PREVENT, Channel
& Radicalisation

What the Prevent duty requires schools to do

Understanding what schools are legally obligated to do under Prevent helps police engage with them as genuine statutory partners, rather than treating the school as a reluctant or passive participant.

• Governance: The school's governing body must ensure the Prevent duty is discharged. The headteacher is accountable to governors for compliance. This creates a formal oversight structure that police can reference when engaging at leadership level.
• Designated lead: The DSL (or a separate Prevent lead in larger schools) is trained in Prevent awareness. This person is your point of contact for Prevent concerns — the same person you would contact for any safeguarding matter.
• Curriculum: Schools must promote Fundamental British Values (democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance) as part of the curriculum. This is not optional and is inspected by Ofsted.
• IT filters: Schools must have appropriate safeguards on internet access to protect pupils from radicalising content. The IT lead and DSL jointly manage this. If your intelligence indicates a young person has been accessing extremist content on school systems, the DSL can check.
• External speakers: Schools must vet external speakers and have a process for refusing or challenging speakers who promote extremist views.

Schools as statutory Prevent partners

Because schools carry the Prevent duty under statute, they are required to engage with police on counter-terrorism matters. This is different from — and sits alongside — the voluntary aspects of multi-agency working. A school that refuses to engage with a police Prevent concern is potentially failing its statutory duty. This gives police a legal basis for the conversation that does not exist in all areas of multi-agency working.

What police should know about school Prevent anxiety

Many school staff are uncomfortable with Prevent. Research and practitioner feedback consistently identifies three concerns:

• Stigmatisation risk: Staff worry that applying Prevent indicators to individual pupils — particularly from Muslim communities — creates a climate of suspicion and damages trust between the school and its community
• False positive fear: Teachers are not counter-terrorism professionals. They are anxious about referring a young person whose behaviour is a normal expression of identity or political engagement, not a genuine radicalisation risk
• Process uncertainty: Many staff do not know what happens after they raise a Prevent concern — whether the young person will be criminalised, whether parents will be told, what the consequences are

When engaging with schools on Prevent, acknowledging these concerns directly — and being clear that Channel is a support programme, not a surveillance mechanism — makes productive engagement significantly more likely.

Channel is the multi-agency early intervention programme that provides tailored, voluntary support to individuals assessed as vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism. Understanding how it works — and the specific police role within it — is essential for any officer working with schools on Prevent.

The Channel process

The police role in Channel

• Referral: Police are a primary referral source. Officers who encounter a young person showing radicalisation indicators — during a school visit, a stop and search, or a welfare call — can and should refer to Channel
• Intelligence: Police bring intelligence to the panel about the individual and their network — associations, online activity, any criminal intelligence relevant to their vulnerability picture
• Panel chairing: In most areas, police chair the Channel panel. This requires preparation: knowing the individual's intelligence picture, having reviewed the referral information, and being prepared to lead a structured multi-agency discussion
• Proportionality: The panel chair must ensure the response is proportionate to the vulnerability — Channel is an early intervention programme, not a mechanism for treating young people as suspects

What Channel is not

General school-visible indicators — any ideology

• Withdrawal from established peer groups and sudden new associations — particularly with older individuals outside the school who the young person is reluctant to discuss
• A marked shift to a "them and us" worldview — expressed in discussions, essays, or social media — particularly framing a specific group (religious, ethnic, governmental) as a fundamental enemy
• Glorifying violence or expressing sympathy or admiration for those who have committed acts of terrorism or political violence
• Accessing extremist content — flagged by school IT systems, or visible in discussions, shared content, or browser history if the school has access to it
• References to grievance narratives — persecution of a community, government injustice, a sense that violent action is justified or inevitable
• Expressed willingness to sacrifice themselves or others for a cause
• Sudden change in behaviour or appearance connected to ideological identification — not all expression of religious or political identity is a concern, but sudden, rigid, or exclusionary change can be
• Disengagement from family and previously valued relationships — isolation is a feature of grooming processes across multiple exploitation types including radicalisation

Far-right and incel-related indicators

• Use of far-right or incel terminology in class discussions, written work, or online (terms that change rapidly — awareness of current language is valuable)
• Expressing extreme misogyny — dehumanising language about women, celebration of violence against women
• Engagement with conspiracy theories relating to ethnic or demographic change (the "great replacement" narrative and variants)
• Glorification of mass shooters or attackers, particularly those with a stated far-right or incel motivation
• Use of coded symbols, imagery, or humour associated with far-right groups — often framed as irony or jokes

What police can share with schools to help them identify concerns

Schools benefit from context about what they should be looking for. Police can provide:

• General awareness of current extremist narratives circulating in the local area or online — without compromising intelligence
• Guidance on what specific content or terminology currently warrants reporting versus what reflects normal online exposure
• Clarity on what the Channel referral process looks like — removing anxiety about consequences makes staff more likely to raise concerns at an early stage

Prevent and child protection are not the same framework — but they overlap significantly, and the overlap is where the most serious risk tends to sit. Understanding when a Prevent concern also becomes a safeguarding concern, and how the two processes relate to each other, is essential for effective police-school working in this space.

