity in social policies, ‘social cohesion’ is not a singular, clear or reliably measurable concept (Cheong et al. 2007; Fonseca, Lukosch, and Brazier 2019; Healy 2019). Invocations of social cohesion in policy ‘symbolically represent a complex set of issues, shaped by the historical and contemporary socio-economic and political realities’ (Cheong et al. 2007, 28), drawing upon anxieties, hopes and imaginaries of the social body (Dobbernack 2010). The duty placed on schools presupposes that school leaders and staff have the resources and skills to deliver such a demand. Taken for granted within the emergent policy paradigm and betrayed by the proposed need to return to ‘British values’ and the repudiation of liberal multiculturalism (Cowden and Singh 2017), was the claim that a true, essential ‘Britishness’ exists at all (Valluvan and Kalra 2019).

Since 2014, schools are no longer required simply not to undermine the Fundamental British Values but rather to actively promote them (Elton-Chalcraft et al. 2017; Lockley-Scott 2019). Schools and their staff have responded to these demands in mixed ways (Bamber et al. 2019; Habib 2017; Vincent 2019a & 2019b). Additionally, the Prevent Duty has introduced considerable legal consequences for a failure to act on suspicions of ‘radicalisation’, itself a loaded and contested term (Kundnani 2012; Hardy 2015; Heath-Kelly 2013; Sieckelinck, Kaulingfreks, and De Winter 2015). Together, these policies signalled a shift in authority and a symbolic extension of the border into British classrooms as school staff are compelled to manage the political, ethnic and religious identities of their students within a punitive framework (O’Donnell 2016, 2017 & 2018; Qurashi 2018).

Methodology

Following Hall’s (2021/1978) insistence that to study specific substantiations of ‘race’ one must keep the look ‘sequentially… [and] laterally’ (p.58), the present article applies this same methodology to an exploration of ‘Britishness’. Therefore, we examine educational policies by adducing both the historical development of the concept of ‘Britishness’ and the ‘relations, structures and events’ (Hall, 2021/1978, 58) which have come to be articulated through conceptions of British national identity. As such, insights are drawn from numerous fields outside education to develop a more substantive, although necessarily incomplete, picture of ‘Britishness’.

Although elements of Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) discourse theory has been adopted (particularly hegemony, ambiguity, antagonism, and frontiers) these have been supplemented with methods developed in critical discourse analysis (CDA), as Jørgensen and Phillips (2002) recommend. We adopt Fairclough’s (2013) approach to CDA as exploring the ­‘dialectical relations between discourse and other objects’ (p.4), in an effort to concretise the power of the British state to intervene in education. However, while discourse and power mutually shape one another; to conflate the two would be too reductive. Rather, following Fairclough (2013), the power to effectively order or reorder discourse within a given social structure is widely varied and uneven.

Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) conception of hegemony indicates a separation of the plane of objects and the articulatory practices which (re)compose them. In this instance, hegemony refers to a particular and contingent discursive field constituted by unevenness. Moreover, articulation is ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (p.91). Indeed, while identities can be non-­articulated (for example, through conflation such as ‘free men’ and ‘citizen’ in Ancient Greece therein rendering the articulation of ‘citizen’ as ‘male’ moot) once articulated relative to other identities their differential position within a total discourse is modified, hence so too the identity itself. Ambiguity, then, refers to an uncertainty of both the limits, features and/or relative position of an identity or articulation within the overall discursive field. Therein antagonisms arise, in which differing articulatory practices vie for dominance and therefore illustrate one another’s limitations and exclusions. As Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) argue, the social world is shot through with multiple antagonisms, the sum total of which prevents the social from attaining ‘the status of transparency, of full presence, and the objectivity of its identities is permanently subverted’ (p.129). Instead, (temporary) frontiers are established through the social practice of articulation, through which the objectivity of identities, and therefore their separateness, becomes a social reality. Indeed, it is the establishment of a frontier between the identities of ‘British’ and ‘extremist’ with which this paper is concerned.

