The puzzles of "preventing extremism" : an exploratory study of enactments of the Prevent Duty by front-line practitioners in English schools and colleges

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The Puzzles of “Preventing Extremism”

An exploratory study of enactments of the Prevent Duty by front-line

practitioners in English schools and colleges

MSc Conflict Resolution and Governance

Graduate School of Social Sciences

University of Amsterdam

June 2017

Author

Josh Walmsley (11261765)

First Reader

Dr. David Laws (

D.W.Laws@uva.nl

)

Second Reader

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Abstract:Since 2011, as the Prevent policy has placed educators on the front-line in the fight against ‘extremism,’ a coordinated effort to make these demands seem less imposing, alien, and threatening has unfolded. It depends on the assumption that educational practitioners are naturally predisposed towards identifying students ‘at risk from radicalisation’ based on the knowledge, values, and practices of safeguarding children that underpin the profession. Practitioners’ efforts to remove ambiguity from Prevent practice, however, are belied by their reliance on the problematic ‘jigsaw metaphor’ commonly used to justify information-sharing practices in child protection work. The ‘jigsaw’ reinforces dominant assumptions about self-evident indicators of risk, but ultimately fails to capture the instability and ambiguity that define Prevent in action. Rather than depending on pre-existing knowledge and skills to make straightforward decisions, practitioners engage in complex processes of pre-emptive sense-making characterised by speculation, suspicion, and doubt. This, along with the concrete experiences of some practitioners for whom the imperatives of counter-terrorism and education are irreconcilable, exposes an important tension in the notion that Prevent can be seamlessly interwoven with safeguarding in education.

Key terms: counter-radicalisation, safeguarding, street-level bureaucracy, jigsaw practices, pre-emptive sense-making, conflicting imperatives

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Utter the word extremism or radicalisation in a staff-room full of teachers in England and the same things usually happen. Staff soon avert their gaze from whatever had held their attention just moments before, with many compelled to comment on the tragic nature of the latest terrorist atrocity to dominate the headlines. Say the name of the “Prevent Strategy,” however, and the responses you are likely to receive are not so predictable. Some people are likely to stiffen in posture, asking for your patience while they gather together evidence of the latest efforts to ensure that their institution is a vanguard against the horrors of ‘poisonous ideologies’. For others, the programme’s very name is toxic, producing responses akin to allergic reactions as they curse under their breath and offer disapproving looks. There are many, however, for whom the British government’s counter-extremism programme provokes no particular reaction at all; schools and colleges are frenetic, fast-moving environments, and for a lot of people there is little time to ponder institutional policies unless driven to do so by particular circumstance. For many, the national-level public relations struggles between those for whom ‘Prevent’ is vital for national security, and those who view it as an insidious

government surveillance programme, occur on a stage that is remote from their day-to-day realities. That said, this does not change the fact that all practitioners in schools and colleges are legally required under the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (CTS) to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” (Home Office, 2016). Much remains to be understood about what this means in practical terms, and the normatively-charged debate around the issue adds little clarity to the picture. It is precisely this opaqueness that this study seeks to address.

1.1 Prevent: A Policy in Motion

Since its introduction in 2007, the Prevent programme has represented a definitive

component of the UK state’s approach to national security. It constitutes one of four ‘P’s at the heart of its CONTEST strategy, accompanied by ‘’Pursue’, ‘Protect’, and ‘Prepare’ (HM Government, 2016). ‘Pursue’ is designed to detect, disrupt, and prosecute plotted terrorist activity, whereas ‘Protect’ focuses on ensuring the security of critical infrastructure, including transport systems and public spaces (Home Office, 2011). ‘Prepare’ targets increasing the ‘resilience’ of state institutions and the British public in responding to the consequences of an attack (Home Office, 2011). Prevent marks the state’s effort to “respond to the ideological challenge of terrorism” and the “threat” this represents (Home Office, 2011). It has thus been described as the “soft turn” in British counter-terrorism, and its identification as such has been underlined by the expansion of its focus from “violent extremism” to “nonviolent extremism” (Elshimi, 2017). It is symbolic of a broader shift that has occurred across Europe since 9/11 towards pre-emptive approaches to combating terrorism, which are characterised by the management of risk and uncertainty (De Goede, 2008; Mythen et al, 2013).

Prevent has evolved considerably since its inception, and it is important to distinguish between its different iterations (Ragazzi, 2016a; Thomas, 2017). Between 2007-2011 Prevent was

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run by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and its principle aim was presented as promoting community-cohesion (Ragazzi, 2016a). Significant funds were given to community-led initiatives that included efforts to provide “spiritual, theological, and ideological

training” to challenge the views of “extremists” (Kundnani, 2015, 182). Between 2011-2015, Prevent’s character shifted considerably; it was removed from the DCLG’s remit and became increasingly oriented towards the public sector, with teachers, nurses, youth workers, and prison officers recruited to the front-line in the state’s fight against “radicalisation” (Kundnani, 2015). The following chapter will provide insight into how this context has unfolded, before foregrounding the need to examine the prevailing assumptions about the intersection between security and education that occurs through the Prevent policy1_.

The CTS 2015 made the “Prevent Duty” a legal requirement for practitioners in the public sector. Accordingly, public sector professionals were tasked with the following responsibilities:

[To] understand what radicalisation means and why people may be vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism as a consequence of it; be aware of what we mean by the term “extremism” and the relationship between extremism and terrorism; know what measures are available to prevent people from becoming drawn into terrorism and how to challenge the extremist ideology that can be associated with it; understand how to obtain support for people who may be being exploited by radicalising influences (Home Office, 2016).

Before discussing the place of “radicalisation” and “extremism,” it is necessary to outline the procedural demands that Prevent places on public sector professionals. If public sector workers identify colleagues or ‘clients’ (students, patients, prisoners) that they perceive to be ‘vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism,’ they are obligated to share such information with the Channel

Programme, the Home Office’s (HO) de-radicalisation initiative. The HO describes Channel as “a multi-agency approach to identify and provide support to individuals who are at risk of being drawn into terrorism” (Home Office, 2012b). Since its introduction, Channel has been framed through the principles of “safeguarding,” which is a term commonly used in the public sector to describe efforts to protect and promote the welfare of children, young people, and adults (Home Office, 2012b). In response to a formal Freedom of Information Request, the National Police Chiefs’ Council released data showing that 3,955 people were referred to the Channel programme in 2015 alone (NPCC, 2016). These referrals are filtered through local police forces who employ “Prevent Officers” to oversee regional delivery. If cases are accepted for de-radicalisation, they are referred to multi-agency teams that include the police and social services called “Channel Panels.” These teams, which vary in their makeup across different localities, then assess the type of intervention that is required for each specific case (HM Government, 2012b). Beyond this, very little is known about exactly how Channel functions.

