Last Updated on October 28, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Prevent is part of the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy. Since 2015, it has placed a legal duty on schools, along with other public bodies, to help prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. It’s relevant to several areas of A-level sociology: education (especially social control and ethnicity), crime and deviance, and social policy.
The Prevent duty: what it means for schools
From 1 July 2015, under section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, schools must have “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. This is known as the Prevent duty.
In practice this means:
- Staff are expected to be able to recognise children who may be vulnerable to radicalisation, and to know what to do if they are concerned. Prevent is treated as part of schools’ safeguarding responsibilities.
- Schools are expected to build pupils’ resilience to radicalisation, partly by promoting fundamental British values (see how do teachers teach British Values?).
- Where staff are concerned about a pupil, they can make a referral to Prevent. Some referrals are passed to Channel, a programme that offers support at an early stage to people judged to be vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism. Taking part in Channel is voluntary.
Prevent statistics
| Prevent referrals, April 2024 to March 2025 | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total referrals | 8,778 (up 27% on the previous year, the highest since the series began in 2015) |
| Referrals from the education sector | 3,129 (36%), the largest of any sector |
| Referrals of children aged 11 to 15 | 36% of referrals where age was known |
| Extreme right-wing concerns | 1,798 (21%) |
| Islamist concerns | 870 (10%) |
| No ideology recorded (for example unclear or mixed concerns) | 4,917 (56%) |
| Adopted as Channel cases | 1,472 (17% of referrals) |
England and Wales. Source: Home Office, Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent programme, April 2024 to March 2025 (published 6 November 2025; official statistics in development).
Two points stand out. First, schools make more referrals than any other sector, so Prevent is very much part of school life. Second, in recent years far more referrals have concerned the extreme right than Islamist extremism, and most referrals involve no clear ideology at all.
Arguments for Prevent
- Safeguarding: supporters, including the police and the government, present Prevent as a form of safeguarding, like protecting children from other kinds of harm. Its aim is to intervene early and offer support, not to criminalise.
- Early intervention: Channel offers voluntary support to people judged vulnerable before any crime is committed. Over a thousand referrals a year are adopted as Channel cases.
- Online radicalisation: schools are well placed to notice when young people are being drawn into extremist views, including online, and teachers see pupils every day.
- It isn’t only about Islamism: the statistics show that most referrals now concern the extreme right or no clear ideology.
Arguments against Prevent
- Damaging trust: the Open Society Justice Initiative’s 2016 report Eroding Trust argued that Prevent in schools, colleges and health services damages trust between teachers and students, and between the state and Muslim communities, and that it risks violating human rights.
- Restricting free discussion: critics argue that pupils, especially Muslim pupils, may feel unable to discuss religion and politics freely in class for fear of being referred.
- Teachers as surveillance: it increases the surveillance of young people, and it is another responsibility for teachers, who may not be well trained to judge the signs of radicalisation.
- Should schools be doing this? Some argue that turning schools into part of the counter-terrorism system politicises education.
- Effectiveness: only a minority of referrals lead to Channel support, which some see as evidence that many referrals are unnecessary.
Is Prevent discriminatory?
The strongest criticism is that Prevent has been applied in a way that discriminates against Muslims. In 2015, soon after the duty came in, the Muslim Council of Britain published case studies raising concerns that Prevent was being applied in schools in ways that were discriminatory and harmful to Muslim children.
A 2019 review of the evidence by Lee Jerome, Alex Elwick and Raza Kazim looked at 27 studies of Prevent in English schools. They found three main themes: that the policy was often read through Islamophobic discourses; that it was bound up with the idea of Britishness in fundamental British values; and that it was framed as safeguarding. They concluded that the evidence supported the critics, because the duty “seems to be generating a number of unintended and negative side effects”. HOWEVER, they also found that teachers have agency: how Prevent works in practice depends a great deal on how teachers interpret it, which may reduce some of the harmful effects.
The statistics complicate the claim, though. Prevent doesn’t record religion. In 2024/25 only 10% of referrals concerned Islamist extremism, against 21% for the extreme right, and of referrals where ethnicity was recorded, 65% were White. So if Prevent once focused heavily on Muslims, the pattern of referrals today is very different.
In fact, the government’s 2023 Independent Review of Prevent, led by William Shawcross, argued the opposite of the critics: that Prevent had become too broad in its approach to the extreme right and too narrow on Islamism, which it said showed ‘a loss of focus’. The government accepted its recommendations. Critics in turn questioned the review’s evidence and approach.
Prevent and sociology
Prevent is useful in the exam in several ways:
- Education and social control: it is an example of schools being used to monitor and control young people’s beliefs. See education and social control.
- Ethnicity and in-school factors: if teachers view some pupils’ behaviour with suspicion because of their religion or ethnicity, that is a form of labelling. See are schools institutionally racist?
- Surveillance and crime control: it links to ideas of ‘categorical suspicion’, where whole groups are treated as potential risks.
In an exam, present Prevent as a debate, with the evidence on both sides, rather than as clearly good or clearly discriminatory.
Sociology of Education Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle, written by Karl Thompson, who taught A-level sociology for eighteen years and spent twelve as an AQA examiner, marking all three papers on the current specification.
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the sociology of education. Related: policies to combat racism in schools.
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Sources
- Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, section 26; HM Government, Prevent duty guidance.
- Home Office (2025) Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent programme, April 2024 to March 2025 (6 November 2025).
- Open Society Justice Initiative (2016) Eroding Trust: The UK’s Prevent Counter-Extremism Strategy in Health and Education.
- Muslim Council of Britain (2015) Concerns on Prevent (case studies).
- Jerome, L., Elwick, A. and Kazim, R. (2019) ‘The impact of the Prevent duty on schools: a review of the evidence’, British Educational Research Journal, 45(4), 821–837.
- Shawcross, W. (2023) Independent Review of Prevent (8 February 2023).