The Psy-Security-Curriculum ensemble: British Values curriculum policy in English schools

ABSTRACT

Framed as being in response to terrorist attacks and concerns about religious bias in some English schools, ‘British Values’ (BV) curriculum policy forms part of the British Government’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015. This includes a Duty on teachers in England to actively promote British Values to deter students from radicalisation. This paper, first, traces the history of Britishness in the curriculum to reveal a prevalence of nationalistic, colonial values. Next, an ensemble of recent policies and speeches focusing on British Values is analysed, using a psycho-political approach informed by anti-colonial scholarship. Finally, we interrogate two key critiques of the British Values curriculum discourse: the universality of British Values globally, and concerns over the securitisation of education. Findings indicate that the constitution of white British supremacist subjectivities operate through curriculum as a defence mechanism against perceived threats to white privilege, by normalising a racialised state-controlled social order. The focus is on ‘British’ values, but the analytic framework and findings have wider global significance.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse/analysis
• race
• Psychopolitics
• curriculum

Introduction

In 2017, UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, announced the need to ‘assert “the superiority” of British Values’ in response to acts framed as terrorism in Manchester and London (Travis 2017, 8). When she made this speech, so called Fundamental British Values had been part of the British Government’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act since 2011 (HM Government, 2015). A central pillar of this Act is the Revised Prevent Duty Guidance (HM Government, 2015)¹ which is the duty given to schools ‘… to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ (DfE 2015, 3). Part of this duty (with legislation in place for implementation and monitoring) is the active promotion of fundamental ‘British Values’ (‘democracy’, the ‘rule of law’, ‘liberty’, ‘mutual respect’ and ‘tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’, DfE 2014a, 2014b) in all schools in England (academies, free schools, independent schools and state maintained schools).²

Our focus in this paper is an analysis of the BV Duty, and media and political discourse about BV more generally, which together we frame as a BV curriculum policy ensemble. This ensemble consists of policies, guidance/advice³, politicians’ speeches and a tabloid news article (spanning 2014 to 2017) (DfE 2014b, DfE 2015; HM Gov 2015; Cameron 2014; Gove 2014; May 2017). We describe these documents as a ‘BV curriculum policy ensemble’ on the basis of our understanding of curriculum as a selection of knowledge from a society’s culture (Lawton 1975), and of policy as text, process and discourse that express decisions made by authoritative political actors as a means to direct understanding and action towards change (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). We subscribe to Ozga’s definition of policy text as ‘any vehicle or medium for carrying and transmitting a policy message’, be it a legal document, speech, press release, strategy, duty, guidance or advice that ‘express[es] policy intentions and ha[s] effects’ (2000, 33). This study looks at a Duty guidance and the related discourses and conditions of possibility for that Duty to emerge, including how it is officially justified.

How the Duty is interpreted in the context of the school curriculum, in other words the curriculum implications of BV curriculum policy ensemble, raises questions about curriculum control, policy governmentality and the constitution of the subject (addressed in the following discussion). Employing a psychopolitical approach, the paper uses specific psychological concepts (disavowal, amnesia, fantasy, defence), informed by and applied within the anti-colonial work of Frantz Fanon and Derek Hook’s ‘critical psychology of the postcolonial’ (2005, 2012), to illuminate the often-unarticulated workings of power within BV policy. Such a focus on the psychic life of BV policy allows us to probe the discourses and practices that ‘enable, foreground, and mediate the state, nation, and senses of belonging embedded in colonialism’s racial and patriarchal project’ (Ngyuen 2014, 118). The psychopolitical analytic framework used here is significant in that, while never reducing racism to the level of the psychological only, it illuminates why certain forms of racism may be so difficult to eradicate, and demonstrates how, within curriculum policy, the language of anti-racism can co-exist alongside racist beliefs and actions. This approach is also unique in that it allows exploration of the way mainstream psy-expertise is put to work within counter-terrorism policies in schools (discussed shortly).

Our paper approaches and analyses BV curriculum policy in five main ways: the first is to trace the legacy of BV within the multiple intersections of racism, colonialism and militarism underpinning Britishness in the history of the school curriculum. Second, we trace the origin of the BV policy. Third, we deploy specific psychopolitical and postcolonial concepts, alongside deconstructive methods, to illuminate the ‘psychic life’ of BV policy. This includes a dual analysis of a) how the psy-disciplines are mobilised within BV policy, and b) how BV policy could be understood as a governmental/state psychic defence mechanism. Last, we revisit two key critiques of BV curriculum policy in schools (the universality of values and the securitisation of education) and interrogate these in the light of our findings about the relationship between education, colonialism, security, and the psy-disciplines.

Throughout the paper, we propose that, whilst BV manifests itself as a ‘new’ curriculum policy, its underlying logic and rationale are symptoms of the much-older colonial education-security relationship, and thus, of white British supremacist subjectivity deployed by Government to defend white privilege. While the focus of this paper is on ‘British’ values, the analytic framework and findings have wider global significance given the interest in values education and intersections of security, racism and education, in many countries of the global North, including the USA (Ngyuen 2014); Australia (Peterson and Bentley 2016; Mayes, Remy, and Mockler 2016); France, (Frej 2016; Chrisafis 2016), and other European countries (Butt and Tuck 2014), and given the continued impacts of coloniality within education globally. Our inter-disciplinary approach draws upon international literature around critical psychology, curriculum studies and postcolonialism, to illuminate and disrupt the British nationalist imaginary embedded in one specific curriculum policy ensemble. As Governments globally exert increasing control over curriculum and assessment policies, this novel analytical approach can be used to critically interrogate a range of policy and other texts addressing national values across educational contexts internationally.

The first step in our argument requires contextualising BV in the curriculum history of Britishness.

The history of Britishness and the school curriculum

‘Britishness’, as much as ‘curriculum’, is an imaginary (Lawton 1975; Anderson 1991). Anderson describes ‘nation-ness’ as a ‘cultural artefact of a particular kind’ (p. 4), for which we need to examine carefully its history in order to understand its power. Lawton recognises curriculum as ‘essentially a selection from the culture of a society’ (p. 6), begging the question of who makes the cultural selection of knowledge and why.