1_{Prevent is variously referred to as a ‘policy,’ a ‘strategy,’ a ‘programme,’ and an ‘agenda’. This study will use the}

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1.2 Contestation and Critique

Despite its nobly stated aims, Channel has been subjected to constant scrutiny and criticism throughout its existence (Thornton & Bouhana, 2017). Its fiercest critics have sought to cast its reliance on the terminology of safeguarding as a thinly-veiled attempt at disguising its fundamental role in the pre-crime intelligence-gathering activities of the state (Kundnani, 2015; Sabir, 2017). Most of the controversy, though, emanates from the fact that “open information about Channel itself —its logic, design, implementation, success measures, and outcomes—remains thin on the ground” (Thornton & Bouhana, 2012, 1). It is precisely this ambiguity, rather than any substantial evidence of sinister intentions, that has fuelled much of the scepticism about Channel (Thornton & Bouhana, 2012). Whist it is beyond the scope of this study to engage in an in-depth analysis of the Channel programme itself, this context is important for understanding how Prevent has been received in both civil society and in academia2_.

Prevent has been vehemently contested in both of these spheres, and criticism has been variously targeted towards its unsteady conceptual foundations, its purported targeting of Muslims and the pernicious outcomes this engenders, and its alleged casting of public service professionals as government informants. The following will contextualise this study by framing how such critiques have unfolded in relation to the education sector, but will also seek to emphasise the importance of a recent observation made by Paul Thomas. He contends that “there is a danger [...] that this

increasingly wide, fierce and arguably well-justified criticism of Prevent’s intent and concrete societal impacts is obscuring more complex understandings of this policy approach” (Thomas, 2017, 2). This study is driven by a sensitivity to what Thomas describes; that the nuance and complexity of Prevent— and what this might reveal about the intersection between education and security— risks being overlooked due to a lack of empirical approaches to understanding it in action.

1.3 Shaky Foundations?

The concepts upon which Prevent is structured have received significant attention. The prevailing theme is that its problematic guiding principles place the programme on unstable ground even before its relationship to the messy landscapes of public policy practice is considered.

Extremism, which educational practitioners are required to be able to identify, is defined as follows in the Prevent documentation: “Vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs” (Home Office, 2016). One of the few empirical studies available in this area demonstrates that, in schools, Head Teachers’ attempts to make sense of the need to consider British values in their institutional agendas are characterised by ambiguity, uncertainty, and fear (Revell & Bryan, 2016). The obvious implication of this is that if it is so difficult to operationalise “British values” in practice, then working with extremism (particularly nonviolent extremism) should be an impracticable

2_{Only recently have researchers managed to gain access to Channel, with Thornton and Bouhana’s (2017)}

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endeavour. As such, criticism has been forceful and high-profile, epitomised by the following condemnation by a UN Special Rapporteur who chastised the programme because:

It is difficult to define the term “non-violent extremist” without treading into the territory of policing thought and opinion. Innocent individuals will be targeted. Many more will fear that they may be targeted – whether because of their skin color, religion or political persuasion – and be fearful of exercising their rights. Both outcomes are unacceptable (OHCHR, 2016).

In addition to the lack of definitional clarity, Prevent’s reliance on the term has also led to accusations that it lends itself towards profiling and stigmatisation (Awan, 2012; Coppock & McGovern, 2014; Kundnani, 2016). Others have taken this further, drawing on the Foucauldian theory of

“governmentality” to highlight the term’s role in the disciplinary governance of British Muslims (Birt, 2008; Heath-Kelly, 2013). The use of extremism then, has not helped to put Prevent on a stable footing.

Premised upon the notion that holding ‘extremist views’ are a reliable determinant of terrorism, “radicalisation” is also one of Prevent’s core concepts. The radicalisation discourse that frames terrorism as pre-emptively governable has proven equally problematic, with many observers regarding it as productive of discrimination against British Muslims. Heath-Kelly, for example,

contends that Prevent’s reliance on the production of “radicalisation knowledge” casts British Muslims as simultaneously “at risk” and “risky” (Heath-Kelly, 2013). As such, she concludes that Prevent “acts in the name of risk but is performative of it” (Heath-Kelly, 2013, 395). For Toby Archer, the

performative nature of the radicalisation discourse functions as a “patchwork of insecurities that facilitate the policy exchange of fears and beliefs’ across a range of governance domains” (Archer, 2009, 331). Arun Kundnani seeks to describe the practical implications of this:

A concept has been contrived which builds into official thinking biases and prejudices that, in turn, structure government practices introduced to combat radicalisation, resulting in discrimination and unwarranted restrictions on civil-liberties (Kundnani, 2012, 20).

Numerous analyses have sought to spotlight the destabilising influence of the radicalisation discourse in British society, developing the thesis that it has marked Muslims as a problematic “suspect

community” (Pantazis & Pemberton, 2011; McGovern & Tobin, 2010; Poynting, 2013). Francesco Ragazzi presents a more nuanced analysis, offering instead three “suspect categories” of Muslim citizen constructed through Prevent’s discourse of radicalisation; the “trusted,” the “victim,” and the “risky” (Ragazzi, 2016b, 733). Whilst all of these arguments are persuasive and compelling, they have unfolded in a domain too distant from the world of practice to be entirely convincing. Ragazzi himself recognises that perspectives such as this serve as starting points in a much greater pursuit of

understanding Prevent as performed. For him, much remains to be understood about how “categories of suspicion, established in official policy documents, become translated, enacted and re-appropriated in local contexts” (Ragazzi, 2016a, 9). Indeed, the prevailing contentions about the impact of

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without richer empirical support. 1.4 “Preventing Education”?

There are few arenas in which the debate about Prevent has been so fiercely contested as the education sector. The demands on nurseries, schools, colleges, and universities are twofold; practitioners must simultaneously ensure that they are able to react to “signs of radicalisation” in young people, whilst also being able to evidence the active promotion of “fundamental British values” in their practice (HM Government, 2016, 3). The former has proven particularly controversial, as evidenced through a series of notable cases in which children have been referred to the Channel programme under the auspices of Prevent on dubious grounds. RightsWatch UK’s “Preventing Education” (2016) report foregrounded some of these cases that have arisen in schools, concluding that the combination of practitioner discretion and formal accountability was conducive to erroneous referrals. Cases ranged from a teenage boy being subject to a police interview for distributing leaflets on humanitarian efforts in Palestine, to a fourteen-year-old who was questioned about being affiliated with ‘ISIS’ for using the term ‘‘l’écoterrorisme” when discussing deforestation in a French lesson (Rightswatch, 2016, 71). Such high-profile cases, including that of a four-year-old boy who was referred under Prevent after a teacher misheard his description of a drawing of a cucumber as “cooker-bomb” (RightsWatch, 2016, 71), have provoked ridicule and condemnation amongst some in the teaching community3_{. The National Union of Teachers (NUT), for example, passed a motion at its}

annual conference calling for Prevent’s immediate withdrawal from schools (NUT, 2015). One teacher told the conference:

We have to be clear that we are being put in the position where we are expected to be the frontline stormtroopers who listen, spy and notify the authorities about students that we may be suspicious of (Espinoza, 2015).