Jørgensen and Phillips (2002) argue that Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) ‘do not do much detailed analysis of empirical material themselves…But that does not mean that … their concepts cannot be used in detailed empirical analyses. It just takes a little imagination’ (p.49). In particular, Jørgensen and Phillips (2002) recommend using the concepts of master signifiers, nodal points and myths as a basis for structuring empirical research using discourse analysis. In summary, ‘nodal points organise discourses……master signifiers organise ­identity … and myths organise a social space’ (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002, 50) and that the uses of discourse analysis require chains of meanings, including non-linguistic practices. Therefore, this research project draws upon both the linguistic meanings established within each policy and also their non-linguistic elements such as implied and explicit invocations of legal frameworks and the historico-social context in which they were written.

The Department for Education (DfE) documents selected for study are: Fundamental British Values guidance (2014); the Prevent Duty originally published in 2014 and reviewed in 2021; and the Political impartiality in schools guidance published in 2021. These documents have been selected for study due to their shared implicit orientation towards the management of diversity of political views, values and expressions of the British public. Therefore, each policy utilises schools, and by extension their communities, to pursue agendas which are not solely education focused. The present study examines these documents using CDA to uncover ‘both the discursive practices which construct representations of the world…and the role that these discursive practices play in furthering the interests of particular social groups’ (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002, 63). This dual outcome is reflected in both the interdiscursive approach taken when examining the chosen documents ― that is by putting them into ‘conversation’ with one another and other discourses ― and the range of orders of discourse which constitute the meanings of these documents as guidance for professional conduct (Fairclough 2013). Such relational and implicit analysis builds a picture of how the policy documents help justify a version of ‘Britishness’ that is related to the state and its educational processes.

To achieve this, our approach followed three steps. Firstly, the documents were examined to identify the emergence of explicit and implicit identifications of those considered ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the borders of the nation as depicted by the documents through the identification of nodal points, master signifiers and myths. Simultaneously, the contents of these identifications were noted with particular attention paid to the possible underlying assumptions which position the identities outlined across the three texts. Finally, the discursive construction of these identities and their position relative to one another was considered within the broader socio-cultural and historical context of Britain (particularly since the beginning of the twenty first century).

Findings

The documents have been reviewed with an eye towards identifying hegemonic constructions of frontiers between ‘British’ and ‘un-British’ values and attitudes. This is not to be conflated with ‘non-British’ which designates difference; rather ‘un-British’ implies negation and opposition of British identity. ‘British’ identity is, as previously noted, an ‘empty signifier’ and therefore has no essential meaning and as such the construction of ‘British’ and ‘un-British’ occurs dialectically. Additionally, ambiguities between political and non-political values and attitudes have been noted. While connections between the documents have been noted throughout the findings, the cumulative effect of the documents will be addressed more fully in the Discussion section.

Fundamental British Values (2014)

It should first be acknowledged that this document only applies to English schools and as such one of the principle preoccupations of this document is establishing the primacy of English law. In particular, English law is positioned in opposition to religious law stating that ‘all people living in England are subject to its law’ (p.4). This is part of the introduction to the guidance and immediately establishes the documents as concerned with a perceived antagonism between the two positions and, through the invocations of Ofsted, the counter-terrorism Prevent Strategy (2011), the Teachers’ Standards (2013) and the Education Act (2002), resolves the ambiguity caused by the co-existence of these two positions. Specifically, the document resolves this ambiguity by intimating at a use of force either through the powers of the Department of Education or the police to ensure that schools do not advocate the breaking of English civil or criminal law.

Indeed, the assumed legitimacy of force used to maintain the English state is ever present throughout the document. Students are expected to ‘distinguish right from wrong and to respect the civil and criminal law of England’ (p.5) and develop ‘respect for public institutions and services in England’ (p.5). Furthermore students should understand that the ‘rule of law protects individual citizens and is essential for their wellbeing and safety’ (p.5) and respect ‘the basis on which the law is made and applied in England’ (p.5). In these instances, the role of the state is to protect its citizens and its prerogative to do so, and conversely refuse to do so, is assumed. Thus, the role of the state is removed from the field of politics and is presented as the state itself: while one may disagree with say, the actions of the police, they can not disagree with the role of the police as representatives of the state.

