Prevent Duty
As part of St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School’s ongoing safeguarding and child protection duties we are fully behind the government’s Prevent Strategy.At the end of March 2015, the Counter Terrorism and Security Act received Royal Assent. The Act includes a new duty to Pevent people from being drawn into terrorism. This duty applies to a range of organisations, including schools. Extremism and radicalisation are just another part of our school’s safeguarding duties. From 1 July 2015 all schools are subject to a duty under section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, in the exercise of their functions, to have “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. This duty is known as the Prevent Duty for Schools. What is the Prevent Duty? There are four key duties for schools: Identify local risks, identify at risk students, work in partnership with other agencies and to keep children safe online, where much of the radicalisation takes place. The Prevent duty applies to all schools, whether state-funded or independent, as well as early years providers and children’s homes.
At St Joseph’s, we build pupils’ resilience to radicalisation by promoting fundamental British values and enabling our pupils to challenge extremist views. You can read about what we do to promote British values here.
The statutory guidance refers to the importance of Prevent awareness training to equip staff to identify pupils at risk of being drawn into terrorism and to challenge extremist ideas. The Home Office has developed a core training product for this purpose – Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP). Senior leaders have received training from the local authority and our staff will receive WRAP information and will take part in training sessions on what Prevent is about and how to deal with any concerns they may see inside or outside school.