Such salient criticism has cast a cloud over Prevent’s relationship to the existing values, goals, and practices of education, though concrete understandings are scarce as many of these assumptions have remained largely unexamined by empirical research.

Much of the ambiguity about Prevent’s delivery in schools and colleges derives from uncertainty about how practitioners make sense of their formal responsibilities. The Channel

Vulnerability Assessment Framework 2012, upon which many of the current Prevent training materials for practitioners are based, is designed to assist practitioners in spotting signs of radicalisation in students (Home Office, 2012a). The signs that a student is ‘engaged’ with an extremist “group, cause or ideology” are presented as follows:

Feelings of grievance and injustice; Feeling under threat; A need for identity, meaning and belonging; A desire for status; A desire for excitement and adventure; A need to dominate and control others; Susceptibility to indoctrination; A desire for political or moral change; Opportunistic involvement; Family

3_{It is important to note that the details of some of these widely-discussed cases (not in the RightsWatch report)}

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or friends involvement in extremism; Being at a transitional time of life; Being influenced or controlled by a group; Relevant mental health issues (Home Office, 2012a)

The model has been much maligned, not least because of its reliance on a psychological study (which has never been published) in which twenty-two indicators for radicalisation were extrapolated from a sample of twenty convicted offenders affiliated with Islam to varying degrees (CAGE, 2016). The use of the Extremist Risk Guidance 22+ (ERG22+) has been lambasted due of a lack of proper scrutiny, with David Miller calling it “a fundamental violation of the principles on which any scientific endeavour rests” (CAGE, 2016, 10). The lack of transparency about ERG22+ has also been condemned by prominent researchers in the fields of psychology, law, political science, and education (CAGE, 2016). This before any discussion about the indicators themselves takes place.

ERG22+ forms the basis of the HO’s guidance for combating nonviolent extremism in schools and colleges, which cites “Islamist” and “Far-Right” extremism as the main threats (Home Office, 2016). This too has been treated with scepticism, with many commentators treating the emphasis on “The Far-Right” as lip-service (Kundnani, 2015). Whilst there is evidence that Channel referrals are increasingly made for those with “right-wing sympathies” (Yorke, 2017), the accusations that Prevent disproportionately targets Muslims continue to linger. This is not helped by the fact that in Prevent’s first iteration, funding for local communities was distributed based on the proportion of Muslim citizens in a given demographic (Thomas, 2010). Again, however, it is difficult to procure an

instructive understanding of the implications of such models without attending to how they unfold in practice, particularly in light of how Prevent has evolved since 2011 (Thomas, 2017).

1.5 Why front-line practice?

The HO’s response to the condemnation of its use of the ERG22+ model for shaping Prevent delivery in public service institutions was revealing. According to one spokesperson, “[t]eachers, social workers and others are familiar with the concepts involved in safeguarding and can readily adapt them to the harms caused by terrorism” (Verkeik, 2015). Much like some of the critique that it seeks to address, this statement rests on assumption. It offers a taken-for-granted, straightforward portrayal of Prevent’s delivery without any substantial evidence to support what the policy looks like in action. The pre-2011 version of the policy has received reasonable empirical attention, with one study finding the “messy, contested and incoherent” nature of practice at local government level (O’Toole et al, 2011), and another foregrounding the conflicting interactions between social cohesion and counter-terrorism policies (Husband & Alam, 2011). Much remains opaque, however, about the ways in which the imperatives of Prevent’s second iteration interact with the existing goals, values, knowledge, and practices of education.

This study is directed towards procuring a richer understanding of how these relationships unfold, and takes the perspective of front-line practice as a point of access. As discussed in the chapter that follows, this emanates from a perspective of street-level bureaucracy as provided by

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Michael Lipsky (1980). This holds that public policy is much better understood through the activities of front-line practitioners than through the distant, simplifying workings of official policy

documentation. Researchers are just beginning to pay attention to the need for to examine the dominant assumptions about Prevent through a focus on front-line practice in schools and colleges (Thomas, 2017), though no concrete findings are available. For example, in May 2017 Thomas indicated the findings of his latest research:

[It] suggests that front-line educational respondents do not find the ‘safeguarding’ element of the Prevent duty, how Prevent relates to broader school/college ‘safeguarding’ systems and approaches in response to varied risks and vulnerabilities faced by students, problematic in theory – it is an approach that they see as realistic in relation to broad understandings of ‘vulnerability’ for this age group (Thomas, 2017, 11).

The research, however, has not yet been published and therefore it is difficult to assess the conclusions drawn. Instead, the implications of what Thomas suggests will be discussed in the conclusion of this study in light of the findings here. This study is directed towards watching the play of front-line practice as it animates the relationship between security and education, with the hope of developing a deepened understanding of the Prevent policy in action.

1.6 The Study

The research is divided into multiple sections. The following chapter unpacks the theoretical insights that frame the study, relating Lipsky’s street-level-bureaucracy to the concepts of securitisation, policy enactment, performativity, and theory of action in order to provide the tools appropriate for effectively addressing the research question: How is the Prevent Duty enacted by front-line

practitioners in English schools and colleges? This leads to the presentation of a more specific set of questions that were used to inform the methodological choices made, which are then presented in the design chapter. The analysis is divided into four sections: Part 1 seeks to contextualise the front-line practice of Prevent by exploring how goals, values, duties, and practices are framed in national-level policy discourses. Part 2 examines how such discourses are translated by managerial actors who seek to shape Prevent’s delivery by front-line practitioners in local settings. This facilitates a detailed analysis in Part 3 of how the dominant assumptions about Prevent practice take shape in the

performances of different types of actors that interact on the front-line in schools and colleges. Part 4 is then able to uncover how front-line practitioners produce strategies for coping with the demands of national security in their work. In anticipation of the findings of this analysis, the performances of front-line practitioners elicit far more instability than assumptions about Prevent’s seamless

relationship with the existing values, knowledge, and practices of education suggest. Despite efforts to regulate the performances of front-line practitioners at the levels of national discourse and middle-management, the discretion inherent in identifying students that are vulnerable to radicalisation elicits a problematic tension in the relationship between education and security. The final conclusions bring all of this together before foregrounding the implications of the findings presented in the analysis. Appendices are used to supplement the design chapter.