The document distinguishes between the ‘active promotion’ of and ‘not undermining’ of the Fundamental British Values by arguing that the former refers to ‘challenging opinions or behaviours in school that are contrary to fundamental British values’ (p.5). However, the document further states that schools or individuals are not to be forced to promote ‘teachings, beliefs or opinions that conflict with their own, but nor is it acceptable for schools to promote discrimination against people or groups on the basis of their belief, opinion or background’ (p.6). Given the introduction of the document, it would be reasonable to link the latter statement to the ambiguity posed by the coexistence of religious and state law with ‘Britishness’ and ‘religiousness’ as distinct but porous categories. Therein, the master signifier of ‘extremism’ is positioned in opposition to the master signifiers ‘democracy’, ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘law and order’ as well as the nodal point ‘British’. Taken together, the document establishes a role for schools as both arbiter and defender of ‘British values’ without recognising the often ‘racialised’ and uneven ways in which ‘Britishness’ is constructed.

Prevent Duty (2015, revised 2021)

The principle theme of Prevent Duty and the broader Prevent Strategy (2011) is risk. Particularly the idea of uneven risks that ‘will vary greatly and can change rapidly; but no area, institution or body is risk free’ (p.4). This risk is posed by ‘them’ (extremists) to ‘our’ (Britain) ‘armed forces’ (B.7) ‘safety and security’ (B.9), ‘democracy’ (B.10) and ‘vulnerable people’ (B.12).To mitigate this risk, a wide ranging ideological disciplining apparatus has been developed to ensure ‘evidence of productive co-operation (sic)’ (C.17) by the designated authorities who are trusted to ‘to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ (A.1). Although the ‘them’ is relatively clearly defined as ‘Islamic extremists’ (B.9 & B.10) and ‘extreme right’ (B.9 & B.11), the effect of this preoccupation with risk suggests that ‘they’ could be anywhere at any time waiting to attack ‘us’. Furthermore, the document emphasises the vulnerability of children and young persons to ‘radicalisation’, hence requiring additional protective measures by ‘us’.

The document outlines plans to mitigate the risks and vulnerabilities to ‘radicalisation’ by two interrelated means: a) expanding its remit to include intervening upon those ‘non-­violent extremist’ views that produce ‘atmosphere conducive to terrorism and can popularise views which terrorists then exploit’ (B.8); and, b) developing skills to counter the ideological claims of extremist organisations (B6; B.8 & E.64). Again, this document uses the same master signifiers to establish the supposedly objective grounds for the separateness of identities; however, this document further elaborates the duties of school staff in maintaining and articulating this separateness.

Finally, the document specifically invokes schools’ duty to ‘promote community cohesion’ (E.58) and specifically states that so-called Islamic extremist ‘ideology includes the uncompromising belief that people cannot be both Muslim and British… [and] specifically attack the principles of civic participation and social cohesion’ (B.10). It should be noted that while so-called Islamic extremists are represented as rejecting social cohesion, here used to denote Muslim integration in British society, the ‘white supremacist ideology of extreme right-wing groups’ (B.11) seemingly does not. Indeed, the contents of said ‘white supremacist ideology’ (B.11) are altogether absent from the Prevent Duty and only marginally present in the Prevent Strategy (2011), clearly communicating that it is seen as a lesser threat. By constructing the extremist position as anti-social cohesion and anti-civic participation, embracing these notions is therefore what ‘we’ do as is thus a frontier between the identities ‘British’ and ‘extremist’.

The political impartiality in schools guidance (2022)

The introduction to this document establishes that a frontier between acceptable and unacceptable political speech in schools exists but remains elusive in its content and form.

The guidance provides a list of proscribed ‘extreme political’ positions which broadly mirrors those outlined within the ‘Fundamental British Values’ regarding free speech, democratic elections, the use of ‘racially’ discriminatory language and committing ‘serious criminal activity’. However, the guidance repeatedly defers to schools’ and staff members’ ‘reasonable judgement’ (p.10) in identifying potentially fraught topics. Indeed, the claim ‘nothing in this guidance limits schools’ freedom to teach about sensitive, challenging, and controversial political issues’ (p.3), is strictly true as the guidance is non-statutory; however, it repeatedly draws upon existing policies which do limit the ways in which sensitive topics can be taught.

