“Better Safe Than Sorry”: Prevent and the Securitisation of Daily Life Through Children

The Prevent Duty is the most visible response to the extremist challenge facing British democracy in the last decades. Since 2015, professionals working in education, healthcare, and social care became responsible for identifying and referring individuals exhibiting signs of radicalisation. This fundamentally altered the role of teachers as civic and political educators both inside and outside the classroom. Prevent was widely criticised for silencing debate, stigmatising Muslim communities and stifling opportunities for critical thinking in the classroom. Previous research has questioned the extent to which teachers adopted, internalised and reproduced the discourses at the core of Prevent in their daily practices (Busher et al. 2019). However, existing studies overlook the sui generis context of the West Midlands, a highly diverse Prevent priority area, home to 19% of the total counterextremist referrals and to the largest proportion of individuals in far-right de-radicalisation programmes. In this paper, we focus on how primary school teachers perceive and implement the Prevent Duty on a day-to-day basis in the West Midlands. The paper draws on an online questionnaire completed by 300 teachers as well as on original interviews with 50 primary school educators and with five Prevent Education Officers conducted in 2019. We find that primary school teachers have internalised Prevent as part and parcel of their wider safeguarding responsibilities, meant as ‘the process of protecting children from abuse or neglect, preventing impairment of their health and development’ (OFSTED 2019). In fact, educators frame their actions under the Prevent Duty as also key to safeguarding local communities and the wider country by calling attention to ‘dangerous’ individuals. In equating the exercise of ‘positive surveillance’ with their citizens’ duty, teachers securitise schools, communities, and wider British society through the lives of children.