Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity: A Critical Investigation 3031306864, 9783031306860

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Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity A Critical Investigation Francis Farrell

Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity “In this book Francis Farrell provides an in-depth analysis of the antecedents and nativist underpinning to the introduction of fundamental British values in education, including teacher education in England. He masterfully implements Foucauldian theory to critically analyse how governmentality and associated technologies have been exercised through the imposition of Prevent and fundamental British values, consequently reasserting the racialisation of Muslim children and young people as the suspect Other in our schools. The empirical study examines how RE teachers navigate the FBV terrain and exercise their ethical teacher subjectivities to mitigate the racialised discourse of this divisive policy mandate. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the racialised discourse of FBV. Every teacher and teacher educator should read this book!” —Professor Vini Lander, Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality, Leeds Beckett University “A political act as much as a text, Farrell’s book not only bears testimony to RE teachers’ experiences of grappling with politically charged policies that demand the cultivation of ‘Britishness’ and tie schools up within a national security agenda. It also sets these within a compelling genealogy of how civic nationalism came to replace multicultural education policy in Britain. Vital and timely reading for anyone with an interest in the teaching of religion and values in schools.” —Dr. Jane McDonnell, Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead for Education Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University “Francis Farrell’s book Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, through his much-needed research with UK school teachers, uses a Foucauldian approach in seeking to critically examine the forced intersections between the teaching and learning of religious education and the policy requirements of fundamental British values (FBVs) and Prevent. Farrell, by representing teacher voice, successfully shows how this call for teachers to uphold FBVs and the Prevent duty has deeply divisive implications long-term for teaching and learning in UK schools, as well as on teacher identities and subjectivities. The book presents a rich and important account of teachers as talking back to the contradictory and insidious nature of enforcing Prevent and FBVs in education, and as problematising power. I am heartened by teachers themselves critically and creatively encouraging inclusive and anti-racist

approaches to exploring multiculturalism, identities and belongings to Britain through religious education teaching in the classroom. Farrell’s book is a mustread for all teachers, and especially for trainee teachers who are grappling with the influence of exclusionary and assimilatory discourses around educational policy in schools.” —Sadia Habib, Lecturer in Education, University of Manchester, UK

Francis Farrell

Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity A Critical Investigation

Francis Farrell Edge Hill University Ormskirk, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-30686-0 ISBN 978-3-031-30687-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them. Michel Foucault, in: The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, 2006: 41

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support of my institution, colleagues, friends and family. Firstly, I would like to thank Professor Vini Lander, formerly Head of Research at Edge Hill University, now based at Leeds Beckett University as Director of the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality. Without the support, encouragement, collegiality and friendship of Professor Vini Lander this book would not have been written. My research collaboration with Vini provided the inspiration for this project, opportunities to present findings and to develop the critical perspective of this work. I would also like to thank Dr. Lynette Turner, formerly Dean of the Faculty of Education at Edge Hill University, now based at Christchurch Canterbury University. Lynette and Vini’s support enabled me to access the institutional funding that made this project possible. I have also benefited from the generous time allocation and the encouragement of Professor David Aldridge, Head of the Department of Secondary and Further Education, and Dr. Clare Woolhouse, Reader in Education, both at Edge Hill University. David and Clare’s encouragement and understanding are greatly appreciated. My most profound thanks are due to the teachers who took part in the study. I hope I have in some small way repaid their trust and done justice to the daily struggles and dilemmas they shared with me. The book is offered in ‘mutual solidarity’.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Above all, I wish to thank my family for their ongoing interest in this project. Especially Joy, whose encouragement and support have been so constant for so long.

Contents

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1

Introduction

2

Britishness in Post-war Politics and Policy: Precursors to British Values

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Crisis Racism and the Introduction of Fundamental British Values

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Multiculturalism, Religious Education, and Fundamental British Values

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5

Research on Fundamental British Values

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6

Foucault and Fundamental British Values

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7

Teacher Narratives: Parr¯esia and the Courage of Truth

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8

Dividing Practices: RE Teachers’ Views of Fundamental British Values

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Brexit, Religious Education and Fundamental British Values

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3 4

9

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CONTENTS

Concluding Thoughts: Working the Cracks

Correction to: Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity Index

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About the Author

Francis Farrell is a Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religion at Edge Hill University, UK. His work critically examines the ways in which teachers of religious education have enacted the UK government’s requirement that teachers actively promote fundamental British values. His work has appeared in journals such as Educational Review and the International Journal of Education for Teaching.

