The Prevent Duty in Practice

Course lessons

Lesson 1. The Statutory Foundation: Section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015

The course opens with the legal source of the entire duty: section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which requires schools, among other institutions subject to the Act, to have "due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism." Learners examine what a due regard standard demands in practice, distinguishing it from an absolute duty to prevent harm and from merely voluntary good practice, and considering how a public body demonstrates that regard was in fact given. The lesson establishes that the duty attaches to the institution while its discharge depends on the observational and procedural competence of individual staff, which is precisely why staff training is the guidance's central mechanism. A closing exercise requires learners to state in their own words what due regard means for a classroom teacher; this formulation becomes the reference point against which every later lesson is checked.

Lesson 2. The 2023 Prevent Duty Guidance: Status, Scope, and How to Read It

This lesson teaches the instrument through which the section 26 duty is operationalised: the Prevent duty guidance issued under section 29 of the 2015 Act, in force from 31 December 2023 and replacing prior versions. Learners study the relationship between the Act, which creates the duty, and the guidance, against which the adequacy of a school's due regard is assessed, and they practise locating and reading the training provisions at paragraphs 156 to 160 in the primary text rather than in secondary summaries. The lesson makes edition-consciousness an explicit professional habit: statutory guidance is periodically reissued, and a member of staff who cannot name the edition in force cannot know whether their training is current. The checkpoint exercise requires learners to retrieve the guidance on GOV.UK and identify the paragraphs governing staff training.

Lesson 3. Prevent Within the Safeguarding System: KCSIE 2025 and the Designated Safeguarding Lead

Prevent is presented as a safeguarding responsibility rather than a surveillance function: the object of professional attention is susceptibility to being drawn into terrorism, not ideology as such, and there is no test of belief that staff are asked to administer. The lesson maps how KCSIE 2025, in force from 1 September 2025, integrates Prevent into the school's safeguarding architecture - Prevent awareness training is required of the designated safeguarding lead and any deputies (Annex C), and whole-staff safeguarding and child protection training runs from staff induction through regular updates and at least annual refreshers (Part one, paras 11-12; Part 2, paras 123-124). Learners also confront an honest currency note: the 2025 edition contains only technical changes, and the Department for Education has signalled substantive revision following the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill and the national audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse, so this course states the edition it covers and will be reissued when a new edition takes force. The exercise asks learners to locate the designated safeguarding lead and deputy arrangements in their own school's child protection policy.

Lesson 4. Who Must Be Trained, and How Often: Paragraphs 156 to 160 and the Proportionality Principle

This lesson gives a close reading of the five training paragraphs that define the market for this course and the compliance question for every school. Paragraph 156 establishes that relevant staff should receive Prevent training; paragraph 157 sets the three competencies - understanding the factors that lead people to support terrorist ideologies, recognising susceptibility to terrorism, and knowing what action to take, including internal referral arrangements; paragraph 158 leaves the decision about who is trained and how frequently to the setting, proportionate to local risk, while naming staff who interact most frequently with learners, staff overseeing Prevent adherence, and staff managing external speakers; paragraph 159 requires more in-depth training, updated at least every two years, for designated safeguarding leads and others with Prevent-specific responsibilities; and paragraph 160 points settings to free GOV.UK training from the Home Office covering awareness, referrals, and Channel. The lesson is careful with vocabulary: the induction at which KCSIE requires staff safeguarding training is workplace induction for all staff, and is distinct from the two-year statutory induction that early career teachers complete under the quality assurance of an appropriate body. Learners finish by drafting a defensible answer to the question a school must be able to answer under paragraph 158: who, in this setting, needs Prevent training, at what depth, and on what cycle.

Lesson 5. The Drivers: Factors That Lead People to Support Terrorist Ideologies

The first paragraph 157 competency requires staff to understand the factors that lead people to support terrorist ideologies, and this lesson builds that understanding with scholarly discipline about sources. The statutory text names the competency but does not enumerate the factors, so the lesson distinguishes explicitly between what the guidance requires and the supporting evidence base - drawn from the official training materials the guidance itself references and from published research on radicalisation - used to satisfy it. Learners work through factor domains such as grievance, identity-seeking, belonging, personal crisis, and exposure to persuasive ideological framing, treating them as conditions that raise susceptibility rather than as predictive markers. Case vignettes require learners to identify which factors are present, which are absent, and why factor presence alone never constitutes a concern in itself.

