The rules around your child changed this year. Here are three things linked to Prevent in schools that you need to know, writes Dr Layla Aitlhadj.
If your child started school or a new year this September, you would have been given the usual things: a uniform list, a safeguarding leaflet, perhaps a form asking you to agree to the school’s online policy.
What you will not have been told is that over the past twelve months the rules that decide when a school treats a child as a possible danger have changed. Each of those changes widens the reach of Prevent in schools or the life of the record it creates, and not one of them gives you any new right to be told when it happens to your child.
At Prevent Watch we support people affected by Prevent, part of the government’s counter-terrorism programme. Most of the children we see have been referred by their school, for anything from a comment in class to a piece of writing that made a teacher uncomfortable.
Changes to the law and to statutory guidance that took effect this September will undoubtedly result in even more children being referred to Prevent from within the education sector, and it is important to understand what these changes are and what they mean for your children.
Only one of the changes below has Prevent’s name on it. The other two are a child protection law and a piece of online safety guidance, and on the face of it neither has anything to do with counter-terrorism.
But Prevent does not run as a separate system in a school. It runs through the safeguarding lead, the pastoral meetings and the IT department – the same people and systems that deal with everything else. Give those more reach and Prevent, the notion of pre-crime and the reality of surveillance, get more reach.
Below are the three changes, what they mean for your child, and what you can do.
Change 1: A teacher no longer needs to see any ideology
Prevent exists under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Its stated purpose is to stop people being drawn into terrorism. Every school in England, Scotland and Waled has a legal duty under that Act to have “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”, which in practice means staff are trained to look for signs of radicalisation and to refer children they are worried about.
In February this year the Home Office published a document called Key Principles for Prevent. One of the principles states that “a clear identifiable ideology is not mandatory to make or adopt a Prevent referral”.[1]
The Government repeated that sentence in July in its response to the Southport Inquiry.[2] It has also set up a taskforce on what it calls “violence-fixated individuals”, and it is assessing by the end of this year whether it needs new legal powers to deal with them.[3]
The Home Office has now put it in writing that a teacher does not need to see anything resembling a political or religious motive before referring a child to counter-terrorism police.
This is not new in practice; it is only new on paper and indeed the official guidance. We know from experience that where Prevent referrals have been made in the past the schools tend to rationalise their poor decision-making by falling back on the statutory nature of Prevent.
Where before an argument could be made that the school did not consider appropriate thresholds before making a referral, the new guidance allows for Prevent to be weaponised even further and the guidance to be used as cover.
Change 2: Your child’s records can now be joined up and shared
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act became law on 29 April this year.[4] It was written in response to the deaths of children whose abuse was known to several agencies and acted on by none, and much of it is about that.
Two parts of it affect every child, not only those at risk at home. Section 4 creates a new legal duty on schools, councils, health services and the police to share information about a child for the purpose of safeguarding. That duty came into force this month.[5]
The same section gives ministers the power to give every child in England a single “consistent identifier”, a number that will attach to their records across school, health and social care so those records can be joined together.
It is being piloted in Wigan, and the government has said it will bring in the regulations to roll it out nationally before the end of this Parliament.[6] Section 3 requires every local authority to set up a multi-agency child protection team with the police as a permanent member.
Prevent is not mentioned anywhere in the Act. That is the problem.
A Prevent referral creates a record. In our casework, and in research published last year by Rights and Security International, that record does not disappear when the case is closed with no action. It stays on police systems, is copied across other policing databases, and can be reached by immigration and other authorities. Most families are never told it exists.[7]
Now put a new legal duty to share information next to that record. Add a police officer inside the child protection team in your area. Add a single number that follows your child from reception to sixth form and through every GP appointment.
Nobody in government has said that Prevent records will be linked to that number or shared under that duty. Nobody has said they will not. However, a Prevent referral made when a child was nine could be visible to a social worker, a school nurse or a police officer on a child protection team when that child is sixteen, under a law that never mentions Prevent and that nobody debated with Prevent in mind.
Change 3: What your child does on a school device is now checked, inspected, and used
The new edition of Keeping Children Safe in Education, the safeguarding guidance every school must follow, took effect on 1 September. Schools already ran filtering and monitoring software on their devices. They must now review it every year, a senior leader must be responsible for it, and from September 2027 Ofsted will inspect it.
In its response to the Southport Inquiry the Government also gave that software a wider job. As well as blocking harmful content, it is now expected to help identify children who are “drawn to violence” online.
Nobody has said what “drawn to violence” means. A child who searches for a video they heard about in the playground? A boy who plays a shooting game and talks about it at lunch? These things happen in every school, every week, and until now a teacher dealt with them with a quiet word or a phone call home.
Add change one, and a child “drawn to violence” with no ideology is now a child Prevent has said it will accept. The software produces the flag, and a teacher with an hour of online training decides whether it becomes a referral. What was a teachable moment inside the school now has a route out of it and into a counter-terrorism programme.
What this means for your child
Put these three changes together and look at them from a teacher’s chair. You have a legal duty to refer. You have been told you do not need to see any ideology. You have a system logging what pupils search for, and you have been told those searches predict what a child might do. You know the police sit inside the local child protection team and that you have a new legal duty to share what you know. And you have Ofsted.
Nothing in that list makes it easier for a teacher to decide not to refer. Nothing helps them tell the difference between a thirteen-year-old who is dangerous and a thirteen-year-old who is angry, or grieving, or autistic, or Muslim and paying attention to the news. Every incentive runs one way.
What this produces is not a safer school but a more suspicious one, and suspicion changes what a child is willing to say.
