Counter-terrorism measures in the classroom: Exploring the perceptions and experiences of education professionals enacting the Prevent Duty in Bath and Bristol

While most education professionals report their straightforward enactment of Prevent, a critical multilevel analysis of 17 interviews with education professionals in the Bath and Bristol areas of the UK data demonstrates however, that the policy is widely perceived to be problematic and potentially counterproductive. As a policy, Prevent was generally perceived to be open to interpretation, with its core concepts—‘radicalisation’, ‘extremism’, and ‘vulnerability’ considered to be ambiguously defined. The policy’s mandated practices of surveillance and ideological intervention into pre-crime spaces were widely regarded as problematic, redundant, and counterproductive to the education process. By the book implementation of the policy was seen as potentially reducing education professionals’ social capital with students and local communities due mainly to a reduction in trust. Despite unanimous agreement with the fundamental safeguarding intent of Prevent, there are widespread concerns that the controversial policy’s roundly criticised discriminatory practices, especially its preferential targeting and profiling of the Muslim community, have now been expanded to target a far wider range of non-violent civil protest groups and social movements not traditionally associated with terrorism.Despite these negative perceptions of Prevent, the study demonstrates that most education professionals mitigate the potentially iatrogenic effects of the policy, by adopting the role of policy actors, and in some cases as policy protagonists: they are generally able to assert their professional autonomy and agency to translate and transform Prevent to overcome its perceived negative effects and embrace its positives such as its widely agreed upon values. The study facilitates the understanding of such policy enactment, and the creativity and resistance of practitioners in engaging with Prevent. On the whole, education professionals were able to use their expertise to reinterpret and recontextualise the ‘regime of truth’ underpinning Prevent, as a rationale for a partial enactment of the policy, often resulting in emancipatory prevention work using value-based pedagogical practices based on ‘good teaching’. Such socially cohesive strategies however, were contingent upon institutional level ‘light-touch’ implementation processes, which allowed education professionals the autonomy and agency to enact Prevent in a partial and relatively invisible ‘tick-box’ fashion, using non-discriminatory practices to protect the civil liberties of their students. The research concludes, however, that Prevent, as currently written, arguably contains a ‘hidden curriculum’ which gives the policy the potential to be interpreted and enacted in ways that could be divisive, discriminatory and ultimately counterproductive, particularly in areas of ‘heavy-touch’ regulation. Participants expressed concerns, for example, about the policy’s surveillance regime, and its integral panopticism, for example through its vague ‘indicators’, the targeting of civil rights protest groups and automated software algorithms that can monitor and record all student activity on institutional computer networks, and thus circumnavigate their professional autonomy to make judgement calls. Ultimately, the findings reveal that despite the diverse responses (and creative resistances) of practitioners to Prevent, their values and the reflexive ways in which they engage with the policy, that placing it on a legal footing has facilitated the installation of a socio-technical surveillance assemblage: a permanent and potentially invasive authoritarian infrastructure, whereby technical, institutional, physical, and bureaucratic mechanisms—and knowledge structures—strengthen and maintain the state’s exercise of power, surveillance and control over the public sphere and by extension over the social body. At a time when Prevent is being reviewed, with further expansions in its remit on the table, the research makes urgent recommendations for the field to scale it back, to re-write it wholescale or to critically revise it in order to avoid harm to civil liberties and democratic processes such as freedom of speech