Countering far-right threat through Britishness: the Prevent duty in further education

ABSTRACT

The 2015 Prevent Duty requires public sector workers, by law, to show “due regard” in the need to prevent vulnerable individuals from becoming engaged in terrorism and extremism through safeguarding mechanisms. For the education sector, this also mandated the promotion of Fundamental British Values. With an increasing rise in concerns over the Far-Right, the Prevent duty has come under increasing scrutiny as to its appropriateness and applicability to prevent “all forms” of extremism and terrorism, beyond those which have long been the focus of the UK government – Islamist-inspired threats. Yet, the role of British Values in this puzzle has yet to be addressed. This research reveals how British Values are positioned within the education system as the antithesis to all forms of extremism and terrorism and embedded within classroom pedagogy. It finds that there are questions over the promotion of an agenda which echoes in-group/out-group constructions of (ethno-nationalist) acceptability found within Far-Right ideologies, through notions of Britishness. Further, it examines the ecological agency of educationalists in responding to such concerns through the enactment of policy to “re-package” the agenda whilst simultaneously revealing the limitations placed on such actions by governance processes, curriculum limitations and wider discourses of exclusionary politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Far-right
• British Values
• ethno-nationalism
• ecological agency
• threat

Introduction

The Prevent duty emerged out of the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, placing a legal obligation on public sector workers to show “due regard” in the need to prevent people from engaging in terrorism or extremism (HM Government 2019). The idea was that these professionals, in day to day contact with the general public, would be able to spot vulnerabilities which might potentially be exploited by radicalisers. This entrenched the notion of preventing through intervention within the pre-crime space, and seeing engagement into terrorism and extremism as a process which could be disrupted (Revell 2019). Public sector workers were “responsibilised” into spotting signs of vulnerability and referring them through the mechanisms of Channel, the government’s multi-agency safeguarding hub, for assessment as to what support would be needed to remove the risk of criminal activity from occuring, or vulnerability from being exploited (Thomas 2017; James 2020b). For educationalists, it was not just embedding safeguarding against radicalisation into their day-to-day pastoral responsibilities. The Prevent duty also prescribed a specific instruction to education institutions and their workers that Fundamental British Values must be embedded and promoted within their curriculums and classroom delivery (HM Government 2015). These British values were identfied as being “democracy”, “the rule of law”, “individual liberty” and “mutual tolerance and respect” (ibid.). The duty in the education sector was therefore delivered through these two core strands: safeguarding and British Values.

It is worth noting, however, that these two strands were not entirely new. Safeguarding against the threat of radicalisation had been a framework utilised within community cohesion agendas since 2007, seeing individuals requiring protection in the form of not only the security services, but those closest to them and thus most likely to spot their potential engagement (DCLG (Department for Communities and Local Government) 2007). The frame made its way into the education sector just one year later, similarly promoting the role of trusted figures – teachers – to be able to spot when involvement in extremism and/or terrorism might be occuring. Likewise British Values, first introduced by Gordon Brown in 2007 (Brown, in The Guardian, 2007) and which came to form the basis of David Cameron’s (2010) “Big Society” endeavour, was utilised as a frame to antithesise threats to British society. It was following Theresa May’s (2010) “Response to the Terrorist Threat” speech that this frame became embedded into counter-terrorism legislation, the government defining extremism as “active opposition to Fundamental British Values” (HM Government 2011, 34) and found itself at the foot of the education system in the 2013 Independent Schools Standards. However, what was new was the legal mandate which stood firmly behind the duty to Prevent from 2015, not only expecting education institutions and their staffs to engage with the agendas of safeguarding and British Values, but now responsibilising them to in the face of both government legislation and Ofsted inspection.

Whilst much of the literature has rightly explored how the enmeshing of these agendas within the education sector has been experienced, it has done so in light of the primary “threat”, as positioned by the UK Government, being Islamist-inspired which da Silva et al., similarly highlight within this issue to have been the case in Portugal. This has left a critical gap in understanding the application of the duty to Far-Right threat within these spaces. This is particualrly important given the rise that the UK government is seeing in Far-Right related “threats”, as Skoczylis and Andrews similarly highlight in their contribution to this special issue. Attacks in the UK motivated by their ideologies, such as the murder of MP Jo Cox in 2016 and the Finsbury Mosque attack in 2017, have led to organisations associated beginning to be proscribed, such as National Action in 2016 and more recently Sonnenkrieg Division and Feuerkrieg Division in 2020. Further, the positioning of Far-Right extremism as a concern of the security services emphasises a shift in the focus of counter-terrorism and extremism measures on these ideologies (Dearden 2019). More specifically for this research, this rise is also translating into an increasing number of Prevent duty referrals to Channel over concerns related to the Far-Right. Where referrals stood at 65% Islamist-related and 10% far-right in 2015/16, they shifted to 37% and 45% respectively in 2018/19, and in the latest data available at the time of writing for 2019/2020, stand at 30% to 43% respectively, seeing the Far-Right as the greatest perceived threat for potential radicalisation (HM Government 2016, 2019, 2020).

Whilst acknowledging the danger of over-accentuating the “threat” posed by the far-right that Jarvis rightly warns against within this special issue, this article problematises a lack of scholarly responses to these policy shifts and seeks to address what the author sees as a lacuna within this literature to the complex relationship between the Far-Right and British values. It does so by drawing on data from over 100 participants, obtained through a four-year study into experiences of the Prevent duty, to examine the implementation of and engagement with British Values to reveal the role the agenda was believed, and has the capacity, to play in countering far-right extremism and terrorism. After reflecting on the current literature and providing a brief overview of the methodology, the article situates the positionality of British values as the antithesis to threat, examining how the agenda is utilised to develop a sense of good Britishness and the values it bestows act as a rejection of those fostered by extremists and terrorists.

Second, the implementation and embedding of the agenda within the classroom is revealed, and third, the construction of Britishness as an identity formation and marker of value is examined. The fourth and final area of signficance within participant experiences fuses the challenges faced by educationalists navigating the agenda within the earlier three sections in revealing the scope of their ecological agency to what Vincent (2019) refers to as a “re-packaging” of the values agenda. The article concludes with a discussion over what the responses of educationalists to the agenda tells us about the perceived capacity for Far-Right extremism to be countered through British values.