In our casework the most lasting effect of a referral is rarely anything that happened in the interview with the police; it is that the child stops talking afterwards, stops asking questions in class and stops writing what they actually think, while their parents begin policing them at home so that the school will not have reason to do it again.
Amnesty International found the same thing when it looked at this in 2023, describing children and young people who no longer felt able to discuss politics, religion or world events in the classroom because of where it might lead, and none of that depends on whether the referral goes anywhere.
Why the rising numbers are a warning, not a justification
On 6 August the Home Office published its latest Prevent figures. There were 10,293 referrals in the year to September 2025, a rise of 39 per cent on the previous year and the highest since counting began.
Schools and colleges made 3,496 of them, more than any other sector. Children aged eleven to fifteen were the largest single age group, at 36 per cent of everyone referred. More than half of all referrals were recorded under one of two headings for “no ideology identified”.[8]
Twelve days later the Children’s Commissioner for England published a report on children referred to Prevent, using data she had obtained from the Home Office. In the year to March 2025, 4,715 children were referred, more than half of everyone referred. Sixty per cent of those children were referred by a school or college. Seventy-one per cent had no identified ideology. Seventy-nine per cent of the children’s cases were closed without going any further. Two thirds of the referrals made by schools were simply sent back to the school, and in ninety-three per cent of those cases, no support from Prevent followed.[9]
Every year these figures come out, and every year they are read the same way. Referrals are up, so the threat must be up, so the duty must be working and needs strengthening.
This year the Children’s Commissioner read them that way too. Her report describes schools meeting “closed doors” when they try to refer, and recommends more of what has just been built: new statutory guidance on children who “pose a risk to others”, counter-terrorism police inside the new child protection teams at the first assessment, and the consistent identifier rolled out to every child “without delay”.[10]
The figures can be read the other way, and in my view that is the only way they can honestly be read. A referral does not measure a child; it measures a decision by an adult to refer.
If every teacher in the country is given a legal duty, told the threshold no longer requires any ideology, and handed monitoring software and an inspector to go with it, then referrals will rise, and they rose by 39 per cent in a year.
When the programme’s own officers then close four out of five children’s cases without taking any action, what they are saying is that those referrals should never have been made.
The Home Affairs Committee, which is not hostile to counter-terrorism policy, said in April that funnelling children with no ideology into Prevent because there is nowhere else for them to go is “a category error”.[11]
The Children’s Commissioner exists to speak for children and yet when she had in front of her the clearest official evidence yet that thousands of children a year are being referred to a counter-terrorism programme and sent away with nothing, she concluded that the problem was that schools were finding it too hard to refer.
The whole of her report rests on an assumption that a child who is referred to Prevent is a child who needs something from Prevent, so that when four in five are closed without action, the failure must lie in the closing even though her own data points the other way.
If 71 per cent of the children referred had no ideology and 79 per cent were sent away with nothing, the most obvious reading is that most of them should never have been referred, and that the harm in their story is the referral itself: the interview, the record, the change in how their school sees them. That harm is nowhere in the report and the suggested recommendations only serve to exacerbate those harms.
That is the loop parents need to understand. A rising count is treated as proof that Prevent is needed rather than as a sign that something is wrong with it. So the threshold is lowered and the data is joined up, which produces the next rise, which is treated as the next proof.
Every change made this year adds capacity on the referral side of that loop. Not one of them makes it harder to refer a child, or easier for a family to find out what was recorded and have it removed.
Here is what that means in practice. Each year the government publishes the number of children referred to Prevent, and each year that number is higher. Ministers point to it as proof that the programme is needed and that schools must stay alert. They do not ask why four in five of those children were sent away with nothing.
Instead of tightening the rules so that fewer children are wrongly referred, they loosen them – as they did this year by removing the need for any ideology and by joining up children’s records – and so more children are referred and next year’s number is higher again.
For a parent, the practical result is simple. It is now easier than it has ever been for your child to be referred to a counter-terrorism programme, and no easier for you to find out that it happened or to have the record removed.
What you can do
The school year has begun with more suspicion built into it than any before, and none of it has been explained to parents. You should not be the last to know, and you should not have to face it on your own.
Prevent Watch exists to support people impacted by Prevent and if you think that your school is viewing your child’s behaviour or what they have been looking at online with suspicion, you can get in touch with one of our caseworkers via our free helpline and ensure you get the best support in finding out if they are going through a Prevent referral and how to challenge it.
Footnotes
[1] Home Office, Key Principles for Prevent (February 2026), as quoted in HM Government, Government response to Phase 1 of the Southport Inquiry (July 2026): “a clear identifiable ideology is not mandatory to make or adopt a Prevent referral”.
[2] HM Government, Government Response to Phase 1 of the Southport Inquiry (July 2026).
[3] Home Office, Response to Lord Anderson’s report “Lessons for Prevent” (30 June 2026).
[4] Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, c. 21, sections 3 and 4.
[5] Home Secretary, Written Ministerial Statement HCWS115 (16 June 2026), confirming the information-sharing duty would commence in September 2026, the Wigan pilot of the consistent identifier, and the intention to make regulations “by the end of this parliament”.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Rights & Security International, Caught in the Web: Prevent databases and the policing of children (January 2025).
[8] Home Office, Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme, October 2024 to September 2025 (published 6 August 2026).
[9] Children’s Commissioner for England, Children referred to the Prevent programme (18 August 2026).
[10] Ibid.
[11] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, Combatting new forms of extremism, Seventh Report of Session 2024–26 (1 April 2026).