Much scholarship shows that curriculum practices often represent the values of dominant groups and played a key role within colonial curricula (Apple 1990; Kanu 2006a). For example, Kanu (2006b, 213) shows how colonial education in West Africa was used to internationalise Western cultural values and psychologically subordinate colonised peoples; how British colonial administration in Sierra Leone set out to socialize students into ‘English middle-class values and behaviours’ (Kanu 2006c, 12); and how compulsory schooling in the USA grew from anxieties that English and Protestant middle-class values were ‘under siege’ by immigrant populations (Kanu 2006c, 13). The residential schools imposed on Canada’s First Nations peoples also aimed to violently replace localized cultural and familial values through ‘inculcation of European values’ (McDonald 2006, 309). Richardson describes ‘the central role that education plays in the construction and maintenance of national identity’ (2006, 284), while Kanu (2006c, 16) shows how the ‘curricular encounter with the Other has been unequal, unethical and anchored in racism and violence’. Yet Kanu also shows that there has been resistance to this project in that ‘values deemed good by the colonizer and/or nation-state have been constantly repudiated by those on whom they have been imposed’ (p 16).

Since the British school curriculum is part of the narrative of the nation’s culture, historical analysis is required to understand the sources and purposes of its cultural values, and to ask whose interests they serve (Tomlinson 2015a). In the late Victorian-early Edwardian period of increased imperial expansion, British public schools⁴ taught imperial values and beliefs to cultivate imperial leaders (Mangan 1980). Public school values of nationalism, glorification of war, racial, moral and religious superiority were passed to state schools, via school textbooks (especially History and Geography) and juvenile literature (Mackenzie 1986). Dominated by transmission teaching, an acceptance of school knowledge as ‘truth’ and the simplification of complex concepts to make them accessible, the school curriculum for working class students took up the public school values of British patriotism, militarism, support for monarchy, imperialist expansion, racial superiority and Christian paternalism (Tomlinson 1989).

Given that (largely white) teachers had been exposed to the ethnocentric curriculum during their own school days and lacked experience of, or training to construct or teach a multi-cultural, anti-racist curriculum, such nationalistic curriculum values continued into the late 20th Century (Tomlinson 2008, 38). The arrival in Britain, during the period of post-war immigration, of people from former colonies, stimulated a number of reports (Government and non-Government) presenting the need for curriculum change to prepare all students for life in a multi-cultural society (DES 1977; Swann 1985; MacPherson 1999; Parekh 2000; Ajegbo and DfES 2007; Goldsmith 2008). Each was thwarted in its quest for radical reform towards a multi-cultural curriculum due to the absence of follow-up policies and guidelines, inappropriate teacher education and lack of resources, together with strong opposition from nationalists determined to defend the white social order by ‘preserv – [ing] an imperial notion of a British national identity from “alien cultures”’ (Tomlinson 2008, 71–2).

The ‘back-to-basics’ National Curriculum introduced by the New Right in 1988 re-established a sense of British heritage and culture (Ball 1994). National Curriculum History was a prime target. Cultural restorationists argued for a curriculum based on key historical facts about British History to illustrate ‘the spread of Britain’s influence for good throughout the world’ and how ‘our pride in our past gives us our confidence to stand tall in the world today’ (Baker 1988; cited in Ball 1994, 37). This ‘past victories’ historical approach narrates the past through a Eurocentric, culturally racist lens to authorise and perpetuate the glorification of empire and Britishness.

The change from Conservative to New Labour Government in 1997 failed to challenge and reform the culturally biased, ethnocentric and racist curriculum (Tomlinson 2008, 146), with the framing of immigration as a ‘problem’. This stance perpetuated the emphasis on nationalism and patriotism conveyed by the Right in the past, with similar effect – marginalising ethnic minority communities whilst ignoring structural inequalities and material disadvantage. Even the Citizenship curriculum introduced in 2002 failed to address structural injustice. Based on recommendations made by a Government-appointed advisory committee (QCA 1998), the report⁵ ignored racism, focused on cultural difference, neglected issues of power and educational outcomes, was mindful only of the national context and offensive in its use of language by reference, for example to ‘the homelands of our minority communities’ (Osler and Starkey 2005, 90).

The 2010 Coalition Government⁶ heralded a new ‘back-to-basics’ National Curriculum configured around traditional academic subjects and ‘core’ knowledge (Winter, 2018). The draft History National Curriculum demonstrates the centrality of state racism today to the social reproduction of British/English imperialist values. For example, Historical Association (HA) members argued that the draft curriculum conveyed ‘Anglo-centric bias’ (2013 section 3), neglecting British, European and global history. Countries other than Britain were only referred to when subjected to Britain’s ‘triumphal’ military impact. Racist language (‘The Indian Mutiny’ and ‘The Glorious Revolution’) ignored alternative value perspectives and Black British history (including immigration).

During its first term (1997–2001), New Labour increased control over the education workforce, curriculum and assessment. Tomlinson notes a parallel reduction in Government promotion of anti-racist curriculum content (2008, 146), despite Parehk’s (2000) call to eliminate racism in society and education and MacPherson’s⁷ critique of institutional racism (1999). By increasing state control over curriculum at the same time as privatising education, neoliberal governance, in effect ‘privatised’ racism, erasing the language of racism from curriculum policy, whilst allowing it to operate ‘under-cover’ in de-regulated, veiled/concealed form (Kapoor 2013, 1034).