The document introduces two conceptions for understanding the concept of partisan (unacceptable) and non-partisan (acceptable) positions and subsequent teaching practice. Firstly, partisan views are defined as ‘those expressed with a political purpose such as to further the interests of a particular partisan group, change the law or change government policy’ (p.6). Partisan teaching is defined as ‘encouraging their support for, or the adoption of, these views’ (p.6) or the presentation of such views as uncontested fact. Secondly, certain political principles are removed from the field of politics altogether. This is evidenced by repeated appeals to ‘shared principles that underpin our society’ (pp. 4, 6, 11) which are ‘not political issues in this context’ (p.6) and refers to principles ‘such as freedom of speech and protection from violence and criminal activity - or challenging discrimination and prejudice, including racism’ (p.6). Implicit to the construction of the ‘us’ in this instance is a consensus of opinion regarding what constitute protected speech, violence and prejudice. The ‘us’ is in part constituted by a ‘them’ who do not share this consensus; however, the ‘them’ remains largely unstated save for the aforementioned ‘extremists’.

The guidance repeatedly reinforces the legal and professional consequences for failure to adhere to the prescribed standards of impartiality. In particular, it names the Prevent Duty (2015), ‘Fundamental British Values’ guidance (2014), several Education Acts, the Equality Act (2010) and Human Rights Act (1998) as disciplinary mechanisms. These constitute a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic practices as warnings are signalled linguistically for legal and professional sanctions. Therefore, the document introduces the existence of an undefined frontier between partisan (unacceptable) and nonpartisan (acceptable) political speech in schools but does not resolve the ambiguity surrounding it. Instead, the document repeatedly insists on the authority of the state, via said disciplinary mechanisms, to reserve the right to resolve such ambiguity through an act of hegemonic intervention.

Discussion

Social cohesion: on whose terms?

Despite its presentation within the Prevent Duty (2015) as simply a shared principle of British life, the history of social cohesion as a policy orientation belies its status as a political project born of a specific vision of ‘Britishness’. The New Labour social cohesion policies inaugurated during the Blair premiership reflect a view of Britain as a collection of ethnic, cultural and ‘racial’ communities bound together through a common British civic identity (Wetherell 2008) or, to borrow Parehk’s influential phrasing, a ‘community of communities’ (Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, 2000, 48). This shift towards ‘Britishness’ as an ethnically and ‘racially’ neutral civic national identity, associated with the adoption of certain attitudes and values (Brubaker 2017; Healy 2019; Vulluvan & Karla, 2019), ostensibly represented a break from the occasionally overt racism of the Thatcher and Major governments (Goodfellow, 2020). Nationalism, whether civic or otherwise, is still in large part structured by its ‘constitutive outside’ (Valluvan 2021, 36), understood as non-belonging identities (Anderson 2006/1983; Hall 2018/1992; Malešević 2011). As such, the presumed alienness of some cultural practices, particularly performed by those ‘racialised’ as Muslim or likely Muslim (Sheth 2009), formalised their status as ‘conditional citizens’ (McGhee 2008, 38) and as a ‘suspect community’ (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009) within the context of the War in Terror (Kumar 2021). Indeed, the shift back towards a more overt assimilationist agenda under David Cameron’s banner of ‘muscular liberalism’ (Crawford 2017; Dobbernack, 2018; Smith 2016) is only legible in contrast to the supposedly laissez-faire approach to national identity which he self-consciously rejected (Lentin and Titley 2011).

The claim that Britain had become too multicultural and as a consequence too unstable and prone to conflict was common throughout the 2000s (Lentin and Titley 2011; Modood and Ahmad 2007; Richardson 2015), especially following the 7/7 terror attacks in London (Meer and Modood 2009). The approach to conflict embedded in the social cohesion framework, and further elaborated through the FBV, reflects this and takes for granted that cultural differences are central in explaining social conflict (Ratcliffe 2012) but does not consider the inverse: that social conflicts can come to structure differences (Hall, 2021/1978; Sheth 2009; Wolfe 2016). Wolfe (2016) argues that throughout history ‘race’ has accounted for ‘the exclusiveness of the bearers of the rights of man’ (p.9) which differentiated populations through various strategies of exclusion and containment. Indeed, the supposedly scientific and rational differentiation of populations, both globally and locally, has been characteristic of capitalist modernity (Simplican, 2016; Federici 2004) and continues to operate to structure contemporary Britain including through regimes of citizenship and nationality (Azoulay 2019; Goodfellow 2020; Walia 2021). That is, ‘race’ and the myriad cultural, political and social dynamics that it has come to articulate (Hall, 2021/1978; Said 1994) operates not simply as an external cause for conflict but as a technology of conflict management which has been naturalised (Sheth 2009). That ‘race’ may play this additional role is scuppered within a framework that seeks to essentialise cultural difference as a way of explaining social conflict. As such, though the often emphasised role of schooling as a location of inter-cultural ‘myth-busting’ remains broadly sound, it also misattributes ignorance as the primary cause of conflict.

