Implementing the Prevent duty: Conceptualising threat within Greater Manchester’s Further Education sector

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 mandated educationalists, alongside other public sector workers, to refer anyone deemed vulnerable to becoming engaged in terrorism or extremism to Channel. What became known as the Prevent duty, extended the realms of extraordinary counter-terrorism measures into the everyday practices of these workers. Concerns emerged surrounding the extent to which the Prevent duty securitised the education sector, risked further marginalising Muslim students through stigmatising narratives which had informed the duty’s predecessor strategy, Prevent, and in doing so created a “chilling effect” on education. More recent studies demonstrated the need to engage not only with the Further Education sector, but to identify the experiences of those who the policy primarily seeks to prevent, students, situating them alongside those across the sector to understand how policy becomes not only enacted but what these implementations tell us about how threat becomes conceptualised within their ‘everyday’. This research, therefore examines a multiplicity of experiences to reveal how the duty becomes implemented through two key tenets: safeguarding and British values. In examining how this becomes enacted, it reveals that threat becomes conceptualised through four narratives: as vulnerability to radicalisation; as all forms of extremism and terrorism; as antithesised by British values; and, as the responsibility to safeguard against. Further, the moments of continuity and conflict within and between these narratives demonstrate the conceptualisation of threat as a fluid process that is spatio-temporally located, responding to both agency and context. Identifying how the duty becomes enacted, therefore, reveals the way in which those within the FE sector have responded to, and become limited by, earlier concerns about its implementation, demonstrating the capacity for the duty to be embedded within existing pedagogic and safeguarding practices, whilst simultaneously being limited by an overriding wider public narrative of prejudice.