Countering terrorism, safeguarding vulnerability, promoting Britishness

The introduction of the Prevent duty raised alarm bells for many who saw it as an entrenchment of a securitised “everyday”, particularly for those who had long been the subject of many previous counter-terrorism agendas within the UK – Muslims (Jarvis and Lister 2012). As referenced earlier, Prevent in particular had explicitly focused on Islamist-inspired terrorism, problematically creating a “suspect community” on those, often visually, identified at most risk of these ideologies (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009; Mythen, Walklate, and Khan 2009; Herron 2013), as da Silva et al., Meier, and Dixit and Miller all discuss within this special issue. Whilst the government had sought in their 2011 Prevent legislation to move to address “all forms” of terrorism and extremism (HM Government 2011, 12), it was not until the 2015 duty that Prevent positioned the Far-Right as a central concern alongside Islamist-inspired threats (HM Government 2015). It is through the duty then, that the UK government has, prima facie, moved beyond a policy of identfiying risk through only “visual signifiers of difference” such as race and religious symbolism (Chadderton 2012; Patel 2013).

Recent studies which have examined the Prevent duty have revealed this re-positioning was enabled by a shift in discourse from one of security to one of safeguarding (Wolton 2017, 131). By reframing the threat of radicalisation as a process which exploited vulnerability, the Prevent duty, in theory, embodied the framework of safeguarding potential victims of these processes, of which anyone vulnerable might fall prey to, as opposed to one of pursuing potential security threats (see Revell 2019; Lundie 2019) Whilst the theoretically driven literature has problematised this approach for normalising security praxis by securitising safeguarding and creating a “chilling effect” (Rights Watch UK 2016, 4) for dialogue within education spaces in particular (see, for example Miah 2017; Gearon 2017; Kyriacou et al. 2017; Taylor 2013; Breen and Meer 2019), more recent empirical studies have challenged the extent of these concerns (Busher et al. 2017; James 2020a; Lakhani 2020). Instead, they have provided empirical evidence to claim that the duty has been, as aforementioned, situated within the existing mechanisms of education institutions (Busher & Jerome, 2020).

James (2020b), Busher et al. (2017); (2019)), Lakhani (2020), Elwick and Jerome (2019) and Higton et al. (2018) have all found that this led to a general acceptance from educationalists who situated radicalisation as a form of harm which they were required to safeguard against, as they would any other form of exploitation. Through what Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012) refer to as enactment, the current empirical literature has demonstrated how educationalists are, rather than beoming bound by the securitisation of education, shaping security discourses themselves through what Durodie (2016) refers to as the “therapeutisation of security”. This literature has positioned educationalists, through their ecological agency, as de-exceptionalising security praxis, and seeing the duty as a continuation of existing practices (James 2020a; Busher and Jerome 2020). There remain concerns, however, that this de-exceptionalisation, in normalising security as safeguarding, retains the chilling effect of silencing discussions in the fear not of being safeguarded, but securitised through referral (Lundie 2019; Durodie 2016; Heath-Kelly 2016).

The British Values agenda, however, has received simultaneously less scholarly attention and even greater scepticism surrounding its appropirateness from those who have explored the values agenda being embedded within the education sector as part of Prevent (James 2020b; McGhee and Zhang 2017; Elton-Chalcraft et al. 2017). In particular, our understanding of the implementation and engagement with British values by those within the education sector, including students, remains limited. Critically, this lacuna remains problematic when literature has demonstrated the role of nationalism within ideologies of the Far-Right (see, for example, Mudde 2019; Macklin 2018; Carter 2018) and explored the pedagogy of British values (see, for example, Winters et al., 2021; Elwick and Jerome 2019; Habib 2018; Revell and Bryan 2018). Yet, none has, to date, examined what occurs when these two elements collide through the statutory obligations of the Prevent duty.

Whilst some studies problematised the vagueness of British values (see, for example, Revell and Bryan 2018), others raised alarm over the notion that values could be “British” (James 2020b; Habib 2018), reflecting some of the earlier concerns raised by scholars in light of the duty’s introduction (see Maylor 2016). In particular, the inclusion of the British values agenda has been seen as an extension of the broader neo-liberalisation of education systems (Revell and Bryan 2018). The utilisation of pedagogic agendas to promote nationalist agendas in order to counter threats to economic, political or social agendas had always been present within education (ibid). What was new about the agenda under the Prevent duty, Miah (2017) and Habib (2018) both claim, was the utilisation of it for counter-terrorism means, positioning radicalisation as an all-encompassing threat to these frameworks. Capitalisation of the Trojan Horse Affair in 2014,¹ some argue, enabled this counter-terrorism agenda to collide with wider nationalist discourses, constructing a good British identity that, when embodied, could counter both internal and external threats from radicalisers (ibid.; Miah 2017; Revell and Bryan 2018). In response to the perceived threat of the so-called “home grown” terrorism, the duty acted as a means for the good British citizen to identify and refer the bad British citizen, preventing their radicalisation by safeguarding against their inability or “opposition” to fundamental British values. British identity, or Britishness, then becomes one which wider scholarship has argued is not only determined by national status, but an embodying of what it meant to be British (see, for Yuval-Davis 2006, 2007; Alam & Husband, 2013).

Parekh (2009, 32–33) writes, is “a term used to refer to what binds and distinguishes the British people and forms the basis of their unity and identity”; it is “not a matter of sharing certain individually possessed contingent attributes but rather a form of relationship, a way of relating to the country and its people”. This, for the British people, Kellner (2009) reveals in the same volume on “Britishness”, centres on two grounds: “either geography/tradition” (e.g. either place of birth, monarchy, pride in British achievements) or “values” (e.g. democracy, fairness and free speech). The latter, of course, forms what is understood as the British values agenda at the centre of this article. Yet, for a number of scholars, the availability of enjoying such Britishness is grounded in a need to assimilate – to be within the “imagined community” of being British and to belong to an identity of Britishness. It is to prioritise and to embody a British identity of both geographical status and values (Anderson 1983. See also Hall 2017; Meer 2014).