The political emphasis on social cohesion and shared ‘British values’ elides material deprivation and inequalities (Cheong et al. 2007; Cowden and Singh 2017; Ratcliffe 2012) by privileging a culturalist approach to social conflict informed by Britain’s imperial past (Kumar 2021; Said 1994). The heightening of cultural, ‘racial’ and ethnic differences which came to define British approaches to multiculturalism throughout the late 20th and twenty first century (Gilroy 2002/1987; Sivanandan 2019) was in turn presented as proof positive of the deft political and administrative skills of the British state and liberal democracy (Cameron 2011; Parekh 2000). This reflects British establishment views of the British Empire as a pan-racial and thoroughly internationalist project (Patel 2021); however, this position was premised on the continuing submission of the British Empire’s colonial and imperial subjects to the metropole (Gopal 2019; Said 1994). Indeed, the perceived backwardness of the ‘Other’ that rationalised British chauvinism and violent subjugation throughout imperial history remains a key justification for moral panics and state intervention today (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021; Hall 2018/1992; Kumar 2021). As such, while explicitly ‘racial’ deficit accounts of difference have fallen mostly out of vogue, they have been supplanted by the more palatable language of homo- and femo-nationalism (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021; Virdee, 2015) as well as appeals to a highly ‘racialised’ discourse of cultural incompatibility (Sheth 2009; Walia 2021) drawing on discourses and tropes developed over British imperial history (Hall, 1992; Smith 2012; Said 2003/1978; Willinsky 1998).

All policies operationalise base assumptions through the selection and framing of social problems (Bacchi 2012). ‘Social cohesion’ policies therefore draw upon existing discourses of belonging and ‘Britishness’ (Valluvan and Kalra 2019) and ‘predisposes government as regards the type of political intervention that appear necessary to rectify social problems’ (Dobbernack 2010 147). These discourses are drawn together to develop a ‘social imaginary’, a background image of the relationships, norms and boundaries of social life (Appadurai 1990, 1996 & 2006; James 2019). Such a ‘social imaginary’ is not static nor universal but rather particularist and selective in the ways they are operationalised to construct problems and solutions (Dobbernack 2010).

The primacy of social cohesion, as a legal requirement of English schools in particular, acts as a key foundation upon which policies such as the ‘Fundamental British Values’ and Prevent Duty rest. ‘Britishness’ can be understood as grounding this foundation; however, the overdetermination of ‘Britishness’ presents some challenges for multicultural Britain.

‘Britishness’: embracing ambiguity?

The legal framework established by the Prevent Duty and its relationship with the ‘Fundamental British Values’ induces schools and staff to approach topics such as citizenship, pluralism and the state in a conservative manner; that is to say, to reinforce the legitimacy and authority of the British state and furthermore develop citizens who tolerate difference ‘within certain national parameters and controlled by the institutions of the state’ (Mitchell 2006, 392).

As argued elsewhere (O’Donnell 2016, 2017; Haynes and Passy 2017), the uncertainty and insecurity that these policies reinforce vis-à-vis the limits of acceptable discussion and opinion can have a chilling effect on open exploration of politically contentious topics. This chilling effect is reinforced by the power of the state to intervene through various coercive and disciplinary arms (Ofsted, the police and Home Office) because, as Ferguson and Vogel (2017) note, protection is always simultaneously regulation. As such, while teachers and broader school staff can, in theory, exercise discretion and professional judgement in the presentation and exploration of these topics; they do so, practically, within the context of Britain’s broader counterterrorism and social cohesion policies.

