Balancing securitisation and education in schools: teachers’ agency in implementing the Prevent duty

ABSTRACT

Since the introduction of the Prevent duty across the UK, schools have had to balance the need to fulfil their responsibilities under the duty – often understood to include monitoring and surveillance – with their ultimate purpose to educate their students. This positions teachers within a particular set of tensions about their own beliefs about education, their values, and their roles and relationships with young people and communities. This article draws on interviews with classroom teachers and members of school leadership teams from 10 schools, in order to compare how teachers have understood and responded to those tensions. The article will focus on the various ways in which teachers frame the policy, and the ways in which they exercise agency in their responses. Drawing on an ecological approach to theorising teacher agency our data reveals how teachers develop different responses to anti-extremism policy depending on their role; their school contexts; and their own beliefs. Whilst in some important regards the statutory Prevent duty has ‘closed down’ some options, nevertheless teachers exercise agency to interpret and enact policy and, when translating the policy into a curriculum context, also make ‘leaps’ of interpretation as concepts such as fundamental British values are turned into lessons.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-extremism
• counter-terrorism
• teacher agency
• securitisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The research on which this article reports was a small-scale project which we nonetheless believe is important, owing to the lack of current studies which explore the role of Prevent with teachers and in classrooms. Given its scale we have not made extensive claims nor sought to generalise our findings and would – as with any qualitative research of this type – advise readers to consider the inevitable limitations of such research, including our own subjectivity; our role as researchers; and the self-selecting nature of the participants. Our data was collected as part of the Building Resilience project run by the ACT, and the schools generally participated in the project because they were already within ACT’s network, and the decision to participate was led by Citizenship teachers in each school. Their interest was in developing a curriculum-based project to incorporate an aspect of Prevent policy, and one of the appealing aspects of participation was teachers’ access to specialist consultants from ACT to support their planning. As we have stated, the Home Office provided a small amount of funding to enable ACT to run the project and employ us as evaluators and so some commentators might question whether this impacted upon our findings – both in terms of what our interviewees told us and our role in analysing and interpreting the data. We have maintained the highest standards of transparency throughout the project and while we believe that we have explicitly addressed the effect that teachers’ positions, beliefs and values might have had on their responses in relation to Prevent – and we have sought to evidence all our assertions by providing direct quotations from our participants – we hope readers feel sufficiently informed in order to make their own judgements on this matter. The full evaluation report and methodology is available on ACT’s website www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association for Citizenship Teaching.

Notes on contributors

Alex Elwick

Alex Elwick is a researcher at the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship, Middlesex University and a Lecturer in Education at UCL Institute of Education. His work is concerned with education policy and social justice at national/regional (government) and local (institutional) levels. He has published on topics including the Prevent policy in education; values and value statements in universities; and urban school system reform.

Lee Jerome

Lee Jerome is an Associate Professor of Education at Middlesex University and has published articles, research reports, books and educational resources for schools in relation to citizenship education. He has also researched and written about how teachers construct medium-term plans, human rights education, and character education.