Teacher practice and the pre-crime space: prevent, safeguarding and teacher engagement with extremism and radicalisation

School involvement in government initiatives to combat radicalisation is an international phenomena, in the UK government has focused on the role of the teacher in detecting radicalisation through the Teachers’ Standards of 2012, the Counter Terrorism Act 2015 and the activation of Prevent in 2011. The Prevent Duty has been described as a geographical pre-crime space characterised by surveillance, risk, fear and the notion of the pre-criminal. This article explores the way teachers understand their practice in this pre-crime space. The data discussed in this study is part of a larger study that interrogates the way teachers approach the teaching of Islam in schools. This article reports on a series of dialogical interviews and analyses the way 57 teachers with a particular responsibility for Religious Education have negotiated this new role. It argues that teachers commonly situate their practice in relation to Prevent in the context of a safeguarding agenda and that most legitimise their role through the employment of a discourse of vulnerability. The research suggests that the ways teachers approach issues of extremism in the classroom is in part informed by their existing views on racism, social class and political ideologies

School leadership and the civic nationalist turn: Towards a typology of leadership styles employed by head teachers in their enactment of the Prevent Duty and the promotion of fundamental British values

British schools are teeming with cultural richness and have long been at the heart of a celebration of heritage. However, the riots in the north of England in 2001 exposed fractures in community cohesion, a loss of economic opportunity for marginalised groups and a rise in far-right activity. The London bombings of 2005 revealed deep fault lines across communities and by 2012 the government had implemented the ‘Hostile Environment’ and Immigration Laws of 2014 and 2016 which saw citizens assume the mantle of ‘border enforcer.’ The Windrush scandal of 2017 was an expression of this environment, and coupled with a resurgent nationalism, the UK voted to leave the EU. Schools, nested within diverse communities across the country, negotiate societal issues and tensions in the quotidian spaces of the school day and head teachers, charged with ensuring the Prevent Duty is enacted and British values promoted, determine the ethos and approach of their respective schools. Drawing on literature from school leadership, this research engages with head teachers in schools in England to explore the leadership styles they employ when enacting the requirements of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (Home Office, 2015) and the Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2012) and navigating the civic nationalist turn

Islam as educational knowledge: challenges and barriers to the development of a Religion and Worldviews approach to teaching Islam in schools

This article discusses the way teachers in primary and secondary schools in England engaged with a project to develop a Worldviews approach to Islam in the RE classroom. The project identified challenges and barriers to the teaching of Worldviews that were demonstrated by some teachers’ unwillingness to engage with knowledge and curriculum content that they believed to be illegitimate or controversial. The authors use Basil Bernstein’s idea of educational knowledge to explore the way teachers made decisions about what pupils should be permitted to learn about and what should be ignored in relation to Islam

Negotiating fundamental British values: research conversations in church schools

In England Church schools seek to express Christian values. They are also obliged by UK government policy, the law, and inspection frameworks, to support fundamental British values. This project sought to find out more about how schools managed and related these two things — how school leaders in schools and academies with a Christian character, negotiate fundamental British values and Christian values in the life of their schools. How do they respond to the dual expectation of cultivating an educational philosophy and ethos that is reflective of or inspired by Christian values, and also supportive of fundamental British values? How do they make sense of these distinctive ideas? Are they viewed as complementary or are their tensions

Analytical study of interior noise control by fuselage design techniques on high-speed, propeller-driven aircraft

The acoustical treatment mass penalties required to achieve an interior noise level of 80 dBA for high speed, fuel efficient propfan-powered aircraft are determined. The prediction method used is based on theory developed for the outer shell dynamics, and a modified approach for add-on noise control element performance. The present synthesis of these methods is supported by experimental data. Three different sized aircraft are studied, including a widebody, a narrowbody and a business sized aircraft. Noise control penalties are calculated for each aircraft for two kinds of noise control designs: add-on designs, where the outer wall structure cannot be changed, and advanced designs where the outer wall stiffness level and the materials usage can be altered. For the add-on designs, the mass penalties range from 1.7 to 2.4 percent of the takeoff gross weight (TOGW) of the various aircraft, similar to preliminary estimates. Results for advanced designs show significant reductions of the mass penalties. For the advanced aluminum designs the penalties are 1.5% of TOGW, and for an all composite aircraft the penalties range from 0.74 to 1.4% of TOGW

Ligand-induced closure of inward rectifier Kir6.2 channels traps spermine in the pore

Small organic amines block open voltage-gated K(+) channels and can be trapped by subsequent closure. Such studies provide strong evidence for voltage gating occurring at the intracellular end of the channel. We engineered the necessary properties (long block times with unblock kinetics comparable to, or slower than, the kinetics of gating) into spermine-blocked, ATP-gated (N160D,L157C) mutant K(ATP) channels, in order to test the possibility of “blocker trapping” in ligand-gated Kir channels. Spermine block of these channels is very strongly voltage dependent, such that, at positive voltages, the off-rate of spermine is very low. A brief pulse to negative voltages rapidly relieves the block, but no such relief is observed in ATP-closed channels. The results are well fit by a simple kinetic model that assumes no spermine exit from closed channels. The results incontrovertibly demonstrate that spermine is trapped in channels that are closed by ATP, and implicate the M2 helix bundle crossing, or somewhere lower, as the probable location of the gate

Religious education and hermeneutics: the case of teaching about Islam

This article attempts to do three things: the first is an exploration of the ways in which Islam is presented in an essentialist way (with a focus on Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales), leading to stereotypes and unsubstantiated generalisations. Secondly, it provides a critique of essentialism, and finally a case is made for the role of hermeneutics in the teaching and learning of Islam