The perceived authenticity of one’s claims to ‘Britishness’ is a determiner of one’s vulnerability to state intervention. This is because, as outlined in the Prevent (2011) ‘extremism’ is defined as a ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values’ (HM Government 2011, 107) and thus a frontier between the identities of ‘British’ and ‘extremist’ has been established. Once this frontier has been crossed one becomes, at least temporarily, un-British and therefore subject to extraordinary regulation. The Prevent Duty however, extends this principle to those perceived as vulnerable to extremism which is informed by existing ‘racial’, cultural and political stereotypes and discourses. As such, the ‘Fundamental British Values’ not only invokes a narrow conception of what it means to be ‘British’ (Kumar 2021; Manzoor-Khan 2022; Walia 2021), but also an idealised image of British social life and the values supposedly orienting it (Dobbernack 2010). Although teachers and other school staff can exercise autonomy and professional judgement in the teaching of the ‘Fundamental British Values’, the framing of the values within the broader socio-political context relies on their particularity as British in their opposition to the Muslim ‘Other’ (Crawford 2017; Shain 2013; Smith 2016).

The ‘Fundamental British Values’ and Prevent Duty guidances, like the Prevent strategy before it, can be understood as hegemonic interventions. These interventions primarily achieved two interrelated things: a) recruiting schools to act as monitors of the borders of the nation itself; and b) the rearticulation of risk factors to extremism and both potentially endangered and endangering deviance (O’Donnell 2018; Sieckelinck, Kaulingfreks, and De Winter 2015).

Although it was certainly not the first act of terrorist violence committed on British soil, the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 represented a ‘sinister escalation in the terrorist threat’ (Richardson 2006, 134) to the security and intelligence establishment. In particular, the fact of the attackers’ British upbringing and involvement in communal life and assumptions that terrorism is committed ‘there’ and not ‘here’ caused widespread consternation (Irwin 2015; Kundnani 2012). This consternation was due in part by the ambiguity between the attackers identities as both British and as terrorists; caused by existing understandings of the supposed incongruity of ‘Britishness’ on one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other. As an act of hegemonic intervention, the language of the Prevent strategy (which has been subsequently adopted in the Prevent Duty and ‘Fundamental British Values’ guidance) established that once someone was categorised as an ‘extremist’ they were no longer British but rather un-British. It is in this context that schools and staff are expected to monitor the borders of the nation; by reinforcing the centrality of a hegemonic understanding of ‘Britishness’ and British identity.

Simultaneously, the ambiguity of what constitutes these borders, or in Lord Nash’s phrasing ‘barriers to extremism’ (DfE & Nash, 2014), and schools role in monitoring them is resolved by the Prevent Duty and ‘Fundamental British Values’. Firstly, the formally passive conception of ‘not undermining’ ‘Fundamental British Values’ was replaced by the active conception of ‘promoting’ (Lockley-Scott 2019). Secondly, the language of ‘vulnerability’ to extremism is premised on a deviance relative to the master signifiers ‘Britain’ and ‘Britishess’ which organises the discursive terrain upon which ‘radicalisation’, ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorist’ can be filled with meaning. Concepts such as ‘tolerance’, ‘law and order’, ‘individual freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are thus articulated in relation to existing British state and social practices. In this regard, Islam can be represented as specifically patriarchal and incalcitrant (Said 1994 & 2003/1978; Sheth 2009); or the image of the ‘Black gang’ can be understood as a cultural issue and not the result of the ‘racialisation’ of poverty and constructions of criminality (Bhattacharyya et al. 2021; Gilroy 2002/1987).

To reiterate, ‘Britishness’ (that is, a constructed expression of ‘British’ as an identity) is a complex of ‘cultural meanings, symbols and images, selectively woven together’ (Hall, 2021/2000, 416). While the concepts evoked in the ‘Fundamental British Values’ themselves are not as clear as the guidance suggests, the image they project of Britain as an ultimately tolerant liberal democracy is clear. However, the Black Lives Matter movement helped to illustrate the incongruity of this image with the lived experiences of many Britons ‘racialised’ as Black.

Britishness and decolonising the curriculum: concluding thoughts

In June 2020, a large bronze statue of slaver Edward Colston was removed from its plinth in Bristol and cast into the harbour. This event came to symbolise the disparate interpretations of the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain: on one side, a rejection and condemnation of the role of racism in the development of Britain; and on the other, lawless mob rule and an attack on British identity itself (BBC 2022). This resulted in the mainstreaming of a broad call to ‘decolonise’ various institutions and practices in British life.