This notion of Britishness mirrors the construction of external threats which Far-Right ideologies position themselves as concerned with countering (Hervik 2021, 95). Mudde (1995) refers to this characteristic as nativism, the combination of nationalism and xenophobia, that is built through and by a belief in natural inequality (Mudde 2019, 6). This inequality, for Fascists of the Far-Right, centres on the state as the beholder of superiority, whilst for Nazism, it centres on the White race. More recently, however, the role of ethnicity has played an important part in understanding the construction of the superior native and the inferior non-native, or Other. In this sense, Far-Right ideologies have become concerned with the promotion of an ethno-nationalist agenda which seeks to eradicate the threat of Others through “assimilation or repatriation” (ibid). Yet, as Mudde (ibid, 32) further reveals, the native is not just external to the geographical borders, but can reside internally through ethnic categorisations. For the Far-Right today, Muslims, and the Islamic faith and culture, are a primary Other. Such concerns map squarely onto the narratives produced by the post-9/11 realm of securitisation surrounding suspect communities which Prevent was built upon (Archer 2009; Mythen, Walklate, and Khan 2009; Brown 2010; Bonino 2012; O’Toole et al., 2016; Ragazzi 2017).

Britishness then, becomes read as a “narrative of protecting national borders [which] lends itself not only to protection against terrorist threats, but threats to (white) civilisation” (James 2020b, 31). In doing so, it reveals a complex and cloudy relationship between the promotion of British values and the countering of Far-Right extremism (ibid; see also Winter & Mills 2020; Keddie 2014). This reinforces the argument put forward by Dixit and Miller within this special issue that CVE policy and practice remains silent on examining such systemic and structural issues, and as a result, serves to feed into white supremacy narratives rather than counter them.

Methodology

This article draws from data collected during a four-year research project which ran between October 2016 and September 2020, analysing experiences of the Prevent duty within the Further Education (FE) sector. The fieldwork was undertaken with the Prevent priority area of Greater Manchester over the period of one and a half years, from the end of 2017 to the middle of 2019. The study engaged with the students and staff of five FE institutions within the region, including a mix of traditional academic and training providers, and with “policy elites” from the area who had direct involvement with FE institutions in relation to the duty’s implementation. Over one hundred participants took part in the research through a mixed-methods approach of semi-structured interviews, focus groups, observations and/or an online questionnaire. Including online responses, a total of 8 of the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester were engaged with and participants largely reflected the diversity of the area in terms of age, race, religion and class.

Specifically, nine participants were considered “policy elites”, understood as those engaged in the relaying of the policy to educational institutions, including council Prevent and WRAP coordinators, Head of the North West Counter-Terrorism Unit, North West Regional Director for Ofsted, the Department for Education North West Prevent Lead, Trade Union Officials and two VCO training partners. Five participants were “Institutional level” staff within FE institutes, made up of Designated Safeguarding Leads – those responsible for the institutional level implementation of the duty – and one British Values Coordinator. Thirty-six of the participants were “Classroom level” staff and 45 participants were students within four of the five institutions engaged with.²

Demographically, 56% of participants were female, 36% and 8% preferring not to answer and unstated; 76% of participants were white British, 9% Asian Indian, 3% White Irish, White Other and Asian Pakistani, 2% of participants Black African and Black Other and 1% Asia Indian and Black Caribbean. Eighty-four per cent of participants identified as British, 11% did not state and the rest of the participants listed other including Italian, Brazilian and Swedish. The religious make up of participants was as follows: 45% of participants stated they had no religion, 23% Christian, 14% Catholic, 9% unstated, 5% Muslim, 3% preferred not to say and 1% stated “Orthodox” as Other. Fifty-two per cent of participants considered themselves working class, 21% middle class and 1% upper, the rest of the participants either did not know, preferred not to state or did not state. This provided an exceptional dataset, overcoming a series of methodological limitations in terms of access, availability and ethical considerations.³

The choice of the Further Education sector for this research was significant for a number of reasons. Whilst studies had focused on the sector, few had engaged with both traditional academic providers and newer training providers. This was particularly important, as the duty coincided with a shift in the education system in 2015 to extend the age for full-time education or training from 16 to 18. As a result, the FE sector saw significant rises in the number of pupils, but also the spread of that volume across a multiplicity of subject areas, from science and humanities, to brick laying and hairdressing. The FE sector was thus subject to seismic changes in 2015. FE was also particularly significant since it represented a blurred area for understanding the Prevent duty’s approach and outcomes.

Though predominantly dealing with 16–19 year olds, the sector was home to a variety of ages from fourteen and above, with no upper limit. Yet, on the one hand, the duty relied on the narratives of safeguarding, typically understood as appropriate to children (under-16), whilst on the other, it bracketed those referred to Channel under its instruction as under 15, 15–20 and so on, making it near impossible to make any conclusions on the role of the sector in referrals. Freedom of Information requests were issued to the Home Office requesting information which would reveal the number of referrals specifically from the FE sector; these were rejected under the name of national security and the potential identification of individuals involved in the programme, further illustrating the absence of transparency in understanding the specific role of the sector in the duty. Empirical research like this into what the duty looked like within the sector is therefore, critical.

The research was guided by an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on theoretical frameworks from Critical Terrorism Studies, Security Studies and Education, and utilising concepts of discursive construction (Jackson 2007), securitisation (Buzan and Waever 2003), ecological agency (Elwick and Jerome 2019, 399) and enactment (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012), respectively. The critical approach provided by Critical Terrorism Studies recognised knowledge as socially constructed (Jackson 2007; Stump and Dixit 2012), providing the grounding to examine discourse as occurring within vernacular spaces and in particular, processes of securitisation to be both created and performed at an individual agentic level (Jarvis and Lister 2012; Huysmans 2002). Understanding these actions as processes of “ecological agency” recognises the “interplay of individual efforts, available resources and contextual and structural factors as they come together in particular and, in a sense, always unique situations” (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, 137 cited in Elwick and Jerome 2019, 399). This enables us to identify not only where actors engage in threat (or security) discourse, but to examine how they do so and the constraining and enabling factors which govern such actions (Huysmans 2011; Jarvis and Lister 2012; Crawford and Hutchinson 2016).