Lesson 6. The Ideological Landscape: What In-Depth Training Must Include

Paragraph 159 expects designated safeguarding leads and others with Prevent-specific responsibilities to receive more in-depth training, including on extremist and terrorist ideologies, updated at least every two years, and this lesson delivers the ideological content that expectation names. Learners survey the principal ideological categories in current casework - Islamist extremism, extreme right-wing terrorism, and cases of mixed or unclear ideology - with attention to how these categories evolve and why classification is often genuinely difficult at the point a school first notices concern. The lesson is explicit that threat pictures change faster than course editions, so learners are directed to current official publications for the live picture and taught to treat this lesson as a framework rather than a snapshot. All staff completing the course gain enough ideological literacy to contextualise a concern; learners in designated safeguarding lead roles are reminded that the two-yearly in-depth update expectation attaches specifically to their tier.

Lesson 7. Online Radicalisation and the Filtering and Monitoring Interface

This lesson addresses the environment in which much contemporary radicalisation risk arises: online platforms, algorithmic recommendation, closed communities, and the meme and grievance-narrative registers in which extremist material circulates among school-age learners. It then connects that environment to the staff-facing obligations already present in the safeguarding training framework, since KCSIE 2025 requires whole-staff safeguarding training to include online safety, encompassing an understanding of expectations, applicable roles, and responsibilities in relation to filtering and monitoring (Part one, para 12). The lesson draws the boundary of the teacher's role precisely: the classroom teacher's contribution is informed noticing and prompt internal reporting, not device surveillance or the technical administration of filtering systems. Scenario work asks learners to distinguish material that warrants a conversation, material that warrants a referral to the designated safeguarding lead, and material that additionally engages the school's filtering and monitoring processes.

Lesson 8. Recognising Susceptibility Without Stereotyping

The second paragraph 157 competency is the ability to recognise susceptibility to terrorism, and this lesson trains it while confronting its best-documented failure mode, which is over-referral driven by stereotype rather than observation. Learners study behavioural change over time as the unit of observation, weigh protective factors alongside factors of concern, and practise separating a pupil's expressed opinion, however uncomfortable, from evidence of being drawn toward terrorism. The lesson insists on the framing established in Lesson 3: susceptibility, not suspicion, and no ideology test. A calibrated scenario bank presents matched cases in which surface characteristics differ but the underlying behavioural evidence is identical, requiring learners to demonstrate that their judgements track the evidence and not the demographics.

Lesson 9. The Classroom Dimension: Curriculum Resilience and Safe Discussion of Controversial Issues

Training that ends at recognition misses the classroom's preventive contribution, so this lesson addresses how teaching itself builds learner resilience against the factors examined in Lesson 5: critical engagement with sources, structured discussion of controversial issues in which disagreement is voiced and examined safely, and a classroom culture in which a pupil who encounters extremist material tells an adult. The lesson situates this practice within Part Two of the Teachers' Standards, the personal and professional conduct part that applies to all teachers, including those on statutory induction; the precise conduct wording, including its treatment of fundamental British values, is quoted in the lesson script directly from the source document rather than paraphrased. Learners rehearse facilitation moves for the moments teachers most fear, such as a pupil voicing an extremist talking point mid-lesson, distinguishing the pedagogical response from the safeguarding response and showing when both are needed. The checkpoint asks learners to plan one curriculum-embedded discussion of a controversial issue with its safeguarding exit route identified in advance.

Lesson 10. External Speakers and Events: Diligence, and the Boundary with Regulated Activity

Paragraph 158 expressly includes staff who manage external speakers among those the setting should train, and this lesson equips exactly that cohort. Learners build a proportionate diligence process for visiting speakers and events: advance enquiry, review of a speaker's publicly available record, conditions on the engagement, and documented sign-off, with the depth of scrutiny scaled to the setting's Prevent risk assessment. The lesson then draws a boundary that is frequently confused in practice: the pre-appointment checking framework of KCSIE 2025 Part Three, within which the concept of regulated activity determines the level of vetting for those who will work with children, is a distinct regime from Prevent-driven diligence on a visiting speaker, and the lesson teaches only what KCSIE Part Three states while directing learners to their school's own visitor and vetting policies for local detail. The exercise requires learners to process two speaker requests, one straightforward and one requiring conditions, and to produce the documentation trail for each.

Lesson 11. Taking Action: Internal Referral Arrangements and the Designated Safeguarding Lead

The third paragraph 157 competency is knowing what action to take in response to a concern, including the setting's internal referral arrangements, and this lesson converts that clause into executable procedure. The route for a classroom teacher runs through the designated safeguarding lead, whose role, deputies, and required Prevent awareness training are specified in KCSIE 2025 Annex C; learners study what a well-formed internal referral contains - observed behaviour described factually and dated, context, factors of concern and protective factors, and the absence of speculation about ideology or intent. The lesson covers timeliness, the handling of urgent cases, and the member of staff's residual responsibility to follow up if a concern appears to have gone nowhere. Learners draft a complete internal referral from a scenario file, and the drafting rubric from this lesson is reused in the capstone assessment.