While certainly not a new demand, calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ gained renewed momentum in the immediate aftermath of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020. Although the concept’s horizons are unclear, decolonisation in Britain requires ‘first, reckoning with its own self-constitution in the crucible of empire and secondly, engaging with the legacies and afterlives of colonialism both ‘within’ and ‘without’ its shifting (and colonial) borders’ (Gopal 2021, 878). Decolonising the curriculum does not imply simply viewing Britain’s past and present ‘as a series of events that instil pride or shame, or balance of rights and wrongs’ (Sanghera 2021, 41), but rather active dynamics which shape the ways in which knowledge is constructed, disseminated and valued (Smith 2012).

What concerns us here is less what decolonisation means in concrete terms—as if this were a settled matter—but rather the ways in which the discursive structures of ‘Britishness’ in educational policies have been deployed to arrest movement towards decolonisation of the curriculum. The current discourse of ‘Britishness’ in educational policies such as the Prevent Duty, the ‘Fundamental British Values’ and social cohesion duties cannot be extricated from its origins in managing the purported deviance of Muslim Britons in general and ‘extremist Islam’ in particular. That is to say ‘Britishness’, as it is discursively situated within these policies, is a reaction to the threat of cultural heterogeneity posed (uniquely) by Islam (Meer and Modood 2009) used as a ‘reference point against which the nation orients itself’ (Valluhan, 2021, 34). Therefore, as argued earlier, the designation ‘extremist’ deployed as a frontier separating the ‘good’ Muslim Briton from the ‘bad’ Muslim un-Briton has been extended unequally to all.

Decolonisation, on the other hand, presents a different political proposition: support for Black Lives Matter was, crucially, multi-racial, cross-class and international and so the chain equivalences which connect these concerns meant they had to be addressed, or at the very least not dismissed out of hand (Laclau and Mouffe 2014/1985). What connects decolonisation to extremism is not the issues themselves but that they speak to an existing White anxiety surrounding the ambiguity of ‘British’ identity. That is the Whiteness (as a political, ontological and epistemological project) at the centre of hegemonic constructions of ‘Britishness’ becomes a site of political struggle and contestation. Unlike the issue of ‘extremism’ however, resolving this ambiguity through clear frontiers between identities is to concede the centrality of Whiteness to ‘Britishness’. As such, the language of social cohesion and ‘shared values’ is used to de-politicise this ambiguity and hyper-politicise the ‘political in its dimension of conflict/decision’ (Mouffe 2005/1993) .

Social cohesion and ‘shared values’ as orienting principles for policy are premised on a view of social attitudes as fixed and commonly held (Dobbernack 2010; Mouffe 2005/1993; Laclau and Mouffe 2014/1985). This view, furthermore, obscures that both concepts are politically constructed and are thus embedded within the unevenness of political power that their usage subsequently obscures. The Cantle Report (2001), produced following urban disturbances in 2001, provides an illustrative example: while it is argued that cultural differences between the communities involved structured the society they shared, the possibility that the structures of the society itself engendered these differences is made moot. As such, the national and local discourses of belonging and ‘Britishness’ as well as material deprivation which shape the relative recourse to non-violent political expression and advocacy was flattened (Kundnani 2001). Moreover, the power and legitimacy entrusted to the writers of the report to narrate the events further disempowers the communities involved.

A similar dynamic of flattening and homogenising British identity and social attitudes can be observed in the non-statutory guidance Political impartiality in schools (2022) which seeks to depoliticise the ambiguities of British national identity in response to Black Lives Matter. The guidance states:

‘Not all areas of ethical debate are political issues. There are some concepts and views that can be considered as shared principles that underpin our society and not political issues in this context. Examples include a belief in upholding certain rights, such as freedom of speech and protection from violence and criminal activity - or challenging discrimination and prejudice, including racism.’

A distinction should be drawn between the shared principle that discrimination and prejudice are wrong, and partisan political views that go beyond this or advocate political reform (DfE, 2022, emphasis added).