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2. Theoretical Framework

This chapter frames the exploration of the delivery of the Prevent programme in English schools and colleges. Securitisation, street-level bureaucracy, policy enactment, performativity, and theory of action are reviewed and related to create a framework for analysing the implementation of the programme. As such, they provide a foundation for understanding what unfolds when individual practitioners navigate the ambiguous terrain where the fields of education and counter-terrorism overlap. The theories introduced guide both the approach to empirical data collection and the analysis of the data together, then offering specific tools for locating, identifying, translating, and comparing meaningful information. Rather than seeking to simply confirm or disconfirm these theories, they are used to draw out nuances in how the data and the theories themselves are understood and applied in specific contexts.

2.1 The Securitisation of Education?

A central focus of this study is to understand how the introduction of national security policy into educational settings interacts with the extant goals, values, knowledge, and practices of schools and colleges; the change this engenders and perhaps how change is resisted. “‘Security,’” as Buzan et al observe, “is the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics” (Buzan et al, 1998, 23). This insight of course underpins the theory of securitisation that permeates contemporary academic discourses in security studies. Securitisation is useful for shaping this study as it provides ways of identifying and analysing the aberrant political processes that occur once the language of security is spoken in a variety of sectors. Securitisation, through its emphasis on such “speech acts” that transform political procedures, is thus important for guiding the exploration of the (re)negotiation of goals, values, knowledge, and practices of education as they interact with those introduced by counter-terrorism through the Prevent programme. As Wæver noted, “[b]y uttering ‘security’ a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it” (Wæver, 1995, 55). The Prevent programme provides an acute example this unfolding in the UK context (particularly in its evolution since 2011). As the radicalisation discourse has increasingly cast the threat of terrorism as pre-emptively governable (Heath-Kelly, 2013), the onus of the state’s counter-extremism strategy has been shifted from local community governance to public services including schools and colleges. Securitisation theory is thus particularly useful for analysing how the “rules of the game” may have been altered in such settings and how actors respond to the extraordinary imperatives imposed upon them.

Securitisation is used here to determine how policy actors in schools and colleges respond to the demands of “stopping young people from being drawn into terrorism” in local settings. Its sensitivity to the role of speech-acts is key for exploring the ways in which the language of

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extremism, radicalisation, and terrorism shape institutional practices through Prevent. Securitisation theory has developed significantly since its inception, and Huysmans’ reflections are useful for capturing what it describes today:

Securitizing in contemporary world politics develops significantly through unspectacular processes of technology driven surveillance, risk management and precautionary governance. These processes are less about declaring a territorial enemy and threat of war than about dispersing techniques of administering uncertainty and mapping dangers (Huysmans, 2011, 375).

Prevent is by definition a “risk management” programme, and it indeed exemplifies a ‘dispersal of techniques of administering uncertainty and mapping [of] dangers’. This insight is important for locating and making sense of the particular ways in which such general processes take shape specifically in the UK context. Introducing a logic of security into education through Prevent is built upon a recognition that the “pre-criminal space” inhabited by would-be terrorists is definitively ambiguous (Kundnani, 2015; Goldberg et al, 2016). This is then used to reinforce the need for “mapping dangers” by training practitioners to identify ‘signs of radicalisation’. Securitisation theory helps to bring the implications of such shifts for political actors (whether organisations or individuals) into focus. It shows that if organisational routines are disrupted and reworked by unfamiliar

imperatives, this usually signifies that a new risk has been successfully legitimised in such a way that practices are required to break from their normal structures (Buzan et al, 1998). When Prevent is viewed through this theoretical lens, it becomes possible to explain the specific ways that such processes unfold.

Some of the theoretical groundwork for analysing securitisation in the context of British counter-radicalisation has recently been laid down, and the empirical focus of this study will contribute to this by exploring how certain conceptual assumptions take practical expression.

Francesco Ragazzi has recently provided a compelling argument for conceptualising the securitisation of social policy in the UK which, in his analysis, is built upon the following principle:

Narrow, professionalised groups of individuals (police, social workers, youth workers) should not have a monopoly on the maintenance of social order. Instead, the entire spectrum of professions that are in contact with the public should be involved (Ragazzi, 2016a, 7).

For Ragazzi, the co-optation of teachers, classroom assistants, and other policy actors in schools and colleges for counter-terrorism work through Prevent is fundamentally rooted in this notion (Ragazzi, 2016a, 7). Ragazzi contends that whilst the logics of welfare and those of security have traditionally shared a complex and interwoven relationship, the Prevent programme has “marked an increased foregrounding of security over welfare” (Ragazzi, 2016a, 1). This leads him to suggest the following:

[I]t indeed appears that the rationality of counter-radicalisation is to inscribe prediction in the tapping, harnessing and use of social relations as modalities of information gathering, influence and coercion (Ragazzi, 2016a, 10).

The significance of this contention is found in that which follows: Ragazzi frames an inquiry into the “long-term consequences of subordinating one of the bases of the fabric of democratic societies” –

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relations of trust cultivated by (in relation to this study) education professionals– “to a constant logic of suspicion” (Ragazzi, 2016a, 10). This research examines how such dynamics play out in the immediate and short terms for those tasked with the Prevent Duty, and this makes it possible to explore the roles of trust and suspicion in shaping practice using empirical data. Ragazzi’s assertions help in framing the exploration of Prevent’s implementation as they maintain a sensitivity to the general processes of securitisation whilst simultaneously providing tools for identifying characteristics specific to the UK context.

Others like Ragazzi have sought to highlight the disconcerting nature of Prevent’s securitising qualities, positing that they naturally bring the goals of national security and those of education into conflict. Kundnani offers one such view:

There is an obvious tension between the imperatives of policing, which is based on gathering information about people, and those of education, which is based on empowering students to think critically and learn how to express their views in effective ways. Young people should be able to fully express their opinions in schools without becoming entangled in the counterterrorism system (Kundnani, 2015, 182).

Whilst a compelling case can be made that securitisation through Prevent fosters the meeting of irreconcilable policy imperatives, this also carries some assumptions that must be explored in

empirical analysis. Securitisation is thus used as a frame for exploring the how such observations take shape in or are challenged by the policy as it is performed. The dual emphasis that securitisation places on both speech and action means that it is essential to analyse how discourses are translated into practice by individuals and institutions to reveal the richness of its character. The “obvious tension” to which Kundnani refers, or Ragazzi’s “constant logic of suspicion,” are of limited utility unless directed towards an effort to capture the idiosyncratic relationship of theory to Prevent practice.

