Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the Education Act 2011 in achieving the aims set out in paragraph 10.53 of the Government's Review of the Prevent Agenda, published in June 2011.

Keeping our children safe, and ensuring our schools prepare them for life in modern Britain, could not be more important. There is no place for extremist views in any school. A dedicated counter-extremism unit was established within the Department for Education in 2010 and has responsibility for implementing the commitments in the Prevent strategy. The Secretary of State’s statement to the House on 22 July, in response to Peter Clarke’s report into allegations about schools in Birmingham, set out the latest steps that the Government is taking to increase the resilience of schools to extremism, and the Secretary of State will be making a further statement to the House on this subject shortly.

Publicly-funded schools remain under a statutory duty to promote community cohesion and have an important part to play in supporting the creation of more integrated communities. This duty is complemented and reinforced by the requirements on schools to encourage respect for the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs. The Department has consulted on strengthening the independent schools standards, which apply to academies and free schools, to require schools to actively promote these values. Ofsted will introduce an equivalent expectation on maintained schools through changes to the Ofsted inspection framework later this year, supported by departmental guidance.