Origins of British Values curriculum policy in schools

An example of the ‘veiled and/or concealed’ racism discussed above occurred through the constitution of British Values discourse and its dissemination throughout social policy. The origin lies in the so-called ‘move from multiculturalism’, generated by the 2001 inner-city riots in Northern England and by the government-commissioned response, the Cantle Report, 2001. Cantle blamed the riots on ‘physical segregation’ and ‘polarisation’ … of ‘communities [mainly of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage] operat[ing] on the basis of a series of parallel lives’ (2001, 9), triggering the political drive for ‘community cohesion’ and ‘common/collective citizenship’ (Blunkett 2001). The underlying assumption was that absence of interaction between mainly Muslim and non-Muslim communities led to lack of common identities and shared values. Then Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett argued the need for a ‘sense of civic identity’ and ‘shared values’, referring to ‘our values of individual freedom, the protection of liberty and respect for difference’. The London bombings of 2005 and subsequent attacks perpetrated by ‘home-grown’ terrorists generated questions about the values and loyalties of young British Muslims and moral panic (Thomas and Sanderson 2011). Framed as being in response to these issues, the Government identified, promoted and disseminated what we now understand as the ‘Fundamental British Values’ discourse. In a speech to the Fabian Society in 2006, Gordon Brown urged Labour supporters to ‘embrace the Union flag’. He spoke of ‘“progressive” ideas of liberty, fairness and responsibility’, ‘tolerance and inclusion’. In the same year Tony Blair identified the values of ‘democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage … it is what gives us the right to call ourselves British’ (Blair 2006).

The dominant narrative underpinning Government policy at this time was, Miah states, ‘The Muslim problematic’, whereby Muslims were understood as the other, both physically and ontologically and ‘the role of public policy is to ensure Muslims reject the key tenets of Islam and to assimilate into Western secular liberalism’ (2017, 142). The CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy and its associated PREVENT policy of 2007 (DCLG) focused on both ‘preventing violent extremism’ and on Muslims (Thomas and Sanderson 2011). Government attention thus moved from tackling the structural inequalities that cause racial, ethnic and religious segregation and polarisation (for example, in housing, schools and employment) to the securitisation of Muslim communities through a policy framed as preventing, monitoring and suppressing terrorist thoughts and acts before they were committed.

Richardson and Bolloten (2014, 10) trace the origin of Fundamental British Values (FBV) as expressed in recent education policy (‘democracy, rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths’) to the definition of extremism contained in the 2011 PREVENT strategy (Home Office, p. 107). They propose that this definition of extremism is based on the seductive theory that terrorist acts perpetrated by Muslims are driven by Islamism, an extreme version of Islam, a theory stoutly critiqued by Kundnani (2014), on the basis of lack of evidence. The PREVENT definition of Fundamental British Values was, nevertheless taken up in both the Teachers’ Standards (2012)⁸ and in the SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development) documents (DfE, 2014a)⁹.

The Trojan Horse Affair erupted in March, 2014 with the publication in The Sunday Times of an article based on an anonymous letter claiming the existence of an Islamist plot to infiltrate Birmingham schools. Whether interpreted as a ‘hoax’ or as ‘truth’ (Miah 2017), the outcome drew on Said’s Oriental/Occidental binary (Said 1978) to impact on media and public discourse by further constructing Muslims as other and opening an opportunity for the state to feed the ‘Muslim problematic’ by governing Muslims through counter-terrorist security policies and practices (Miah 2017). In other words, the Government used the Trojan Horse Affair and the ensuing moral panic to justify and consolidate its de-radicalisation agenda. Rachetting-up of the British Values discourse in policy documents and politicians’ speeches occurred through the shift in requirement from ‘not to undermine …’ (DfE 2012, 41) to ‘actively promote …’ Fundamental British Values’ (DfE 2015, 13). The Prevent Duty and its bedfellow, Fundamental British Values appear to offer an antidote to potential national and global terrorism. At the same time, these policies contribute to racial governance under neoliberalism through the continued targeting of certain racialised community groups for surveillance, management and containment.

Ofsted (2015, 13)¹⁰ requires school leaders to ‘actively promote’ Fundamental British Values. Ofsted inspectors assess ‘British Values’ teaching and teachers are required to identify, monitor and report to the authorities those students who they suspect to be ‘at risk’ of radicalisation. To further assist in embedding counter-terrorism strategies explicitly within education, a whole industry of training providers has grown up (see for example training provided through the Global Learning Programme, and the Citizenship Foundation)¹¹, alongside a vast literature of guidelines (largely available for free online), mainly aimed at teachers. For example, the Department for Education released (2014a, 2014b) guidelines in how to translate British Values teaching into SMSC education (as part of section 78 of the Education Act 2002); and the Association for Citizenship Teaching¹² released Guidelines for teachers to develop a curriculum response to the Prevent Duty (Expert Subject Advisory Group for Citizenship 2015).

BV curriculum policy is not a separate curriculum strand or a discrete subject in the repertoire of the English school curriculum. Instead, promotion of Fundamental British Values, as a cross-curricular topic, forms part of the requirement for students’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. It is enacted differently across different school contexts, from history fieldtrips to WW2 battlefields, and celebrating Christmas (Busher et al. 2017), to mock general elections, BV days and citizenship/PSHE lessons (Haughton 2017). McGhee and Zhang (2017) conducted research into the enactment of BV policy by analysing school websites, finding that through deploying ‘local discretion’, schools defused some of the security’ aspects of the policy to meet their aims of achieving a multicultural community. But when such pedagogical activities are considered alongside recent research into teachers’ perspectives on BV, several concerns emerge. Maylor (2016) found that some teachers held ‘uninformed views’ about specific ethnic groups ‘which could be regarded as racist’ (p. 324), whilst Keddie (2014) remarked on the ‘prevailing reductionist and racialised constructions of Britishness’ held by some teachers in her case study school. Several researchers discovered that teachers lacked in-depth knowledge of their students’ cultural backgrounds and did not recognise the complexity, multiplicity and provisionality of their students’ identities (Rhamie, Bhopal and Bhatti 2012; Farrell 2016). Revell et al. (2016) found a minority of teachers in their study fearful of engaging with BV policy beyond the banal, being wary of being accused of presenting an unbalanced perspective in relation to political views (p. 352). Revell states that teachers lacked the knowledge (and/or the power), language and concepts to discuss what undermining BV might look like in their classrooms (p. 351). Other researchers expressed concerns that BV policy re-constructs teachers as security agents, closing down safe spaces for discussion, especially around racism (Lander 2016; Panjwani 2016; Elton Chalcroft et al. 2017).

