Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent steps her Department has taken on the implementation of the commitments made in and monitoring of outcomes following the 2011 Prevent Strategy.

The Prevent programme is a strand of CONTEST – the UK’s strategy for countering extremism – aimed at stopping people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism and extremism. The Government publishes an annual report on CONTEST which describes recent developments in the terrorist threat to the UK and its interests, and the progress made in our counter-terrorism work. This includes high-level information about the contribution of different Government departments to the implementation of the Prevent Strategy. The most recent report is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contest-annual-report-2013.

The Department for Education established a dedicated unit to lead work on the commitments set out in the Prevent strategy. This work has focussed on putting in place due diligence arrangements and strengthening regulatory frameworks to reduce the risk of children and young people being exposed to extremist views and to increase their resilience to extremism and radicalisation. The Secretary of State made a statement to the House on 29 January on the progress the Department is making to implement the recommendations contained in Peter Clarke’s report on Birmingham schools, and this gives details of a number of steps the Department has taken to tackle extremism in schools. The statement can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/update-on-birmingham-schools.