Further, it was also grounded in an intersectional approach to understanding experience, identifying the levels of privilege and oppression and identity formations which informed and were informed by participant experiences (Crenshaw 1991; Carbado et al. 2013). Though the space for an intersectional analysis is not prioritised in this article, the approach of analysis remains grounded in locating the meaning-making of actors as temporally located across time and space and deeply embedded within the identity formation of themselves and those around them. In other words, through this interdisciplinary theoretical approach, the research pays attention to not only the discourses being created and performed by agentic actors, but also to the environments that shape and are shaped by their experiences. In doing so, it reveals how “policy is never simply implemented, but goes through a networked process of representation, translation and enactment of beliefs and values instead” to transform it into practice (Beighton and Revell 2018, 2 citing Braun et al. 2011; see also Ball 2003; Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012).

As has been done elsewhere (see Lakhani and James 2021), this article – in prioritising an assessment of the role of British values as a counter-extremism agenda over one of the Far-Right – utilises Lee’s (2019, 18) umbrella approach to referring to individual and group ideologies associated with the extremities of right wing thought, whether understood as “extreme”, “radical” or “populist” (see Bjørgo and Ravndal 2019; Mayor 2021). The usefulness of “Far-Right”, Lee (2019, 18 cited in Lakhani & James 2021) states, is that it can act as a:

container term for a diverse set of views ranging from revolutionary neo-Nazism to radical right-wing populism that seeks to work (mostly) within established democratic systems. These views are all characterised by hostility to perceived alien groups within societies, although the level and form of this hostility varies widely.

It is without question that greater clarification surrounding the terminology utilised is needed, as are studies which explore the implications and appropriateness of these terms and their labelling. This is of particular importance, given the challenges which lie more broadly in determining where non-violent, violent and “hateful” extremism merge and can be differentiated (Lakhani and James 2021; Bjørgo and Ravndal 2019). The term “Far-Right” then, provides the breadth within which a multiplicity of narratives that centre on “hostility” to Others, as Lee (2019, 18) states, can be understood as extreme and thus applicable to prevention through the duty.

British values as the antithesis to threat

British Values was one of the two core tenets, alongside Safeguarding, through which the Prevent duty was embedded within education institutions. The agenda was seen to represent “what we stand for as a British citizen” (Business and Customer Service Educator, Training Institute 2), and thus acts as an antithesis to that which extremists and terrorists stood for. For some participants, the role of a values agenda was “to do with like individual freedoms and respect, and the duty you have to society and the duty society has to you” (Jake, Academic Institute 1, Group 2). It was understood, for them, as something which enabled a good moral standing in order to protect oneself and others within society. Indeed, for some it was that this was a distinctly British idea – that the values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual tolerance and respect, were tied to the geographical space of Britain:

I can see the difference between what happens in the UK and what happens in my country, for example, I’m from South America, when I was a child we had a military government and were at risk of electing someone with the same tendencies after years and years of democracy, so I see British values as very, very important. (Social Care Educator, Training Institute 2)

Further, as one participant noted, this “ties” the agenda to the duty since spotting those who reject British values, could enable one to spot those who might pose a threat to Britain and its internal imagined community (Anderson 1983):

… it’s about making sure that er, people stop their hatred of whichever group it is that they dislike within society and by neutralising their sort of prejudice, their discrimination against other people, it therefore lessens the risk to other British citizens who have the right to life and the right to go about their daily business in a confident manner. (Politics Educator, Academic Institute 1)

This replication of governmental narratives – extremism labelled as “the active opposition to British values” (HM Government 2011, 34) – was not visible across all participants, however. For some, there remained a critical outlook on the purpose of the agenda. One participant who was responsible for interpreting the British values agenda and delivering training to colleagues on how it should be embedded, claimed: “[I]t was a knee jerk reaction to all that sort of Trojan Horse stuff wasn’t it, in the Birmingham schools and ‘oh let’s all just be British now!’ [laughs]” (British Values Coordinator, Training Institute 2). For this educator, the utilisation of a British values agenda was not a means by which tolerance and cohesion could be fostered, as the previous participants had suggested, in order to counter those who wish to threaten it. Instead, linking the agenda as a “knee jerk reaction” to the Trojan Horse Affair, the participant demonstrated the sense visible across other experiences, that the agenda was a direct response to a perceived threat of Islam, an identity marker not perceived to be synonymous with Britishness, as earlier explored. For others, it was the notion of the values emerging out of this space that meant even if British values should be about antithesising “all forms” of threat as the government had positioned it to be, it was difficult to read it as such.

Educationalists’ experiences revealed two key ways they dealt with this arising tension of antithesising threat through British values. First, the framework of safeguarding which had enabled them to embed referral mechanisms into their existing practice, for some, similarly provided a grounding for the narrative of British values as antithesising all forms of threat to be adopted. Safeguarding was about protecting all vulnerable people from becoming victims of any exploitation. Seeing radicalisation as a form of harm within this framework meant that the duty, and therefore the values agenda, was applicable to everyone. It was only where, as Busher et al. (2017) found, it was not implemented properly that this would not be the case, it was argued. Similarly, for some of the students positioning British values as “the duty you have to society and the duty society has to you”, regardless of background, enabled British values to be read through a lens of safeguarding everybody (Jake, Group Two, Academic Institute 2).

This led to the second way other educators responded, largely those who remained concerned at the labelling of the agenda but knew that it was quite simply there to stay. In this second type of response, educators sought to recognise the stereotypes that (had) existed within the context of a post-9/11 fight against Islamist-inspired ideologies and account for their own and others’ internalisations of bias. In this sense, viewing the agenda as something which antithesised only Islamist-related extremism and terrorism could be minimised by “keep[ing] it as general as possible, rather than focusing particularly on something where its targeting specific, erm cultures” (Education Educator, Training Institute 2). This “focus on the values” (DSL, Training Institute 1) enabled educators to ground the approach in recognising that other forms also existed and required safeguarding against. Yet, as is explored further shortly, at the same time: “a lot of people who trying for it not to be [just about antithesising Islamist-inspired threats] … it almost can’t be anything else because of the context”, and the “strategy at its core, it’s just quite blatantly aimed at that” despite “doing all these different things by trying to exclude words like Islamic extremism and put in extra stuff” (Art Educator, Academic Institute 1).

