Children's Commissioner Demands Overhaul of Prevent
The Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, called for a fundamental overhaul of Prevent, warning that the counter-extremism programme is failing children who are fixated with violence but hold no clear ideology. Referrals of children rose from 2,918 in 2016-17 to 4,715 last year, with 71 per cent showing no fixed extremist beliefs. She urged that such cases be handled by local safeguarding teams, cautioning against another “Southport attacker”.
The intervention reopens a difficult question the Southport murders forced into the open: what to do with children drawn to violence itself rather than to any cause Prevent was built to counter. Dame Rachel’s figures suggest a programme straining under referrals it was never designed for, with most children flagged falling outside its ideological remit and schools left facing “closed doors and dead ends”. Her proposed fix, routing such cases to local safeguarding teams working alongside counter-terrorism police, would mark a significant redesign. Ministers have faced sustained pressure to reform Prevent since the Southport failures. Watch whether they accept the recommendation and how they redraw the line between safeguarding and counter-terrorism.