‘British Values’ (DfE 2014a, 2014b) have also been critiqued for being unclear conceptually and limited in scope, for example, why are equality, anti-racism and social justice not included? (Panjwani 2016; Struthers 2017). The introduction into education policy and practice of these values is marked by absence of definition, explanation, justification, discussion or examples (Richardson 2015, 41), making it difficult for teachers to know what these values are and when they are undermined (Panjwani 2016, 337). Identification, celebration and authorisation of ‘British Values’ confer a binary of insider/outsider as British/non-British (Elton- Chalcraft, et al. 2017, 41), thereby constructing a polarisation between ‘good’ and inferior ‘other’. The ‘British’ pre-fix harks back to nostalgic sentiments of Empire, deflecting attention from the violent realities of race and religious inequality in British society, and, as we shall now explore, working to psychically defend white privilege.

A psychopolitical analysis of British Values curriculum policy

One of the foci of this paper is the psychic life of the British Values curriculum policy assemblage. Conceptualization of ‘psychic life’ has occurred broadly within psychosocial theory (Froggett 2012) and postcolonial theory (the focus of this paper). This literature references both how psychological concepts can be used to understand power, and how colonialism (and wider systems of oppression) impact on psychic life.

Much of the work on ‘psychic life’ merges Foucauldian thinking (particularly on subjectivity) with concepts from psychoanalytic theories, exemplified in Judith Butler’s (1997) ‘psychic life of power’. Butler proposes that ‘regulatory and disciplinary regimes’ of power enact the constitution of the subject (1997, 18) via the psychical internalisation of norms. Pre-dating Butler’s work in this area is Ashis Nandy’s writing on ‘the psychological contours of colonialism’ and colonial selfhood (1983, 2), as well as more recent postcolonial work on the ‘psychic life of colonial power’ (Riggs and Augoustinos 2005; Hook 2012). Riggs and Augoustinos, (2005, 464) show how white subjectivities are formed amongst the non-Indigenous settler Australian population through structures of racism and how this ‘operates in the service of the white nation’.

This paper uses specific psychological concepts (disavowal, amnesia, fantasy, defence), as they are applied within postcolonial theory and critical psychology, to illuminate the coloniality of BV policy. Therefore, the paper does not explore the psychic lives made possible (enacted, appropriated, resisted) through, or the psychological impact of, BV policy for racialized young people, teachers or training practitioners as they navigate BV curriculum (although we conclude that this is an important area for further research). Our analysis is part of a varied literature applying psychoanalytic and psychopolitical insights to understand the workings of organisations, policies, and indeed psychoanalysis itself (Mills 2017; Fortier 2017; Parker 1997). Specifically, this paper takes inspiration from Fortier’s (2017) ‘psychic life of policy’, which attends to the psychosocial dynamics of UK citizenship policy and to its psychic impact – desire and anxiety around belonging. Fortier conceives of policy as a mix of the psychic and the social, and as a product of contextualised relational practices (2017, 6).

Drawing upon Hesse’s (1997, 96) analysis of white amnesia and white governmentality, we can see how the BV duty operates a disciplinary regime to constitute students, teachers and parents by means of the psychical internalisation of a ‘British nationalist imaginary’. Thus, the formation of white subjectivities/supremacies occurs through the reproduction of white power, national belonging, security and colonial relations embedded within BV curriculum policy discourse.

An important critique to bear in mind when using psychoanalytic concepts and psycho-diagnostics for analysis of the ‘psychic life’ of curriculum policy is: a) the potential of these concepts to ‘transmit, re-inscribe, [and] reify certain ideologically-loaded Eurocentric ideas’, even as we apply them critically; and b) that such terms may impede social critique by moving analysis away from structural and economic factors (Hook 2012, 108 &120). The psycho-politics of Frantz Fanon (an anti-colonial revolutionary from colonised Martinique) are thus useful here, because while Fanon, himself a psychiatrist in colonised Algeria, used psy concepts to analyse racism and colonialism, he made clear that racism is one part of a wider systematised oppression, not something reducible only to peoples’ psyches and interpersonal behaviour. Fanon insists that ‘the habit of considering racism as a mental quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned’ (Fanon, 1967/1986, 33–40). Yet while Fanon prioritises a socio-diagnostic analysis that attends to social and economic realities, he still sees the psychological as fundamentally important (Hook 2012, 109). Illustrative of this is Fanon’s assertion that the affective dynamics of racism operate through:

a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly – with the help of books, newspapers, schools…work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world and of the group to which one belongs (Fanon 1967/1986, 152).

It is interesting to note here that Fanon names school as a key institution in the colonisation of minds, and of inculcating inferiority in colonised and racialized young people. Here Fanon is illustrating a ‘psycho-politics of racialisation’ where race becomes a central mode of colonial and postcolonial governance (Tyler 2013, 42). We draw on Hesse’s (1997, 100) notion of white governmentality to identify BV policy drivers and levers (Steer et al. 2007), interpreting Hesse’s ‘nationalist political rationalities’ as policy drivers that ‘define the goals of policy’. They represent the ‘cues to action’ (Steer et al. 2007, p. 177), and in other words, are the factors that drive the policy in a certain direction (the, sometimes unconscious, ‘why?’ of policy). BV curriculum policy provides moral directives and the articulation of values as objects of governance, in other words, the very construction of specific (liberal) values as ‘British’. In contrast, BV policy levers form the mechanisms through which the policies are implemented and enacted. These ‘racist programmes of government’ focus on resolving anxieties, such as ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ mentioned by Hesse (1997, 100), and are exemplified in a number of political speeches that make up the BV policy ensemble. Policy levers, in the BV case, form the ‘disciplinary logic of whiteness’ (Hesse 1997, 99), evident both in institutional bodies, such as the top-down directive to embed British Values in the school curriculum, and positioning Ofsted as the agency to regulate this; and in individual bodies and psyches.