It was also on this more practical basis that British Values was further questioned as an agenda which could act as a challenge to threat, even if it were to be aimed towards all forms of extremism and terrorism:

… if somebody is going to become radicalised online or by whatever means, the fact that there’s a poster in the classroom saying mutual respect, rule of law, tolerance, isn’t going to stop that young person from becoming radicalised! (British Values Coordinator, Training Institute 2)

This revealed further key tensions which emerged between educationalists’ duty and their capacity to embed the agenda within their classrooms as something which could and should fight against far-right extremism.

Pedagogic approaches to British Values

First, it is worth exploring how the agenda was positioned within the classroom pedagogies. It was also something which, unlike the first strand of safeguarding, James (2020b) Busher et al. (2017) and McGlynn and McDaid (2016) amongst others found, was seen as particularly difficult to implement (see also Moffat and Gerard 2020; Lockley-Scott 2019;; Maylor 2016). Fieldwork indicated that ideally, for educationalists and elites, the agenda should have been embedded implicitly, with natural opportunities (such as case studies, news stories, or national/saint patron days) capitalised upon to discuss the values. In reality, however, it was primarily about ensuring explicit engagement through signposting and posters to ensure Ofsted, FE’s regulatory body, could physically see them obliging to their duty and them pass their inspections in relation to the legislation:

… it’s just about signposting it, you know? So you just say something like you know “the British value of you know, right to join a political party or right to protest the government” you just have to signpost it in that way but we’ve got a poster on the wall about it … The posters got like the key British values on it so like right to free- sorry freedom of speech, er the freedom to have different opinions to one another, freedom of erm you know choice etc so it’s just on the wall and it’s there cos obviously when British values came in, we had to evidence to Ofsted that you know it’s within our classrooms at all times. (Politics Educator, Academic Institute 1)

The introduction of the agenda into the classroom in this way did not go unnoticed by students who felt the sudden appearance of the word “British” on posters in each classroom and on the opening slides within tutorials was “a bit weird and patronising” (Rachael, Academic Institute 1, Group 1). In fact, this limited engagement was replicated across all of the focus groups with students where, for the most part, they said that they had heard of British values but were unaware “off the top of my head” what the values were, since they had “not paid attention to them” (Ava, Academic Institute 1, Group 1) and in some cases, “didn’t even know [the posters] were there” (Maisie, Academic Institute 2, Group 1). This arguably was a result of what institutional and classroom staff saw as a limitation to time and resource that would have enabled them “to promote British values as part of Social, Moral, Spiritual [and] Cultural education, and then all the duties around a broad and balanced curriculum” (Senior Union Official). Instead, many staff were not left with “loads of opportunities” to embed the values and discussions around them into their classrooms without it being “tokenistic” (Art Educator, Academic Institute 1).

Interviewee:

there has to be time, where staff can have that open discussion with young people about what they think

Interviewer:

and currently there isn’t?

Interviewee:

currently there isn’t, because there’s no funding for it

(DSL, Academic Institute 3)

Promoting the values agenda as a means of preventing radicalisation then was viewed by many as limited, since the time and space to host conversations that would enable staff to encourage the embodiment of British Values or identify those who showed opposition to, ceased to exist. This was further evident in only one student recalling discussing the values in a subject other than tutorial or induction, this being Politics where the discussions were felt to have naturally led to a values-based conversation on democracy and the rule of law. However, this was not universal since some classroom staff did express a belief that their subject matter did provide this space for the values to be embedded within discipline discussions:

… courses like health and social care, psychology, counselling, they lend themselves quite naturally to talk about British values and different things that are going on in society so it’s quite easy to add them in, or sometimes [students] will talk about British values, just mention them quite generally, and I’ll be like “oh you’re mentioning British values there” so it does lend itself, I think, quite easily to talk about them. (Social Care Educator, Training Institute 2)

It was this more “natural” approach which North West Ofsted Regional Director claimed would be praised in inspections:

… when we go into a provider we don’t particularly expect, we don’t expect full stop you know union jacks to be waiving and pictures of the Queen everywhere (laughs) that’s not in any shape of form, although that you know still important at times to do that, you would do that perhaps when it’s the Queen’s birthday etc., that’s a rather very limited view of what it’s all about, so it is much more about those values of democracy and all of those things and how do young people and children understand that. (Andrew Cooke, North West Regional Director for Ofsted)

Yet, for a number of teachers, the reality of how this could be embedded within the classroom, given the perceived applicability to their subject matter and the time they had to engage in discussions around the values of democracy, was limited and so in the time available, British Values posters in their classrooms was the only real and consistent means of ensuring visible compliance. Moreover, there was also a concern that this could lead to the “limited view” of British Values referenced by Andrew Cooke:

In some parts of the organisation the staff were very receptive to the concept of British values, erm to quite an alarming extent in some places because, there was this sense that, they’ve got the license now to tell everybody that they were teaching that “you’ve got to stick to these British values!”. Some people actually saw it as, a patriotic opportunity, for them to demonstrate to their learners how to behave in Britain, which, is is absolutely not the rationale for it, even though the rationale isn’t particularly clear, erm, so you’ve got people on that end of the spectrum who were saying, “great!”, you know putting union jacks up on the wall and pictures of Winston Churchill. (British Values Coordinator, Training Institute 2)

Though this experience was not widespread in its replication, the fear of it occurring was felt across a number of participants. It revealed a tension for those delivering the agenda in managing educators advocating for what was seen to be a narrow form of Britishness – and its potential to feed into “extreme” ideological stances of nationalism – and an approach instead embedded in talking about “values for life in modern Britain” that was “contextualised for that group of learners”. By advocating the promotion of British values as inclusive and “not a one size fits all”, the experience of the British Values Coordinator demonstrated how some educationalists were overcoming the challenges of an agenda that for some, fed into the very discourses it was trying to prevent. It was not just the limited time to explore the values themselves however, that was claimed to be at the root of such problematic applications of the agenda, but too the language of Britishness.

