Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to reduce the potential radicalisation of young people in school.

The Department for Education has made it clear that there is no place for extremism in any school, particularly in the aftermath of the ‘Trojan Horse’ events in Birmingham and cases of young people travelling to Syria. All young people must be prepared for life in modern Britain.

We are tackling this problem at both ends: taking determined action where we find areas of concern, and building resilience in the system by putting the active promotion of fundamental British values at the very heart of our plan for education.

The following developments are at the cornerstone of our response:

• We now expect all schools to actively promote fundamental British values, which include mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. Ofsted is now inspecting them on this.

• We are working with Ofsted on improvements to their capacity; they are training their inspectors on extremist ideology and have strengthened their inspection frameworks to include Fundamental British Values.

• The Counter Terrorism and Security Act, which comes into force in July, places a new statutory duty on schools, further education colleges, higher education institutions and local authorities to have due regard to the need to prevent individuals from being drawn into terrorism. We are issuing statutory guidance on this duty.

• We are putting in place a whistleblowing process for schools and the public to raise safeguarding concerns more easily.

• We have established a dedicated Due Diligence and Counter Extremism Group within the Department for Education focusing specifically on preventing extremism, with an expanding remit and capacity to proactively identify and address extremism concerns.

You can find out more about the wide range of action underway in the education sector in the Secretary of State’s oral statement of 29 January reflecting on the developments in the six months since the Peter Clarke Report here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/update-on-birmingham-schools

A detailed table of actions in the education sector is also available at the following link:

www.parliament.uk/depositedpapers#toggle-126 . The reference number for the table is DEP2015-0126.

This is a priority for this Government, and we remain vigilant. Keeping our children safe, and ensuring our schools prepare them for life in modern, multi-cultural Britain, could not be more important.