A key reason for the significance of a psychopolitical analysis of BV comes about from the rarely critiqued use of more mainstream psy-expertise within counter-terrorism policies in schools. Here the disciplinary logic of whiteness is evident in the framing of radicalization as a psychological process, in need of psychological interventions (Kundnani 2012; Coppock and McGovern 2014). Those ‘at risk’ of radicalization are portrayed as psychologically vulnerable to specific ‘psychological hooks’, with mental health problems named as a potential risk factor (HM Government 2015, Annex C). Coppock and McGovern (2014) trace how the psy-disciplines (psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and psychiatry) play a key role here, both in searching for the social and psychological factors that may contribute to the acquisition of a ‘terrorist mindset’ (Moghaddam 2005), attempting to locate a ‘cultural-psychological disposition to violence’ (Kundnani 2012, 8–9), and in framing interventions aimed at halting radicalization, for example, referring children seen as ‘at risk’ of radicalization for cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) through the CHANNEL programme (HM Government 2015, 217).¹³ The Counter-Terror and Security Act (HM Government 2015, 13) states that radicalization may manifest as ‘Changes in behaviour and outlook’ which ‘may be visible to staff’. This links into ‘debates about whether changes in belief or changes of behaviour are the ultimate aim’ of counter terrorism strategies (Davies 2016, 12). Psychological and behavioural change then are key aims of the BV policy ensemble (as evidenced in the use of behavioral economic ‘nudge’ strategies linked to PREVENT, see Ecclestone 2017).

In contrast to the reduction of radicalisation and terrorism to individual psychological factors, found in much counter-terrorism discourse, the analysis used in this paper does not aim to reduce racism and colonialism to the psychological. Yet, like Fanon, it recognises that racism and colonialism are affective, and that the application of some psychological concepts, alongside deconstructive methods, can be useful to illuminate the ‘psychic life’ of British Values policy. A further reason for this kind of analysis is that it helps us to see why certain forms of racism may be so difficult to eradicate, and to better grasp how, for institutions and individuals, the language of anti-racism can co-exist alongside racist beliefs and actions. The following section of the paper analyses the BV curriculum policy ensemble using four psy-concepts (outlined below): disavowal, white amnesia, fantasy, defence.

Disavowal, white amnesia, fantasy and defence

In his Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial, Derek Hook (a white South African scholar) (2012), writes that disavowal (as a clashing of ideas, wishes and anxieties) can illuminate the workings of the ‘ideological functioning of racism’, specifically addressing the co-existence (politically and individually) of often contradictory positions, for example, a professed view of tolerance alongside racist behaviour (p. 180). ‘Tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’ is one of the British Values now embedded in English school curricula. Yet, as an example of disavowal at the political level, the value of tolerance (itself problematic) co-exists alongside housing policies and government cuts to welfare that disproportionately negatively impact racialized people (in the UK, Runnymede 2017; and in the USA, Thomsen 2016).

Also, linking to a disavowed state of exception, Kundnani points out the disavowal of ‘structural violence on which liberal society itself depend[s]: the ways in which racialized “others” live in a “state of exception” in which liberal norms are permanently suspended -paradoxically, in the name of defending the liberal way of life’ (2014, 114). He describes how reformers held up liberalism as the universalising, civilising cultural and political framework under threat from ‘alien ideologies’ in the ‘war on terror’. But, as people of colour are well aware, liberal society is riven with structural inequalities which compel them to live in ‘a state of exception’ from liberalism’s values of freedom and equality. Those liberal reformers, arguing to defend the institution of liberalism, disavowed the exclusion of racialised others from the liberal way of life. Here the use of disavowal, and the seeming harmonious co-existence of anti-racism and racism, seems to be an adaptation to a perceived or a socially and politically constructed ‘threat’, and thus disavowal starts to function as a defence (Hook 2012).

Similar to the perceived ‘immigrant threat’ that contributed to the USA’s development of compulsory schooling (to inculcate white, middle-class moral values) (Kanu 2006c, 13), British Values policy is clearly articulated as a response to the ‘terror threat’. This is evident in the introduction of British Values through the counter-terrorism policy of Prevent and exemplified in Michael Gove’s¹⁴ 2014 speech (discussed shortly). The disavowal of the racialized state of exception in sustaining and defending liberal values is also worth discussing in relation to another British Value: rule of law.

The DfE (2014b, 5) guidance on Promoting Fundamental British Values in schools explains that students need to have ‘an appreciation that living under the rule of law protects individual citizens and is essential for their wellbeing and safety’. Rule of law was in fact ‘one of the most vigorously advertised aspects of British Empire’, which portrayed itself as ‘planting the principles of the Magna Carta in foreign soils around the globe’ (McBride 2016, 10). In 2014, ‘to mark the 799th anniversary of Magna Carta’, then Prime Minister David Cameron, wrote an article on British values for the newspaper the Mail on Sunday. For Cameron, the principles of the Magna Carta ‘shine as brightly as ever’ because they paved the way for the values that ‘make Britain, Britain’, and therefore ‘every child’ should learn about it. For Cameron, the introduction of British Values into schools should be actively promoted, not optional, because they are at the ‘core of what it is to live in Britain’ (Cameron 2014). Cameron explains:

The values I’m talking about – a belief in freedom, tolerance of others, accepting personal and social responsibility, respecting and upholding the rule of law – are the things we should try to live by every day. To me they’re as British as the Union Flag, as football, as fish and chips. Of course, people will say that these values are vital to other people in other countries. And, of course, they’re right. But what sets Britain apart are the traditions and history that anchors them and allows them to continue to flourish and develop.

For Cameron, these values and their historical underpinnings form ‘the bedrock of Britishness’. While he thinks history should be taught ‘with warts and all’, ‘we should be proud of what Britain has done to defend freedom’, and we should be ‘more muscular in promoting British values’. Cameron mentions ‘history’ six times in his short article. Yet amongst the many things missing from his history of Britain, in which he sees rule of law as playing a key part, is awareness of how ‘the violence of imperialism was legitimated in its being exercised through law’ (Fitzpatrick 2011, 19). McBride (2016) traces how ‘historical practices of British colonial rule’ illustrate how ‘rule of law was an element in the development of an unequal system of international economics, politics, and law’. Others have pointed out that colonized countries functioned as the limit, or exception, to the rule of law (Hussain 2008). Disavowal again becomes a useful concept to understand how the exoneration of rule of law can coexist alongside its denial – something that is not only part of colonial history, for ‘liberal democracy and the rule of law are imposed worldwide through the conditionalities of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and whenever convenient, through military intervention’ (Santos 2014, 169).

