Social Sciences, Research, Durham University

Understanding the implementation of Prevent Duty in County Durham Schools

This summer, my research will help to identify trends/differences regarding the implementation of Prevent Duty. It aims to understand how Durham Schools interpret and operationalise it, evaluating the extent of reliance on central government guidance and if a consensus on implementation is present.

May 22, 2024

Matthew Lim

Student, Durham University

Understanding the implementation of Prevent Duty in County Durham Schools

Liked by Emily Jack and 2 others

Implementation of Prevent Duty in County Durham Schools

Supervised by: Dr Jessie Blackbourn, Associate Professor in Public Law and Human Rights,
Durham Law School

Background of Prevent Duty

The Prevent Duty is a statutory guidance that sets out what schools and local authorities must do to comply with the law concerning counter-terrorism preventive measures. This is part of the wider campaign under the UK government’s CONTEST strategy, with the aim of ‘Prevent’ being not only the prevention of radicalisation but also subsequent rehabilitation. While not technically a law, this guidance still has to be largely followed unless there is a good reason not to as according to precedents set in R v Islington LBC [1998] 1 CCLR 119.

Issues and rationale of the project

As mentioned the Prevent Duty guide is ultimately only a brief guidance material that will fail to account for every situation regarding possible radicalisation. While it attempts to engage and “deal with all forms of terrorism”, it serves only as a skeleton blanket guidance scheme. Hence this potentially leaves much room for personal discretion in terms of application and implementation. It is thus important to understand the degree of adherence these schools have undertaken; and how differing institutions interpret the language utilised in these guidance materials compared to the original intention of parliament.

Additionally, it is good to note that the original statutory duty is very brief and short. It only directs how “a specific authority must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”, followed by who is classified under ‘specific authority’. It relies heavily on the Prevent Duty statutory guidance to further elaborate on, for example, actions and steps to be taken. This could potentially allow for further detraction from its original claim as while guidances should be followed, they are not as limiting as laws. The aforementioned case of Islington ruled this obligation comes “with liberty to deviate from it where the local authority judges on admissible grounds that there is good reason to do so”.

Research Methodology

This research will then aim to collate school policies on the Prevent Duty, general safeguarding and radicalisation requirements and their definitions on keywords like ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’.

This along with other relevant material will then be collated into a central database whereby the information is sorted and presented together. Most of this data will likely be collected from school websites and other platforms these schools use to disseminate and share information and policies.

Possible limitations

Given the sensitive nature of this topic in regard to counter-terrorism procedures, it might be possible that some schools would not publish such records openly for public access. Additionally, the Prevent Duty policy is inherently controversial in nature with claims of discrimination and eroding public trust, crucially the student-teacher relationship. It was documented that more than nine out of ten Prevent referrals in 2017/18 did not require any further de-radicalisation actions, further emphasising its possible discriminatory practices. Hence, this would further reduce the possibility of schools publicly sharing their doctrines and procedures.

In such cases, should the sample size reduce drastically due to the lack of publicly available information, a Freedom of Information Request might be considered. However, the time frame of the project has to also be taken into consideration and this will be further evaluated should the need arise.

Existing literature review

While there are journal articles and research done on this very topic with similar aims like “The Prevent Duty in UK higher education: Insights from freedom of information requests” published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations by Andrew Whiting et al., or “The Impact of Prevent Duty on Schools: A Review of Evidence” by Jerome Lee et al. These articles are largely concerned with the general, macro impacts and implications of the Prevent Duty policy on schools.

This project differs in two major ways. Firstly, its focus on Durham County is interesting as while the guidance published is general and largely focused on what the government deems to be the central threat, “In the UK, the primary domestic terrorist threat comes from Islamist terrorism”. For Durham, it is arguably far-right extremism that poses a larger problem. Hence with the guidance more focused on spotting Islamist-inspired terrorism, it leaves a gap in this more domestic form of radicalisation. Secondly, given the smaller scope of this research, it is also able to dive into each school's policies and draw more nuanced conclusions about the extent of discretion utilised in their implementation.