The key distinction

Prevent is about prevention of terrorism — it is a counter-terrorism intervention programme, and Channel is its main delivery mechanism. Child protection is about safeguarding children from significant harm. They are grounded in different statutory frameworks and have different decision-making structures. They are not interchangeable, and one does not replace the other.

When both apply

A Prevent concern should be treated as both a Prevent matter and a child protection matter when:

• A child is being actively recruited into a proscribed organisation or terrorist network — this is child criminal exploitation by another name, and the child is a victim
• A child is being groomed online by extremists — the grooming process is functionally identical to CSE and CCE grooming, and the child protection framework applies in full
• A child is at risk of travelling to a conflict zone — this is an immediate safeguarding emergency and the police response must be immediate
• A child is subject to family-based extremist influence — ideological coercion within the family is a form of emotional abuse; the child protection threshold may be met
• A child has expressed an intent to harm themselves or others in an ideological context — this triggers both Prevent and child protection responses simultaneously

The two processes run in parallel — not sequentially

What to discuss with the DSL

When you have a Prevent concern about a pupil, the conversation with the DSL should explicitly address both dimensions:

• "Do you believe there is a Prevent concern that warrants a Channel referral?" — separate question from the below
• "Do you believe there is a child protection concern that warrants a MASH referral?" — address this independently
• Be explicit: "These are two separate processes. A Channel referral doesn't mean the welfare concern is covered. We need to consider both."

Confidentiality across the two processes

Channel referrals carry specific confidentiality requirements. The existence of a Channel referral should not generally be shared with the wider school staff — similar to the confidentiality restrictions around Encompass notifications. The DSL and the Channel coordinator manage confidentiality for the Channel process. The safeguarding referral has its own confidentiality framework under Working Together 2026. Be alert to the risk of the two streams creating contradictory confidentiality expectations — and address this explicitly in your discussion with the DSL.

What Fundamental British Values means in schools

Schools are required under Prevent to actively promote Fundamental British Values (FBV) as part of their curriculum and school ethos. The four values are:

• Democracy — understanding how decisions are made collectively, the right to participate, the rule of the majority within protections for the minority
• The rule of law — understanding why laws exist, why they apply equally, and the difference between law and personal or ideological preference
• Individual liberty — the right of individuals to make choices within the law, freedom of thought and expression, personal autonomy
• Mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs — not requiring agreement with all beliefs, but requiring respectful coexistence

FBV is taught through PSHE, citizenship, RE, assemblies, and school culture. Ofsted inspects for it. Schools take it seriously as a statutory requirement.

Where police can contribute meaningfully

Police have a natural role in FBV education as visible representatives of the rule of law and civic institutions. Effective contributions tend to focus on:

• The rule of law — lived examples: Explaining why laws exist and how they protect everyone equally; how policing works within legal constraints; what happens when the rule of law breaks down
• Democracy — civic institutions: Police accountability mechanisms (elected Police and Crime Commissioners, IOPC, etc.) as examples of democratic oversight of state power
• Mutual respect in practice: Community policing examples — how officers work across different communities, what hate crime law protects, how policing adapts to serve diverse populations
• Individual liberty and the limits of the state: Honest engagement with police powers — stop and search, arrest, surveillance — and the legal constraints that apply to them. Young people who understand their rights engage more constructively with police.

The tension to navigate carefully

FBV engagement can backfire if it is delivered in a way that feels targeted at specific communities. Young people — particularly those from communities that have experienced disproportionate policing — are alert to messaging that frames their community as the problem to be solved. Effective FBV engagement by police is:

• Universal, not targeted — delivered to all pupils, not assembled for a specific group
• Honest about complexity — acknowledging that police have made mistakes, that institutions have failings, while explaining why civic values remain worth holding
• Framed around shared values, not threats — "this is what we all benefit from" rather than "this is what protects us from extremism"
• Invited, not imposed — working with the DSL and curriculum lead to integrate appropriately, not arriving with a Prevent-branded presentation