Another example of the state of exception foundational to the rule of law and the disavowal embedded within this, comes in the form of Michael Gove’s 2014¹⁵ speech promoting British Values in response to a domestic ‘terror threat’ targeting Birmingham schools. Curriculum sits at the heart of this debate as Gove criticises practices in some secular schools in Birmingham as narrowing the curriculum to promote specific faith based (conservative Islamic) teachings. A curricular response to this is then articulated in the form of promoting British Values in schools. Gove’s promotion of rule of law as a British Value is striking given that in his 2006 book ‘Celsius 7/7’, he called for assassinations of terrorist suspects and a ‘temporary curtailment of liberties’ to prevent Islamism from destroying the West (Gove 2006, p. 136) (see also Kundnani 2014, 174). This is not only a Govian fantasy, the incarceration and torture of terrorist suspects in extra-judicial sites occurs across the world - sites where rule of law does not apply.

Disavowal is also evident in the contradictions around the notion of schools as spaces of enquiry and openness in which controversial political discussion can occur. On the one hand, HM Government states that:

Schools should be safe spaces in which children and young people can understand and discuss sensitive topics, including terrorism and the extremist ideas that are part of terrorist ideology, and learn how to challenge these ideas. The Prevent duty is not intended to limit discussion of these issues (2015a, 11).

Yet, on the other hand, extremism is defined as ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British Values’ (HM Gov 2015, 3). Teachers are charged as national security surveillance agents in risk assessing students who may show ‘support for extremist ideas that are part of terrorist ideology’ (HM Government Prevent Duty 2015, 10 para 64). This issue is particularly salient with respect to students from racialised groups who may feel excluded from mainstream politics and whose expression of views is curbed by themselves or their teachers out of ‘fear of being labelled an extremist or attracting the attention of the security forces’ (Versi 2015). This also raises methodological questions for research into young people’s views on, and experiences of, BV when the expression of these views is foreclosed through government policy.

In their retellings of Britain’s history and exoneration of rule of law, David Cameron, Michael Gove, and Theresa May’s¹⁶ (below) speeches and articles, as constellations of a British Values policy-ensemble, appear to exhibit a ‘profound historical forgetfulness’ and ‘historical amnesia’, that is for Stuart Hall (1978, 26) ‘a decisive mental repression’ which attempts to ‘wipe out and efface every trace of the colonial and imperial past’. This is a ‘forgetting to remember’ (Bhabha 1994, 160) the ‘exclusionary acts of symbolic and material violence that are central to many nation-making projects’ (McDonald 2006, 308). Hesse (1997, 87) draws upon Derrida (1982, 213) to explore how this amnesia is part of a ‘white mythology’ that:

has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest.

Here ‘“whiteness” forgets its contested antecedents’, it ‘represses the historical context of racism because the threat of the “racialised other” absorbs all attention’ (Hesse 1997, 87). White governmentality, for Hesse (1997), is an entrenched and routinized form of government that legislatively ‘valorises whiteness’ while engaging in the conduct of people of colour, who are framed variably as ‘a threat, a resource, a fantasy’ – to be regulated by whiteness (p. 99–100). According to Hook (2012), political fantasy provides ‘the subliminal narrative frame that underlies the conscious production of discourse’, that frames the parameters of understanding, and ‘sets targets for desire’ and ‘co-ordinates patterns of affect’, while always being ‘implicitly present without being explicitly stated’ (p. 129–130). For Richardson (2006) the nation itself and national identity are fantasy structures which have an ‘emotive strength’ and draw upon history and tradition as a legitimating force. Salman Rushdie, speaking in relation to the decline and poverty symptomatic of the Thatcherite Government in the UK, explains how these conditions encouraged ‘Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence’ (1992, 91). Decades later, and in an era of austerity, we might read BV as a symptom of this continued imperial nostalgia (Tharoor 2016), or what Gilroy (2006) calls postcolonial melancholia. In fact, illustrating this, Tharoor (2016) cites a 2014 UK YouGov poll that found that 59% of respondents thought that the British Empire was ‘something to be proud of’, 19% were ‘ashamed’ of it, and 39% would like it if Britain still had an Empire (p. 214).

It is partly this white-washing of history – the ‘reimagining of history to present a unified tale of the triumph of white civilizing values over the forces of repression’ (p. 486) that illustrates Gillborn’s (2005) analysis of education policy as ‘an act of white supremacy’ (p. 498). While Gillborn does not explicitly refer to the psychological mechanisms of racism, his discussion of the ‘comforting myths’ that racist societies tell about themselves, white people’s lack of awareness of whiteness as a construction, and questions raised in terms of intentionality, shows that the psychological intersects with the ‘material and ideological work that is done to legitimate and extend race inequity’ (p. 492).

Drawing upon the concept of fantasy allows us to engage with a different set of values: ‘values that European culture has tried to distance itself from’ (Hook 2012, 131) – the things it does not want to admit about itself and that it thus projects onto others. Both fantasy and projection seem to be at work in a speech (a part of which is reproduced below) made by Theresa May (UK Prime Minister) on 22 March 2017 after an attack claimed to be linked to ‘Islamic terrorism’ resulted in the deaths of five people on Westminster Bridge (outside the Houses of Parliament):

The location of this attack [Westminster Bridge] was no accident, the terrorists chose to strike at the heart of our capital city, where people of all nationalities, religions and cultures come together to celebrate the values of liberty, democracy and freedom of speech. These streets of Westminster, home to the world’s oldest parliament, are ingrained with a spirit of freedom that echoes in some of the furthest corners of the globe. And the values our parliament represents: democracy, freedom, human rights, rule of law – command the admiration and respect of free people everywhere. That is why it is a target for those who reject those values. But let me make clear today, as I have had cause to do before, any attempt to defeat those values through violence and terror is doomed to failure

(Theresa May, March 22nd, 2017).