Lesson 12. Channel and Multi-Agency Support After a Referral

This lesson follows the concern beyond the school gate to Channel, the multi-agency mechanism through which support is arranged for people assessed as susceptible to being drawn into terrorism. The verified sources for this course establish Channel's place in the training expectation - the guidance directs settings to free Home Office training covering awareness, referrals, and Channel (para 160) - and the lesson teaches the post-referral sequence at the level those sources support, directing learners to the official Channel module for current operational detail rather than reproducing unverified procedural claims. Emphasis falls on what the school experiences in practice: the referral is the beginning of a supportive process rather than an accusation, the school remains involved as information-holder and often as part of the support around the pupil, and the pupil remains a pupil throughout. Scenario work rehearses how a teacher continues to work with a child while multi-agency support is in place, and how to respond to colleagues or parents who mischaracterise the process as punitive.

Lesson 13. Proportionality, Rights, and Data Protection in Prevent Casework

Prevent casework processes sensitive personal information about identifiable children, and this lesson grounds that processing in the verified statutory position: schools are data controllers under the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018, and records of concern, referrals, and any subsequent information sharing must be handled accordingly. The lesson teaches accurate and factual recording, need-to-know circulation, and the discipline of separating observation from inference, alongside the professional handling of parental concerns about the duty and the imperative, carried forward from Lesson 8, of applying the duty without discrimination. Two honesty notes are built into the teaching text: first, no primary source verified for this course supports any fixed statutory cadence for data protection training, and circulating claims of a legally required interval, such as every two years, are unverified and are not repeated here; second, the Information Commissioner's Office publishes expectations on induction and refresher training for staff handling personal data, but that material was identified and summarised rather than full-text verified in the underlying research, so learners are directed to the ICO's current published framework itself. The checkpoint asks learners to review a specimen record of concern and correct its data-handling failures.

Lesson 14. Evidencing Compliance: The Risk Assessment, the Training Record, and Inspection

Because paragraph 158 assigns the who-and-how-often decision to the setting, a school must be able to show the reasoning behind its answer, and this lesson teaches the evidence chain that does so: a documented Prevent risk assessment, a training plan derived from it, and a training record demonstrating delivery, into which an edition-stamped certificate from this course feeds directly. KCSIE 2025 notes that schools are free to record additional information alongside the single central record, giving the example of dates on which safeguarding and safer recruitment training was undertaken (para 278), a recommended rather than statutory practice that this lesson treats as the natural evidence artefact. Learners also confront two facts about the limits of any purchased course: training should be in line with any advice from the local safeguarding partners (KCSIE 2025, para 123), whose local expectations can exceed the national baseline and which this course complements rather than replaces, and Ofsted grades safeguarding on a binary met or not met scale under the framework in force from November 2025, so gaps in the training record carry consequences disproportionate to their size. The exercise is an audit: learners test a specimen school training record against paragraphs 156 to 159 and identify what an inspector would find missing.

Lesson 15. Capstone: Integrated Scenario Assessment, Referral Drafting, and Maintaining Currency

The capstone integrates the full course through an assessed scenario bank spanning the ideological range studied in Lesson 6 and the judgement problems studied in Lessons 5, 7, and 8. Learners complete three graded tasks: drafting a full internal referral to the designated safeguarding lead using the Lesson 11 rubric, writing a reasoned justification for not referring in a deliberately borderline case, and auditing a specimen Prevent risk assessment and training record against paragraphs 156 to 159. Passing the assessment generates the completion certificate stating course title, six clock hours, the editions covered (Prevent duty guidance in force 31 December 2023; KCSIE 2025), and the completion date, in the form schools log against their training records and appraisal documentation. The closing segment sets each learner's personal currency plan: whole-staff learners locate their Prevent refresh within the school's safeguarding update cycle, which KCSIE requires to run at least annually (Part 2, para 124), designated safeguarding leads and others with Prevent-specific responsibilities diary the in-depth update expected at least every two years (para 159; KCSIE 2025, Annex C), and all learners note that a substantively revised KCSIE edition has been signalled, at which point this course will be reissued and recertification offered against the new edition.

This syllabus was designed from primary-source research of this nation's official teacher requirements and passed independent verification. The full course, its lessons, assistant, and materials are live for enrolled educators.