Description
In July 2015, a legal duty came into force as part of the United Kingdom’s Counter Terrorism and Security Act that included a requirement for schools and other education providers to ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. As part of this initiative (referred to as the Prevent Duty), schools in England and Wales were required to include teaching on ‘Fundamental British Values’ as part of the curriculum, to ‘build pupil’s resilience to radicalisation’.
Yet this element is not required in schools in Scotland or Northern Ireland, and the Prevent Duty guidelines for Scotland make almost no mention of ‘fundamental British Values’. This paper argues that the absence of a requirement for teachers in Scotland to include teaching on Fundamental British Values simultaneously politicises and depoliticises the Duty, Britishness and British identity in this context. By withholding the requirement for values education to be framed through the prism of Britishness, teachers are not asked to engage in contentious and subjective discussions on the nature of what makes values uniquely ‘British’. Yet this decision also highlights the political nature of its original inclusion and the contentious nature of British identity in Scotland, especially in the wake of fractious debates about Scotland’s constitutional future, and its absence is a distinctly political act.