Britishness

I’m not really so comfortable with the British part of it, because I don’t think they’re British values I think they’re just values, and for everybody, you don’t have to be British (laughs) and there is that sort of connotation that they’re only for British people (laughs) and er, it’s not! You know, what is British? And it is funny because we used to have erm, oh years ago we used to do One World week, and all this sort of thing would come up about British values, and er, for students it was often about “oh fish and chips!” and “the Queen!” and these sorts of things like “what!?” you know (laughs) but, and it is interesting what people come up with when they think of what is British erm … we’re a very multi-national college, erm, and you know, I just say “what is British?” (laughs) (DSL, Academic Institute 3)

The majority of participants questioned the idea that these values were distinctly British, particularly since most educational institutions were believed to “promote a lot of those British values without explicitly calling them British values” (DSL, Academic Institute 1) through the longstanding Social, Moral, Cultural and Spiritual agendas (Department for Education 2014).

In fact, as the excerpt above reveals, there were a number of concerns which arose from the new terminology of British that the duty brought with it. First, the belief that “it implies that our values are better than anybody else’s” was felt and evidenced to cause both discomfort and insult amongst both staff and students (British Values Coordinator, Training Institute 1). For one participant, this was actually “a dangerous game” which created a “barrier” between those who would consider themselves as British and not (Art Educator, Academic Institute 1). Whilst there were some members of classroom staff who felt that it offered opportunities to learn about cultures from outside Britain (Access to HE Educator and Social Care educator, Training Institute 2) and even bring together different cultures through a unifying sense of Britishness (Politics Educator, Academic Institute 1), this was not the case for a number of students:

It felt quite excluding because it’s almost like if you’re saying it’s British, for somebody who maybe has moved to this country or maybe has like relatives who like maybe first generation immigrants or whatever, they are living in this country, attending school here and are being told these are how British people are and if they don’t feel British then that’s just it – like that’s not okay, we should make people feel welcome and they’re values that should be carried across people’s lives generally throughout the world, it’s not something that’s exclusive to British people. (Rachael, Group 1, Academic Institute 1)

The excerpt spoke to the discourses of “assimilate or repatriate” (Mudde 2019, 6) through the construction of a national identity and was further linked by some to the utilisation of Britishness as a way of determining and countering threat posed to it:

(laughs) I don’t know I feel like just being here in Britain is enough to have like British values or be British, I feel like you shouldn’t need to prove that you’re British, I feel like that’s a bit of a, way to protect ourselves and try to show that we’re keeping people out and stuff so, that’s what I think about that … a lot of people think like immigrants come in and take jobs and you know do these terrorisms, so I think the act of having like British values and like a test is like, a way to separate ourselves from them, which I just feel like is just, just terrible and erm, and it might just add just to that to terrorism just because people feel like segregated and separated, especially with like this new Windrush stuff as well like, that’s quite a, a big deal. (James, Group 3, Academic Institute 1)

James was not the only participant to link the promotion of Britishness to the wider sphere of “exclusionary politics”, where a narrow reading of British was being invoked in determining the good “Us” from the threatening “them”:

… some [staff] will evoke the British thing with “well it’s about not bringing more immigrants into the country isn’t it, that’s what it’s about” so they’ll hook on this thing and when Brexit happened, I think, well we noticed across the country hate crime increased, erm people became more confident about being racist and this that and the other you know, and some people will sometimes turn British values in on itself, “it’s about us”, “us in this country” and “us protecting ourselves isn’t it, that’s why the government have done it and to stop immigrants coming in” … I’ve seen it, mm, particularly after Brexit … there was a level of confidence around the country where people were “yeah it’s okay, it’s okay to be racist, because what they’re going to do is stop the immigrants coming in, and they’re doing that because erm, because we’re British” (DSL, Training Institute 2)

However, for a number of the participants, there was a sense that it was not necessarily the agenda itself was discriminatory, but it was the wider context within which it sat that gave way to these concerns:

… for people to say it’s targeting let’s say a Muslim group, just smacks to me as complete and utter naivety, ignorance, I mean when you’re doing British values effectively you’re opening up people’s minds and you’re combating intolerance and loads of stuff, equality, diversity, etc … a Muslim group in North Manchester who feel they’re being targeted, well they might well be targeted, it’s nothing to do with the Prevent agenda, there might be bigotry and racism in that area. (DSL, Training Institute 2)

Yet, it was the link between this wider sense of prejudice and the promotion of Britishness which for some, whether through intention or not, fed directly into the same sense of nationalism that was promoted through Far-Right ideologies: “Isn’t the EDL⁴ like an extremist group of British values?” (John, Group 2, Training Institute 1). This led some to question whether “actually, if you think about it, that agenda is then supporting those, that far-right cause really isn’t it, it’s lending, it’s giving almost giving a platform for, those other groups to you know, erm, drum up more support” (DSL, Training Institute 1). Whilst for many, as earlier noted, this was a fear that could happen when improperly implemented, for a minority of participants there had been a visible utilisation of Britishness by some staff members to promote ethno-nationalist agendas amongst students:

I’ve had a minority of white, working class, male staff, who have reacted, erm, in quite an alarming way actually, so when I ask the question of, I start the session off asking “what do you think of erm when you hear the term British values?” and I looked at what they’d wrote and somebody had written “it’s to make them behave like us” (…) “it’s to make them behave like us” (…) and, it was two blokes, I’m sure they were in some sort of right-wing group, I swear they would be, because they just, the reaction “to make them be like us” … I know it’s a minority, but still they’re being expected to teach British values and they’re the ones with the union jack posters up and the British bulldog so, if it’s misunderstood it can be hijacked for a completely wrong agenda … if I was a member of Britain First and I was teaching young motor mechanic apprentices, I could take the British values agenda to take them along a right-wing route, and I could say that I am doing something legitimate because it’s so ill-conceived and badly explained, not explained at all … there’s no clear instruction, and there’s no definition and it’s open to interpretation and if somebody wanted to use it for the purpose of recruiting people to have a right-wing ideology they could do it. (British Values Coordinator, Training Institute 2)