Here Hesse’s nationalist political rationality seems to be at work, constructing a nationalist imaginary based on a political fantasy of freedom, admiration and respect. Violence and terror are positioned as antithetical to British Values in a move that is amnesic of, and which therefore deflects, Britain’s violent colonial history and violently racialized present that also ‘echo’ around the globe.

Universal values and the education-security complex: a discussion

As evident from this paper, British Values curriculum policy (and the wider counter-terrorism agenda that lends legitimacy to it) has been widely critiqued. This section of the paper (before concluding) focuses on two main critiques of BV, arguing that similar to the UK government, these critiques risk employing the same problematic ahistorical and apolitical framing of BV.

One main strand of critique centres on the argument that BV values cannot be described as exclusively British, but universal (Tomlinson 2015b, 10), since they can be applied to other countries which purport to uphold democratic values (Tomlinson, 2015a, 2210). A number of guidelines and training activities suggest these values are universally shared (Expert Subject Advisory Group for Citizenship 2015, 5). This approach is also taken by political figures who promote BV, for example, while for former Prime Minister David Cameron values such as rule of law are as British as ‘fish and chips’ (2014), he also acknowledges that these values are shared by others in other countries. Thus, the slippage from ‘British’ to universal values is common across the British Values curriculum policy ensemble, illustrating the way whiteness ‘conceals itself discursively’ as universal (Hesse 1997, 87). Furthermore, invoking certain values (such as rule of law and tolerance) as universal overlooks and actively delegitimises non-western epistemologies, and ethical and political values (Santos 2014). The citizenship curriculum in England (DfE 2002) appeared to offer a prime opportunity to re-vitalise anti-racist curriculum values and challenge universalising trends, but instead dampened critique and promoted citizen-domestication (Shain 2013). Whilst many researchers (Pangwani 2016; Farrell 2016; Maylor 2016; Keddie 2014) argue for anti-racist curriculum and teacher education policy reform, at the same time, school funding cuts, excessive teacher workloads, pressures to raise grades and to comply with Ofsted and Teachers’ Standards create major pre-occupations for teachers, deflecting attention from values education around controversial political issues (Elton-Chalcraft et al. 2016). 

A second strand of critique suggests that BV policy points to a worrying securitisation of education (for example, see 2017 special issue of the British Journal of Educational Studies). Akin to BV policy itself, some of this critical literature also seems to be amnesic in relation to British colonial history. For example, Davies (2016) suggests that ‘Education has become caught up in the merging of security and development’ (p. 5–6), while O’Donnell (2016) (despite acknowledging colonial histories) argues that it is ‘important to preserve education’s autonomy from security agendas’ (p. 70). This literature frames education as either innocent or as separate from practices of security and surveillance – overlooking the multiple and historical ways that security and education overlap and intersect, including the disciplinary practices and surveillance technologies that are part of everyday schooling, especially within a high-stakes regime of performativity. Schools have long been a tool of the security state, ‘embedded in a longer genealogy of colonialism, intervention, and patriarchal, racist ideologies’ (Nguyen 2014, 118), and thus a key critique of the ‘securitisation’ of education is the denial of the co-constitutive histories and conditions of possibility between education and security (and how both interlink with the psy-disciplines) (see Howell 2014, 2018; for a critique of securitisation and militarisation in relation to International Relations).

Our analysis, while still conceptualising what is ‘new’ about BV curriculum policy and the PREVENT policy in which it is embedded, simultaneously explores how the logic that makes BV and PREVENT ‘make sense’, has a longer colonial genealogy. Howell (2018) queries the framework of militarisation when applied to Universities in the UK and USA, pointing out that this way of thinking risks assuming a pre-militarised, innocent University, and thus overlooks the history of the university and its domains of knowledge as constituted through slavery, colonialism, and war-like relations both domestically and internationally. Instead Howell (2018) puts forward a framework of martial politics, which would be timely to apply to curriculum policy and schooling, especially given their role as colonial tools (as outlined earlier in this paper). Researching the martial and psy politics of schooling would not assume that schools or policy were somehow innocent prior to PREVENT and BV, but would instead locate these within ample evidence of the racism of the education system (including the racist history of IQ and standardised testing, the racialised school to prison pipeline/nexus, and the so-called BME attainment gap (Annamma 2018).

Nguyen’s 2016 ethnographic study investigated student and teacher responses to Homeland Security policy in a US case study school, highlighting important issues about the relationship between the security state and education relevant to the English setting (Nguyen 2016). This raises an important area for future investigation into the psychic life of BV policy for students, teachers and parents, including attention to the ways BV is enacted, appropriated, or resisted. Nguyen (2014) traces how education in the US is folded into ‘the assemblage of technologies used to explain and advance military intervention’, forming part of an ‘imperial strategy of war’ (p109). Post 9/11, schools in the US have been constructed as ‘essential sites of war on terror strategy’ (Nguyen 2014, 113). In the US, not only has the failure of its domestic public schools been positioned as a threat to national security, but the portrayal of Islamic religious schools (madrassas), for example in Afghanistan, as inculcating violent extremism in young people, has been used to justify the export of US style education – an attempt to ‘replace an entire education school system with schools that mimic US values and epistemologies’ (Ngyuen 2014, 113 & 123). Given Kundnani’s (2014) illustration of the extent of policy-borrowing between the UK and USA, especially in terms of conceptualisations of radicalisation and its surveillance within communities and schools, Nguyen’s findings may well have purchase in the UK. For example, one implication for psychic life highlighted by Nguyen (2014) is how school reform under the aegis of security enrols and elicits in young people ‘securitised subjectivities’ – ‘a sense of self defined by heightened fear, anxiety, and uncertainty of an unknown threat’ (p. 131).