It is worth considering, for example, whether Prevent’s introduction into educational settings reveals a more nuanced relationship than that described by securitisation. Bill Durodie has begun to pose some of these questions. He foregrounds the notion that “rather than seeing this process as being merely one-way, through a so-called securitisation of education,” it is necessary to explore a dialectical relationship between the spheres of counter-terrorism and education (Durodie, 2015, 1). Durodie suggests:

[t]hat a heightened sensitivity to the supposed consequences of inflammatory rhetoric on the well-being of supposedly suggestible or vulnerable students has been in existence within education for quite some time. In that regard, the securitising efforts of politicians and officials are pushing against an open door (Durodie, 2015, 1).

Durodie’s observation of a particular receptiveness in education to policies that look to safeguard vulnerable children from a wide spectrum of harms is also instructive. It is significant for ensuring that this study retains an analytical sensitivity to assumptions about to how the relationship between

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education and counter-terrorism unfolds in practice. As they are drawn from discourse and media analysis, however, Durodie’s observations are of limited effectiveness for capturing the reality of Prevent. Likewise, the primacy of securitisation for describing Prevent’s interaction with education can only be maintained if supported by empirical data demonstrating how the policy is performed. A framework must therefore be developed (building on the groundwork laid by securitisation) using a set of sophisticated concepts that hone the analysis on sites at which assumption can be explored in relation to practice.

2.2 Street-Level Bureaucracy

If the discussion about Prevent is to lead to instructive insights, it is essential to see how these general concerns about security get expressed in the details of practice. Here Lipsky’s classic concept of street-level bureaucracy is used to address how the intertwining goals, norms, and values are expressed in the unstable landscape of practice. Lipsky’s 1980 book “Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services,” has become an enduring influence in the study of public policy. It recognised that policy “is not best understood as made in legislatures or top-floor suites of high-ranking administrators, because in important ways it is actually made in the crowded offices and daily encounters of street-level workers” (Lipsky, 1980, xii). Street-level bureaucracy thus sustains a focus on the active agents who respond to policy directives, distinguishing front-line practitioners from other members of policy bureaucracies in important ways. As such, rather than official regulations and rules, it is “the decisions of street-level bureaucrats, the routines they

establish, and the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures [that] effectively become the public policies they carry out” (Lipsky, 1980, xii). These insights provide a frame for analysing the relationship of national security policy and social policy by focusing on how it is played out by individuals on the front-line.

Lipsky (1980) demonstrated that even though institutions regulate and systematise heavily to limit the variability experienced by the citizens who seek services from public workers, the discretion and autonomy inherent in street-level bureaucracy guarantees a level of unpredictability. In their interactions with citizens, public professionals like teachers need to “process workloads expeditiously,” balancing numerous demands from above with a need to make decisions immediately (Lipsky, 1980, 18). As Hupe and Hill have observed, Lipsky’s model is helpful for approaching policy analysis due to its recognition that “rules—whatever they come from —are never self-executing.” (Hupe & Hill, 2007, 281). In fact, actors are often faced with “situations in which rules are ambiguous or even

contradictory” (Hupe & Hill, 2007, 281) whist simultaneously confronting an imperative to act immediately, requiring them to use their initiative to produce the best outcomes (van Hulst et al, 2011). This is instructive for shaping this study as it signposts how policies come into being through the idiosyncratic performances of practitioners. The Prevent Duty vests front-line practitioners with considerable discretion in assessing students that are ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’ (RightsWatch, 2016), but the details of how this takes practical expression remain opaque. Much remains to be

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understood about how practitioners’ existing goals, values, knowledge, and practices interact with the practical and moral imperatives of Prevent. By illustrating that public policy is never as stable as its characterisation on paper, Lipsky’s theory is therefore important for encouraging a focus on the ways in which Prevent’s true nature is revealed as practitioners exercise their discretion and autonomy.

Lipsky’s model offers a framework for exploring how discretion, rule formation, and the unpredictable character of what practitioners face unfold in Prevent (Hupe & Hill, 2007). Street-level bureaucracy “presupposes a degree of trust” in practitioners’ “competence to produce desired responses, and to deal with situations that may be exceptional in a sensible and creative way” (Hupe & Hill, 2007, 282). If Prevent exemplifies the securitisation of education, then this is as much about the creative responses, coping strategies, and rules of thumb of front-line practitioners as it is about language. Lipsky highlighted that practice remains dynamic despite efforts to limit the discretion of street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980), which for teachers arrive in the form of Prevent training and guidance documents based on the ERG22+. As such, street-level bureaucracy provides a useful way of making sense of educators’ efforts to cope these regulatory forces whilst also retaining space to determine the services that they provide.

The drama of security means that it is not only a concern that dominates all others, but one that perhaps comes into tension with other kinds of competing values as it permeates areas of public and private life. Street-level bureaucracy opens a window into seeing how such relationships develop. Focusing on Prevent as performed by practitioners, in relation to how it is constructed at other levels of the policy bureaucracy, enables a perspective of how the assumptions of securitisation take practical expression on the boundary between state and public occupied by front-line practitioners. If the purported conflict between the imperatives of security and education through Prevent is to be understood, the performances of practitioners in schools and colleges offer a site at which it is visible and can be accessed. Such tensions are increasingly spotlighted as Western states seek to act on a variety of ‘security issues,’ and a profound example of this can be found in the response of Los Angeles City officials to an increase in the discretion afforded to front-line workers in the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Their letter to the ICE provides an acute example of how conflicting organisational imperatives are embodied in the practical activities and social identities of street-level professionals:

[w]hen ICE agents targeting immigrants identify themselves only as “police” officers, they undermine decades of this work, eroding public safety in our city. In Los Angeles, the term “police” is synonymous with the Los Angeles Police Department, so for ICE agents to represent themselves as police misleads the public into believing that they are interacting with LAPD. This is especially corrosive given that to advance public safety, LAPD does not initiate police action with the objective of determining a person’s immigration status…. Especially in these turbulent and uncertain times, we urge that ICE agents operating in Los Angeles immediately stop representing that they are “police” officers (Feuer et al, 2017).

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This example highlights how the conflict between different public goals (public safety and immigration control) can be accessed via the daily activities of front-line practitioners like the ICE agents.