Reframing Britishness

As the British Values Coordinator (Training institute 2) noted, in an attempt to minimise the potential challenges that an ethno-nationalist narrative of Britishness attached to the agenda brought, “especially in such a multicultural environment”, her focus was on “making sure that staff could identify opportunities to embed British values but without necessarily overtly saying that they are British values” (British Values Coordinator, Training Institute 2). This was replicable across the majority of educationalists who spoke of embedding the agenda within their institutions and classrooms. Critically, it was not the values which participants felt were of concern, but the language of Britishness which surrounded them. As a result, whilst some, as above excerpts demonstrate, were happy to utilise the term British values, there was a general push towards reframing, or what Vincent (2019) refers to as “re-packaging” the discourse:

I think if possible the schools should be using their own values rather than making a big deal about British values and I think you can, generally if you’ve got values, erm a values mission and a statement which schools generally will have that you can, embed that in everything you do and you can use that as a reference point, it doesn’t have to be, British values, as defined by the government. (Senior Trade Union Official)

For many staff, the reality that “Ofsted will still expect them to utilise those, that terminology” (Nigel Lund, North West DofE Prevent Coordinator) of “British”, however, limited their ability to remove the discourse from institutions and their classrooms. This created a layer of tension whereby managing Ofsted expectations with agentic enactment that fit within institutional and classroom pedagogic approaches at points conflicted. This was particularly critical where …

… most of our students do not identify as being British, a lot of our students are Nigerian or South Asian, they don’t identify as being British and as soon as you say that when you’re talking about British values they automatically feel isolated and marginalised from that conversation because they don’t identify as being British. I just think its nicer if they are human values rather than British, because you don’t have to be British to follow them and to adhere to them. (Counselling, Psychology and Mental Health, Training Institute 2)

This sentiment was acute within student discussions, where almost all of the focus groups situated the values as “Universal” (Ava, Group 2, Academic Institute 1), arguing that holding them didn’t depend on “where you’re from, what religion you’ve got [or] what race”; it was about being a “good person”, not a British one (Lois, Group 1, Academic Institute 1). Students therefore echoed the educationalists’ sentiments which favoured a broader adoption of the values agenda which teachers were similarly advocating. For Andrew Cooke, North West Regional Head of Ofsted, however, the language of Britishness was critical since it was, in line with government rhetoric, the “fight against” or “pushing back on British values” which defined extremism. Yet, in line with student concerns, it was the very link between the agenda and extremism, many institutional and classroom staff felt, which enabled the ethno-nationalist narratives earlier drawn upon to emerge, where non-Britishness became synonymised with the threat of radicalisation:

British values is an extension of the equality and diversity work we’ve done in colleges for the last fifteen years, it’s no different for me … if we’d have had British values first, erm, and worked with that in the way that we work with E and D (Equality and Diversity), I think we’d have all said “oo it’s like, it’s like the old E and D” and then perhaps, perhaps we might have had more of an understanding of where Prevent is at loggerheads with you know, sorry, not Prevent – extremism, terrorism, are in conflict with what British values are. (DSL, Training Institute 2)

Institutional staff, in particular, felt that the role of British values in challenging extremism and terrorism would have been better framed in the same way as its partner strand of safeguarding had been – as a continuation of existing practices. This, as the excerpt above demonstrates, would have enabled educationalists and their students, to have seen the values as building on the principles of equality and diversity “to ensure that societies and communities work effectively” (Andrew Cooke, Ofsted North West Regional Head), rather than positioning them as a pre-requisite for avoiding radicalisation. This revealed a further core tension which emerged in the implementation of the agenda whereby the ecological agency to enact the duty in a way that reflected institutional and student pedagogy and make-up was limited by overarching governance processes that required it to remain within the linguistic confines of government policy.

Discussion and conclusions

This article has provided empirical insights into the implementation of the Prevent duty’s British values agenda within Greater Manchester’s Further Education sector. It has done so in order to reveal and explore the complexities surrounding the utilisation of Britishness, a characteristic found within the core of far-right ideology, as a counter-terrorism/extremism mechanism and the challenges faced by staff and students in embedding this agenda into their everyday pedagogic experiences. It drew upon an extensive qualitative dataset which examined the lived experiences of over 100 policy elites, institutional and classroom staff, and students. In doing so, it provided four significant insights. First, how British values was framed as a mechanism of countering terrorism and extremism within the UK; second, how the agenda become implemented on the ground, specifically within the classroom spaces of the five participating FE institutions and the consequential tensions; third, how Britishness became understood and articulated within educational spaces; and finally, how and why attempts to reframe the agenda emerged in attempts to overcome tensions. What emerged from these discussions was an overt concern within institutions that the language of Britishness not only created implementation problems, but had the potential to undermine attempts to counter Far-Right extremism, in particular, through a synergy in nationalistic ideologies which underpinned both.

The Prevent duty positioned British values as the antithesis to those of extremists and terrorists; through the embodiment of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance, individuals could reject those purported by radicalisers. Yet, the ability of educationalists to implement the agenda was limited by an overarching concern that Britishness had come to be understood within the wider public and policy domain through a narrative of ethno-nationalism (Keddie 2014). This sense of ethno-nationalism emerged from a longstanding securitisation of, primarily, Muslim communities within the UK which had been situated as a threat within both the context of counter-terrorism following 9/11, and wider integration and cohesion agendas before and after (Winter & Mills 2020; Bagguley & Hussain, 2006). This was enabled by an Othering of their ethnic, cultural, racial and religious status to determine the enemy within when such identities came to challenge their assimilation to Britishness (see Smith 2016). Against a backdrop of Islamist-inspired terrorism dominating both policy and media rhetoric, educationalists and their students found challenges in reading Britishness as a means through which firstly, non-white, non-British born individuals could be part of, and secondly, (partly as a result) as a counter to all forms of extremism and terrorism.