As the above quotes illustrate, one of the orienting principles of the guidance is that certain positions and rights (such as non-discrimination and freedom of speech) are apolitical expressions of a ‘shared principle’ of ‘Britishness’. As such, the master signifier ‘Britishness’ again locates these concepts within an overall discourse of British identity. However, by further articulating these ‘shared principles that underpin our society’ as ‘not political issues in this context’, not only are their histories as political struggles hidden but so are the uneven ways those differentially constructed within the discourse of ‘Britishness’ interact with them.

Many of the ‘shared principles’ which are being depoliticised had to be wrestled from the British state itself (Bryan et al. 2018/1985; Gopal 2019). They are, in the final analysis, the result of political struggles; of ambiguities resolved through hegemonic interventions (Laclau and Mouffe 2014/1985). As Mouffe (2005/1993) trenchantly argued: ‘A healthy democratic process calls for a vibrant clash of political positions and an open conflict of interests’ (p.27) which forces these ambiguities into the open. Indeed, the discursive function of ‘Britishness’, particularly as it pertains to education policies, is to obscure these conflicts by focusing on abstract ‘shared principles’. To take one of the central themes of the Black Lives Matter movement as an example, anti-Black ‘racism’ is embodied by state institutions such as the police (Davis 2003; Vitale 2017). By depoliticising non-racism and thus hyper-politicising anti-racism a frontier between acceptable and unacceptable school interventions has been established. However, the guidance itself relies specifically on unclearly articulating these frontiers while implying their enforcement.

Despite the stated claim nothing in the Political impartiality in schools (2022) guidance ‘limits schools’ freedom to teach about sensitive, challenging, and controversial political issues’, the existing statutory requirements and legal frameworks make this claim untenable. Rather, as NEU joint secretary Dr. Mary Bousted argued, the guidance adds ‘new layers of mystification and complexity’ (National Education Union 2022) which will result in schools and staff avoiding these topics for fear of discipline. It should be noted here that this guidance came after a sustained campaign of anti-teacher press coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic in which teachers were positioned as at once hyper-militant and anti-British for refusing to teacher full classes in-person. In this regard, the guidance should be understood simultaneously as a labour discipling practice on the one hand and a hegemonic intervention regarding the status of teachers as political agents on the other.

So what does this mean for ‘decolonising the curriculum’? One immediate impact of these disciplinary moments is to discourage experimentation with different pedagogical approaches. Approaches such as culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP) (Paris and Alim 2017) which challenge deficit framings of cultural, linguistic and epistemic pluralism; or education for critical consciousness (Hooks 2003) require the participation and experimentation of students and teachers together (Freire, 2016/1974 & 2017/1968; Lee 2017). Creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in classrooms as to what opinions can or cannot be expressed without legal ramifications is certainly counter to this requirement (O’Donnell 2017). Decolonisation is not a fixed or certain process but rather demands imaginative explorations of alternative modes of being together (Azoulay 2019). Even more disabling, we would argue, are attempts to flatten different experiences relating to ‘Britishness’ implied by appeals to ‘shared values’ and social cohesion. The problem is not the mere fact of differences, but rather what differences come to mean within the discursive structures of Whiteness which shape Britain (Hall, 2021/2000 & 2018/1992).

By invoking the language of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘Fundamental British Values’ these policies obscure the inequalities and differential positioning that structures ‘Britishness’. We have argued that Whiteness is an orienting principle of current discourses of ‘Britishness’. However, we have not closely examined the roles of gender, sex, dis/ability status nor class within constructions of both Whiteness and ‘Britishness’. Indeed, differential exposure to vulnerability, by force or by abandonment, is characteristic of the nationalism explored here (Butler 2020; Malešević 2011; Valluhan, 2019; Walia 2021). Without acknowledging that constructions of Whiteness and ‘Britishness’ can actively pit some communities against one another and expose communities unequally to vulnerability, ‘social cohesion’ and ‘Fundamental British Values’ compound the problems they purport to solve.

Acknowledgements

The lead author would like to acknowledge the peoples of the Kulin Nations as the Traditional owners of the land on which Monash University stands, and recognise and pay respects to Elders past, present and future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For a historical outline concerning ‘race’ and education in Britain see Mirza (2022): https://www.oneducation.net/no-13_april-2022/a-short-history-of-race-in-british-schools-a-75-year-timeline/