In tandem with securitisation, Lipsky’s model enables an analysis of security not merely as an ambiguous symbol (Wolfers, 1952) aloof from the population it purports to represent. Rather, a Lipskian appreciation of the fundamental roles of front-line practitioners in constituting what Prevent iscan lead to revealing insights for both schools of public administration and critical security studies. It also offers a way of exploring practitioners’ autonomy (Lipsky, 1980) as they seek to resist efforts to limit their discretion when forced to confront the ambiguity of identifying students ‘at risk of radicalisation.’ This means that in order to understand the complexity of front-line practice, it is also necessary to pay attention to what occurs on other levels; the managerial actors with whom they interact, and the national-level policies to which they seek to respond. Lipsky used the term ‘street-level bureaucracies’ to connect all agencies “whose workers interact with and have wide discretion over the dispensation of benefits or the allocation of public sanctions” (Lipsky, 1980, xii). Its use here ensures a capacity for comparison in future research relating the use of autonomy and discretion across the institutions tasked with Prevent. It is now possible to develop this framework to meet the particularities of the context under study.

2.3 Policy Enactment

It is unlikely that a single theory can capture the complexity of front-line practice (Loyens & Maesschalck, 2010), and here enactment theory supplements Lipsky’s institutional framework. Lipsky’s model of discretionary policy-formation focused on the coping strategies, or forms of “bureaucratic rationing” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000), that made particular sense in the context of the distribution of benefits in social welfare bureaucracies. These, however, do not

accurately describe enough of the subtleties of contemporary front-line practice in British educational settings. Street-level bureaucrats do not always act to “make their work easier, safer, and more rewarding” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000, 329). Rather, as Maynard-Moody and Musheno note, they will “often make their work harder, more unpleasant, more dangerous and less officially

successful in order to respond to the needs of individuals.” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000, 329). Practitioners often base their actions on normative choices, rather than solely responding to rules, procedures, and regulations (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000). This is certainly true of many educational practitioners, whose efforts to deal with other people in a “formal professional context which is also simultaneously a context of care, obligation and rights” produces unpredictability (Murphy & Skillen, 2016, 20). Prevent’s demands in schools and colleges are both practical and normative; practitioners are required to know how to identify children ‘at risk of radicalisation’ (Home Office, 2016) and must consider their duty of care to students when deciding how to act. Enactment theory is used to draw out nuances in how practitioners respond to these imperatives in educational

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settings.

Enactment theory can be used to describe what policy work looks like in educational settings, and is built on the observation that “policies are crude and simple, [whereas] practice is

sophisticated, complex and unstable” (Flew & Ball, 1995, 10-11). Educational sociologist Stephen Ball has been influential in theorising the instability of policy activity in schools since the late 1980s, and it is the version of enactment theory he has developed along with his colleagues that is particularly relevant to this study. The term enactment is used to reflect an understanding of policies as always “interpreted” and ‘translated’ by diverse policy actors in educational contexts, rather than discussing policies as merely ‘implemented’ or ‘delivered’ (Braun, Maguire & Ball, 2010, 547). It is most useful here for investigating how “teachers come to understand new policy ideas through the lens of their values and pre-existing knowledge and practices, often interpreting, adapting, or transforming policy messages as they put them in place” (Braun, Ball & Maguire, 2011, 581). This strikes at the heart of what this study seeks to explore; how the introduction of the imperatives of national security policy into schools and colleges interact with the extant goals, values, knowledge, and practices of individual practitioners.

This theoretical perspective on policy enactments in UK schools is central to framing where Prevent sits in this context. Here, enactment acknowledges that new policies in schools are always “set within a myriad of others which address other aspects of school life and over-lap, inter-relate and contradict” (Braun, Ball & Maguire, 2011, 581). This study seeks to reveal new insights into the particular characteristics of Prevent’s relationship with other policies in schools, viewed through the eyes of the practitioners tasked with its enactment. Whilst Prevent is often discussed in safeguarding terms (Home Office, 2016), little is known about where and how it overlaps, interrelates, and conflicts with other policies in practice. This reinforces the need to engage the actors who embody these activities. In this spirit, enactment theory can be key to ensuring a sensitivity to the agency of the individual practitioners who give policies like Prevent practical expression. It indeed acknowledges the creative, complex, sophisticated, and unique ways in which they respond to new imperatives (Braun, Ball & Maguire, 2011). Building on Lipsky’s presentation of discretion and autonomy, enactment illustrates the particularities of how discretion is used in schools. It also shows that such activities always occur in localised contexts that require situated processes of balancing different priorities. This study is thus aimed at understanding the ways in which the imperative to ‘stop young people from being drawn into terrorism’ is translated and performed by practitioners in local contexts in order to better understand what Prevent looks like in action.

2.4 Policy-type and Positionality in Enactment theory

The development of enactment theory through empirical research in British schools has continued to yield insights into how education policy works. Policy activity in schools, as Lingard and

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Ogza describe, involves “dealing with all texts, apart from curriculum, which seek to frame, constitute and change educational practices” (Lingard & Ogza, 2007, 2). As there are myriad imperatives scattered across the policy landscape of any given school or college, it is important to delineate different forms of policy to develop a perspective on where Prevent sits. Maguire et al (2014) have recently emphasised how policy-type influences enactments. Building on Wallace’s (1991) earlier observations, they demonstrate that “the form and extent of enactment will depend on whether a policy is mandated, strongly recommended or merely suggested” (Maguire et al, 2014, 496). The ways in which individual practitioners initially “read” and respond to policy are conditioned by

questions such as: “Does the policy have to be done?... What does it really mean in practical terms?” (Maguire et al, 2014, 486). Whilst all policies require a creative element of interpretation, and often “interpretation of interpretations” (Maguire et al, 2014, 486) by policy actors, these vary across policy types and from person to person. A richer knowledge of what Prevent looks like on the ground can be developed through an awareness of what type of policy it is.

Policies with high stakes have been found to naturally “narrow the range for imaginative responses” (Maguire et al, 2014, 496), and in this sense enactment theory helps to contextualise the stakes of Prevent compliance. Whilst it is tempting to assume that Prevent, for which the stakes are characterised as stopping young people from being drawn into terrorism (and are thus significantly higher than those for academic attainment) therefore exhibits few imaginative responses, this is belied by the nature of street-level bureaucracy. Maguire et al have found that while high stakes policies offer little discretion in terms of how their agendas are determined, creative and imaginative responses can still make such work “more engaging and pedagogically valuable” (Maguire et al, 2014, 493-4). The majority of high stakes policies analysed by Maguire and her colleagues relate to student and organisational performance academic standards and attainment. Much remains to be understood about the Prevent policy, in which the stakes are simultaneously framed in terms of “safeguarding” and an ideological struggle (HM Government, 2015). Prevent requires practitioners to make

ambiguous normative choices that include identifying whether a child is displaying ‘extremist views,’ and then deciding if this is sufficiently concerning to warrant sharing information with other

professionals. By paying specific attention to how the stakes of Prevent are translated in local contexts by practitioners, it is possible to develop a richer understanding of its interaction with existing goals, values, knowledge, and practices. This, in turn, can elicit nuance in the relationship between security and education.