Critically, as the beginning of the article explored, this also finds root within far-right discourses of today (see Mcdonald 2011). Many groups affiliated with this far-right ideology see the enemy of nationalism and national borders being Islam (Mudde 2019), with the identification of this “threat” undertaken through what Chadderton (2012) refers to as “visual signifiers of difference” – ethnic markers of culture, race, religion. Indeed, one of the most worrying concerns which emerged from some of the participants was that this promotion of values which were distinctly British and available only to those deemed worthy enough of being British, echoed the white nationalist hierarchy invoked by far-right extremists (Mudde 2019). Moreover, in doing so, fears were raised over the agenda feeding into and being exploited by far-right sympathisers to bolster anti-immigrant, anti-Other discourses (Maylor 2016). British values through this lens then, appeared to counter itself by antithesising Islamist-extremism and terrorism, but by reinforcing some of the same narratives which are drawn upon by those on the Far-Right.

Nevertheless, this albeit concerning outcome was not the full story. In fact, as other scholars have demonstrated, educationalists adopted what Elwick and Jerome (2019) refer to as “ecological agency”. In recognising the potential dangers of the agenda and additional concerns raised over a sense of more general uncomfortableness with promoting something as British within the multicultural geography of Greater Manchester, educationalists responded through tailored enactment (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012). This came in the form of what Vincent (2019) refers to as “re-packaging” the agenda through the use of “our” “universal” or “human” values that placed focus on the values themselves and provided an inclusive escape from the narrowness of “British”, something which was also found by Winter et al. (2021) in their recent study on Britishness in the classroom. This means of enactment saw educationalists and their students shift the focus away from the identity aspect of the values and focus on the values themselves as being those which anybody could have, and their institutions had always had in line with wider Equality and Diversity, and SMSC agendas.

Yet, as the data revealed, there were a number of challenges to this which revealed the complicated web of tensions which educationalists had to grapple with. The sheer scale of policy educationalists have to engage with alongside their pedagogic responsibilities is enormous (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012). The agenda, in its labelling of the values as distinctly British, did mean that rather than simply a continuation of those existing agendas, yet another layer of policy was required of educationalists. A central and seismic challenge as part of this came through Ofsted, the regulatory body monitoring their implementation and embedding of the British values agenda. In Ofsted’s directive for the agenda to be explicitly labelled “British values”, the need to demonstrate compliance dominated the little time available within a crammed curriculum; time and resource constraints meant focus had to be placed on ensuring visible awareness of the agenda, rather than critical engagement with the values, leaving educationalists little scope to unpack and explore the relevance and importance of the agenda with their students when it was questioned (James 2020b). Instead, the introduction of British values within the classroom came to be about signposting not engaging, in the hope of both downplaying divisions it was seen by some to have caused, whilst simultaneously meeting Ofsted requirements.

It is without question then that future work should pay attention to the challenges that Ofsted and other governance processes bring to educators’ abilities to enact policy that is responsive to the educational and procedural needs of the institutions, their staff and their students. This is of particular importance in light of the other key findings of the research, namely, that a complex relationship exists between the British values agenda and the Far-Right, one which has the potential to not only counter the role of values within the education system through its current labelling, but also one which has the potential to bolster that which it seeks to prevent. The findings of this research are therefore significant. First, the article has revealed a fear from institutional and classroom staff that the agenda can be hijacked by far-right extremists; second, it has uncovered concerns from students that there remains bias and prejudice which governs who can and cannot be British and thus who may or may not be understood as threatening; and third, it has revealed the challenges educationalists face in enacting an agenda which has limited capacity to be fully enacted.

Subsequently and perhaps most critically, the article has revealed a series of tensions which emerge, despite the ability for educationalists to demonstrate ecological agency, in enacting the Prevent duty in relation the countering the Far-Right. It speaks to a growing diversity in views which is emerging within the academic literature surrounding the Prevent duty. The article highlights the persistence of a context, narrative and perception that Prevent can disproportionately focus on countering Islamist-inspired extremism and terrorism. Simultaneously, it shows that there is belief and action being played out on the ground to move beyond the stereotypes and securitisation of earlier iterations and focus on safeguarding against, through antithesising, all forms of threat. The article reveals that the notion of values being distinctly British, plays into a narrow understanding of threat whilst also speaking to wider narratives of exclusionary politics of anti-Other. Yet, it also reveals a shift from positioning educators as “agents of the state” (Heath-Kelly 2016) towards an ability to demonstrate ecological agency through their re-packaging of the agenda in response to their pedagogic, institutional and personal positionality, albeit with Ofsted’s governance process limiting this to some extent. It simultaneously demonstrates how far the Prevent duty has come from the introduction of Prevent whilst revealing how far it has yet to go. Through the promotion of Britishness, which has been synonymised with and by ethno-nationalist agendas, the potential for the Prevent duty to tackle Far-Right extremism and terrorism has not only been undermined, but has, this article posits, revealed the challenges faced within the Further Education sector of enacting a policy that they claim, should be about safeguarding against all forms of terrorism and extremism.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to extend a sincere thanks to all of the participants who agreed to take part in this research and share their experiences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie James

Natalie James is an ESRC-funded Postdoctoral Candidate. Her research focuses on the discursive conceptualisation of threat through counter terrorism and extremism policy and its enactment.

Notes

1. The Trojan Horse scandal refers to an anonymised letter published in a national newspaper that alleged that a number of Birmingham schools where being run by Radical Islamist preachers and children being radicalised within the institutions. The letter led to a national outcry and an Ofsted review of the schools in response; Ofsted found there to be serious risks posed to the safeguarding of children, despite only a few years prior using the very same examples of practice to commend the institutions for fostering tolerance and promoting a values-based education (see Mogra 2016).

2. To uphold participant confidentiality, all participants were referred to through their job role, except students who were asked to select a pseudonym for themselves. Any identifying information was removed.

3. This data reflects participants of both the online data collection methods and the fieldwork.

4. English Defence League.