Both of the above critiques (universal values, and securitisation of education) overlook the material and psychological ways that white supremacy is structured into the education system and policy-making. Gillborn (2005) shows how ‘race inequity and racism are central features of the education system. These are not aberrant nor accidental phenomena that will be ironed out in time, they are fundamental characteristics of the system’ (Gillborn 2005, p. 498), showing that ‘education policy in England is actively involved in the defence, legitimation and extension of white supremacy’ (p. 499). As this paper has shown, these polices are amnesic of but shaped by long histories of colonialism and racism, and the intersections of material, psychological, and ideological white privilege. BV as one articulation of education as white supremacy also fits well within the current performativity regime, where there is a tendency to treat racism (if it is acknowledged at all) as a school-based problem requiring a school-based solution (Gillborn 2005).

Conclusion

Applying an analytic framework of ‘psychic life’ throughout this paper has made visible the ways that BV policy is more than a counter-terrorism strategy, it is a psychic defence mechanism that protects and privileges whiteness; denies the normalised state violence and radical exclusions on which liberal values have been built and maintains an anti-black social order within education and more broadly (Mills 2018). Introducing such a counter-terrorism measure into English schools uses the school curriculum to re-assert and defend nationalist white supremacy.

The findings from this paper suggest the need for curricular/pedagogical response. This is something that a widespread, student-led movement in Higher Education, asking ‘why is my curriculum white?’ and seeking to decolonise curricula, is calling for within the UK. This came about partly in response to the NUS Black Students Campaign National Students Survey (NUS 2014), which found that, ‘42 per cent did not believe their curriculum reflected issues of diversity, equality and discrimination.’ At school level, subjects like History, Geography, Religious Education and Citizenship bear responsibility to highlight, disrupt and offer alternatives to discourses of white supremacy currently threaded through curricula, examination specifications and textbooks (Winter 2018). These curricula should promote political analysis and critique of how dominant notions and history of Britishness constitute and perpetuate the psychic life of racism and racist subjectivities, and curriculum responses should be part of much wider anti-racist struggles worldwide.

The second level response is the creation of safe spaces for teachers in initial and in-service training and for students in the curriculum. Teachers need time and guidance to engage in research by others and for themselves, to discuss critically how to teach controversial issues such as race, ethnicity, religion, identities and values. Students of all backgrounds need safe spaces where they can ‘openly share their views … and have their views subjected to rigorous and informed challenge and debate’ (John 2014, 2). Further actions are needed for students and teachers to understand their own complicity in racism and colonialism – to see that they/we ‘are each implicated in systems of oppression that profoundly structure our understanding of one another’ (Razack 1998, 10), and that teach ways of thinking that render co-presence between different ways of knowing possible (Santos 2014, 118). We argue in this paper that BV is a symptom of a much-older colonial psy-education-security relationship, and thus, of white British supremacist subjectivity deployed by Government to defend white privilege. Exposing and challenging the psychic life of colonial power embedded in the school curriculum is particularly important at a time of rising islamophobia, anti-immigration and nationalist feeling in an austere, Post-Brexit, Trump world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Winter

Christine Winter is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Sheffield, where she co-directs the Centre for Critical Psychology and Education. Her research interests focus on school curriculum knowledge and its politics, securitisation and education, postcolonialism and globalization and education policy. She is a former secondary school teacher.

China Mills

China Mills is a Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Sheffield. Her research develops the framework of psychopolitics to examine the way mental health gets framed as a global health priority. In 2014, she published the book ‘Decolonizing Global Mental Health’ (Routledge), and she is Principal Investigator on two British Academy funded projects researching the social life of algorithmic diagnosis and psy-technologies.

Notes

1. Prevent is one of four strands of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, known as Contest. It was created by the Labour government in 2003 and its remit was widened by the coalition government in 2011. The other strands are: Prepare; Protect; and Pursue. Prevent is designed to support people at risk of joining extremist groups and carrying out terrorist activities. (BBC 2014)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-40151991 The strategy was re-issued in 2015.

2. State maintained schools are state-funded and controlled by the local council; academies and free schools are state-funded independent schools which are not run by the local council; independent/private schools charge attendance fees and are not funded by the government.

3. The British Government policy documents reviewed here represent statutory guidance or advice issued under particular sections of an Act. In the case of guidance, authorities subject to the Act ‘must have due regard to this guidance when carrying out the duty’ (HM Government 2015, 2). In the case of advice, for example, issued by the DfE, the advice is non-statutory, ‘to help recipients understand the implications of’ the legislation’ (DfE 2015, 3). But for BV guidance and advice, other legal duties are brought into play to ensure compliance, for example Ofsted and Teachers’ Standards.

4. Public schools – private.

5. QCA, 1998 Education for citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools. Final report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship, 22 September. London: DfEE.

6. Conservative and Liberal Democrat.

7. Sir William MacPherson chaired the inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, a 19 year old black man in London in 1993.

8. The teachers Standards set the minimum requirements for teachers’ practice and conduct for training and appraisal (DfE 2012). https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/665520/Teachers__Standards.pdf.

9. Cultural education, religious education and collective worship, promoting British values and citizenship in schools. https://www.gov.uk/education/spiritual-moral-social-and-cultural-development.

10. Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. The organisation inspects and regulates services that care for children and young people, and services providing education and skills for learners of all ages . https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ofsted .

11. The Global Learning Programme (GLP) is a DfID funded programme to help Primary, Secondary and Special school teachers to teach about development and global issues at Key Stages 2 and 3. https://glp.globaldimension.org.uk/

The Citizenship Foundation is an independent education charity that helps young people to understand the law, politics and democratic life. It promotes participation, helps teachers to teach citizenship and works with young people on issues that concern them. http://www.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk/main/page.php?6.

12. The Association for Citizenship Teaching is the professional association for Citizenship teachers. https://www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk/ .

13. CHANNEL is a part of the PREVENT programme that focuses on providing support at an early stage to people who are identified as being vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/channel-guidance .

14. Secretary of State for Education in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat-coalition Government between 2010–2014.

15. Michael Gove was Conservative Secretary of State for Education in the British Government 2010–2014. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/birmingham-schools-secretary-of-state-for-educations-statement.

16. Theresa May has been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party since 2016.