As a supplement to Lipsky’s general model, enactment theory provides a template for

exploring how different positions within a policy bureaucracy influence performances of initiatives like Prevent. Schools and colleges are “highly complex and internally differentiated organisations”

(Maguire et al, 2014, 486), and this heterogeneity “lends itself to divergences in the various

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of empirical research into the Prevent policy in educational settings, knowledge of how it is variously enacted by different types of practitioners is scarce. This study seeks to understand how individual actors define their roles and duties as related to Prevent, and how their interpretations of their positions are expressed in their enactments. Ball et al have illustrated how managerial actors, like Lipsky’s “managers” (1980), often provide “pre-emptive readings” (2011, 15) of policies through which they seek to regulate the enactments of other staff in their setting based on what they identify to be valuable in their context. This research pursues an enriched understanding of which types of actors engage in “pre-emptive readings” and how these are expressed in the context of existing values and practices. Through this it will be possible to view how front-line practitioners respond to this initial interpretive activity; do they derive “interpretations of interpretations” (Ball et al, 2011, 15) that closely resemble efforts to limit their discretion in enacting Prevent? Or do they resist in

imaginative ways like Lipsky (1980) describes? Each of these considerations contribute to a guiding principle of this study; that producing meaningful knowledge about how security policy takes shape in schools and colleges is contingent upon understanding how it interacts with the practices, values and positions of different types of practitioners.

2.5 Performativity

The concept of performativity provides a context for understanding how Prevent enactments interact with accountability mechanisms in schools and colleges. Braun et al have demonstrated that policy formation in British education has been “appropriated by the central state in its determination to control, manage and transform society and, in particular reform and ‘modernise’ education provision and ‘raise standards’” (Braun et al, 2010, 547). This has resulted in the roles and practices of practitioners in schools and colleges becoming heavily prescribed by the state (Braun et al, 2010). In turn, this has given rise to the increasing role played by performativity in shaping policy

enactments in schools and colleges (Ball, 2003). Performativity in this context describes “...a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic)” (Ball, 2003, 216). The interactions between practitioners’ responses to Prevent with the generic accountability mechanisms used to regulate and monitor policy activity are better understood when the insights of performativity are considered.

Performativity is instructive because it links the Lipskian notion of front-line practitioners (as always dancing between regulatory efforts to limit their discretion and their own attempts to cope or push back) to the context of English schools and colleges. The performativity that Ball describes in education is reflective of a general trend in which professional practices in the public sector have become engulfed in a culture of accountability (Ball, 2003). Indeed, Ranson’s work illustrates how this shift has been central to the development of “the performative society” which is nourished by a “preoccupation with specifying goals and tasks [which] distorts the practice of public services as

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quantifiable models of quality” where “evaluation increasingly displaces concern for the internal goods of excellence” (Ranson, 2003, 460). “Ofsted,” or the Standards and Effectiveness Agency in the Department of Education, emerged in this direction based on the logic that “improving the

performance of schools required increasingly meticulous specification of the ‘inputs’, processes, and outputs that are expected of schools” (Ranson, 2003, 460). The looming presence of government inspections through Oftsed have contributed to what many school and college workers describe as a palpable climate of fear and discontent (The Guardian, 2017; Thompson, 2017). Ranson attributes this to:

[a] sophisticated national system of regulations… put in place to measure and monitor a limited set of performances and outcomes – principally, test and examination results which inadequately represent the more comprehensive spiritual, cultural, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values and purposes the nation has established for its schools (Section 1 of the 1988 Education Act) (Ranson, 2007, 467).

Ball notes the conditioning effects that this has on practitioners. He observes that the performances of individuals “serve as measures of productivity output, or displays of ‘quality’, or ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection” and thus come to “represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgement” (Ball, 2003, 216). Whilst this is obviously influential, street-level bureaucracy and enactment have shown that front-line practitioners can always find ways to add value to their practice on their own terms.

The related theories of street-level bureaucracy and enactment have illustrated that even the most high-stakes or heavily monitored policies can produce imaginative responses from practitioners. Given the central role of situated interpretive activity in all policy work in schools, Prevent’s inclusion in Ofsted criteria cannot be expected to produce stable and consistent responses. That said, it is important to consider how practitioners’ enactments of Prevent interact with the technologies of performativity (Ball, 2003). The regularity of Ofsted’s inspections means that performativity in schools can “become a continuous process, an orientation to shape and reshape the course of practice” (Ranson, 2007, 469). It is therefore important to consider how performativity might influence how practitioners present their enactments, and how this might perhaps require creative ways of accessing the values underneath their performances.

Very little is known about the idiosyncrasies of practitioners’ performances of Prevent in different contexts; what they say as they enact the policy, how this communicates their existing values, and whether these are altered by Prevent’s unfamiliar demands. Performativity pushes practitioners to engage in a particular form of ‘gamesmanship’ in which they must “take responsibility for the relationship between the security of their employment and their contribution to the

competitiveness of the goods and services they produce” (Willmott, 1993, 522). Much remains to be understood about how these types of coping strategies are applied in practitioners’ enactments of Prevent; does it produce routines of ‘presentation’ and merely ‘being seen to be doing what is

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required’? (Ranson, 2007). This is a defining characteristic of how performativity can function in such settings, as the imperative for individual actors (“to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations”) pushes them to “set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live in an existence of calculation” (Ball, 2003, 215). Conversely, for some practitioners, inauthenticity is unbearable, and they thus seek to engage in acts of resistance (Ball, 2003, 215). By engaging with practitioners as they seek to respond to the demands of national security policy, this study is directed towards understanding these aspects of their performances; where and when discretion gets used, how individual translations foster different forms of responses including promotion, compliance, coping, and pushback. Performativity therefore provides an important tool for locating and identifying different types of responses within the broader policy landscape of schools and colleges.

2.6 Theory of Action

Argyris and Schön's theory of action (1976) is used to access how the imperatives of security interact with the values, beliefs, and routines of educational practitioners through their enactments of Prevent. Enactment theory has already been used to illustrated that “teachers come to understand new policy ideas through the lens of their values and pre-existing knowledge and practices, often interpreting, adapting, or transforming policy messages as they put them in place” (Braun, Ball & Maguire, 2011, 581). Argyris and Schön’s work demonstrates that, often, the values and beliefs that guide the actions of teachers can be difficult to access without close attention being paid to the relationship between their ‘espoused theories’ and their ‘theories-in-use’ (Argyris & Schön, 1976). The former describes how practitioners speak about their actions; the knowledge and values they

explicitly invoke when justifying what they do (Argyris & Schön, 1976). Espoused theories are thus “the words we use to convey what we do or what we would like others to think we do” (Smith, 2001, 2). Conversely, theory-in-use articulates the tacit knowledge and beliefs that actually govern (and are reflected in) the actions of practitioners. Theories-in-use articulate the “assumptions about self, others, the situation, and the connections among action, consequence, and situation” that guide practitioners’ actions when responding to a policy like Prevent (Argyris & Schön, 1974, 7). This is particularly important to this study in light of the preceding insight into performativity; the ways in which practitioners in schools and colleges often articulate their practice have been shown to be governed by a need to respond to value systems imposed upon them by others. The ways in which their justifications for acting in certain ways are regulated by “moments of inspection” that often cause them to “set aside their personal beliefs and live in an existence of calculation” (Ball, 2003, 215) mean that understanding how they enact Prevent requires a sensitivity to how theories of action develop.

Practitioners are often not explicitly conscious of the beliefs and knowledge that drive their actions due to their tacit nature (Argyris & Schön, 1976). This poses significant implications for this research, in conjunction with how performativity can create an even greater disparity between the beliefs they hold and those they espouse. Particularly around such a normatively sensitive policy area,

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it is likely that what practitioners say they do will sometimes differ from what they actually do. Whilst theories-in-use can be inferred from action (Argyris et al, 1990, 82) to provide a more accurate insight into how actors actually decide to act upon policy imperatives, the very nature of Prevent means that observing action is extremely difficult4_{. The assumptions about self, others, and situations}

that govern practitioners’ enactments of Prevent can, however, be accessed through how they reflect on their actions (Argyris et al, 1990). Teachers usually do not articulate grand pedagogical theories to explain why they act in certain ways, but in fact often articulate the meaning of their behaviour through situated narratives or anecdotes related to specific cases that they have experienced (Munby et al, 2001). These insights offered by Argyris and Schön are therefore central to shaping the

research design that follows. They guide the analysis of how Prevent interacts with the existing goals, values, knowledge, and practices of street-level bureaucrats by ensuring that such insights can be drawn from the relationships between actors’ espoused theories and their theories-in-use. Whereas the pressures of performativity might produce certain types of responses (that are also revealing), practitioners’ reflections on their actions taken in specific cases can uncover a richer way of understanding the nuance and complexity of Prevent enactments.

2.7 Chapter Summary

This section uses the interrelated theoretical insights presented above to outline key lines of inquiry that supplement the main research question: How is the Prevent Duty enacted by front-line practitioners in schools and colleges? The concepts of securitisation, street-level bureaucracy, policy enactment, performativity, and theory of action have been integrated into this framework to examine the interactions between national security policy and education that occur through Prevent.

Securitisation plays an important contextualising role, providing effective ways of identifying and analysing the aberrant political processes that occur once the language of security is introduced into a new domain. By illuminating the role of “speech acts” in transforming political procedures— such as the transfer of knowledge in schools and colleges — securitisation helps to frame the questions at the centre of this study. One such inquiry relates to understanding the (re)negotiation of goals, values, knowledge and practices of education as these interact with those of counter-terrorism through Prevent. Equally, whilst scholars like Ragazzi and Kundnani have offered compelling cases that purport to cast Prevent as an archetype of the securitisation of education, many questions remain unanswered due to a lack of empirical evidence. Whether or not, for instance, the imperatives of counter-terrorism and those of education are irreconcilable cannot be fully addressed without

exploring how these dynamics take practical expression. This study is not directed towards confirming or disconfirming these assumptions in a way that can be generalised, but rather it is aimed at

exploring whether they are reflected in the daily performances of practitioners in search of nuances in the broader relationship. Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy is thus used to provide a focal point for this

4_{Cases rely on practitioners’ relationships with their students (which often feature private conversations) that}

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analysis, emanating from the position that the Prevent policy is better understood as the interactions of practitioners themselves as they animate the relationship of security to education through the need to act.

Lipsky’s model demonstrates that Prevent is the product of the daily performances of street-level workers in schools and colleges. If Prevent exemplifies the securitisation of education, then this is as much about the coping strategies, rules of thumb, and improvisations of front-line practitioners as it is about discourse. Street-level bureaucracy captures how the practice of policy remains dynamic despite efforts to limit the discretion of front-line workers (Lipsky, 1980), which for educators arrive in the form of Prevent training and guidance documents like the ERG22+. Lipsky’s framework is

complimented by enactment theory for this reason, along with its acknowledgement that front-line practitioners in public services are forever caught between ‘top down’ efforts to regulate and their ‘bottom up’ attempts to autonomously determine outcomes (Lipsky, 1980). Enactment illustrates how educational practitioners do not merely seek to cope with a barrage of regulations, but also base their decision-making on normative choices and sometimes complicate their own practices to benefit those they serve. This angle is particularly relevant here as the demands of the Prevent policy in schools and colleges are both practical and normative; practitioners are required to know how to identify children ‘at risk of radicalisation’ and must also consider their duty of care to students when making choices. The terminology of translation, reading, and interpretation in enactment theory provides a more sophisticated set of tools than the language of implementation, which omits much of the imagination and instability that characterise practice. Another key question for this study then becomes: how do practitioners translate, adapt, and transform the imperatives of Prevent as they seek to understand it through the lens of their values, pre-existing knowledge, and practices? (Braun, Ball & Maguire, 2011). By foreground the roles of policy-type and positionality, enactment theory enhances an ability to locate and analyse meaningful information in this responding to this question.

Performativity is significant for setting the analysis of these dynamics into the particular context in which Prevent is enacted. This study, by engaging with practitioners as they seek to respond to the demands of Prevent, targets a better understanding of where and when discretion gets used, and how individual translations foster different types of responses including promotion, compliance, coping, and resistance (Ball, 2003). These forms of response are much more effectively identified and understood when considered in relation to the specific technologies of performativity with which practitioners in schools and colleges have been shown to regularly interact. An insight into how performativity fosters different ways of promoting, coping, and resisting policy imperatives in schools makes this an important backdrop for making sense of how actors respond to Prevent. This prompts another question: how do practitioners cope with efforts to regulate their performances of Prevent and what do their responses imply about the broader relationship between education and security? The concept of theory of action begins to bring these insights and their implications for the

The puzzles of "preventing extremism" : an exploratory study of enactments of the Prevent Duty by front-line practitioners in English schools and colleges