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Abbreviations

CCF CRE CRT CT&S Act DCLG DCSF DfE ERA FBVs OfSTED

PGCE QTS TDA

Core Content Framework Commission for Racial Equality Critical Race Theory Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 Department for Communities and Local Government Department for Children, Schools and Families Department for Education Education Reform Act Fundamental British values: democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance Office for Standards in Education: non- ministerial department of the UK government responsible for inspecting services providing education and skills to all ages Postgraduate certification in Education Qualified Teacher Status Training and Development Agency

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List of Tables

Table Table Table Table Table Table Table

1.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 9.1 9.2

Data collection schedule Data collection schedule Pre-service teacher participants February 2015 Pre-service teacher participants December 2015 In-service teacher participants Group interview pre-service teachers January 2017 December 2019 roundtable discussion participants

10 172 176 185 193 218 224

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In his book ‘The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11’, the political philosopher John Brenkman states ‘Since September 11, 2001, the fog of war has enveloped political thought’ (Brenkman, 2007: 1). Brenkman’s imagery applies equally to UK government education policy making in this period. Following the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 and the July 2007, 7/7, bombings in London, education in the UK has become one of the front lines of the domestic War on Terror. Terror attacks in Europe, the rise of Islamic State (ISIS) and British citizens leaving the UK to become ISIS fighters in Syria, led to the introduction of fundamental British values (DfE, 2011) and the Prevent duty in England, Wales and Scotland (DfE, 2015). Fundamental British values (FBVs) came into effect in 2012 in Part 2: Personal and professional conduct of the teachers’ professional standards (DfE, 2011) which stated that,

The original version of this chapter was revised: Text correction have been updated. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_11 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_1

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‘Teachers uphold public trust in the profession and maintain high standards of ethics and behaviour, within and outside school, by: Not undermining fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs’ (DfE, 2011: 14).

The standards are the regulatory framework that defines the minimum professional standards for teachers’ practice and conduct in schools in England and Wales. The Prevent duty was introduced in 2015 in Part 5 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (CT&S) as a duty placed on specified authorities ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ (Home Office, 2015). FBVs and Prevent represent a radical shift in government policy from postwar discourses of ‘opportunity’ and multiculturalism (Swann, 1985) to a fearful discourse in education that positions teachers as the de facto agents of state security (Elton-Chalcraft et al., 2016). Fundamental British values mark the introduction of an explicitly civic nationalist policy into education in England and Wales. By civic nationalism, I am referring to Michael Ignatieff’s definition of ‘the nation as a community of equal rights bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values’ (Ignatieff, 1994: 3–4). However, the civic nationalism of fundamental British values works by placing national civic values in opposition to those it positions as culturally different. Fundamental British values constitutes those it deems deficient in Britishness and in need of correction as the outsiders of its discourse. This book has been written to document the effects of the FBVs policy discourse on teachers as they endeavour to accommodate its demands and enact the requirement. My aim is to write ‘a critical history of the present’ (Foucault, 1991a, 1991b: 31) that can trace a genealogy of the Britishness discourse in education and interrogate its objectifying effects on teachers’ ‘subjectivities’. By providing a rich qualitative account of the views of secondary teachers of RE of the requirement ‘to not undermine’ (DfE, 2011: 14) and to ‘actively promote fundamental British values’ (DfE, 2014: 4) and their experiences enacting the requirement, the book seeks to address several questions: • What are the teachers’ understandings of British identity? • What are the teachers’ views of the requirement to promote fundamental British values?

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• Do they problematise the requirement or are they able to accommodate it? • As its points of articulation, how do the teachers implement and enact FBVs in practice? To undertake this critical history of the present, I have drawn on the ideas of the philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault (1926– 1984) and his theories of power, discourse and subjectivity. The teachers’ accounts in chapters eight and nine reveal how power, operating through the policy discourse of FBVs and Prevent, acts on them and their students. The narratives reveal how the discourse produces conflict and dissonance as the teachers attempted to accommodate their roles both as the instruments of policy and as progressive, inclusive pastoral educators. Their accounts show how FBVs and Prevent act on the bodies and minds of their students, particularly their Muslim students by transforming them into problems requiring intervention. Foucault’s conceptualisation of modern power as disciplinary, normalising and biopolitical enables sharp critical analysis of the pernicious forms of objectification that operate through FBVs. Teacher subjectivity is a central focus of this enquiry. The introduction of FBVs went hand in hand with the government’s hostile disavowal of multiculturalism. Politicians from all sides of the spectrum denounced multiculturalism as ‘passive tolerance’ (Cameron, 2011) incapable of tackling religious extremism and a causal factor of community selfsegregation. But, as Chapter 4 aims to show, what is really under attack in this retreat from multiculturalism, is the political project of creating a polity capable of accommodating religious, cultural and ethnic difference and engaging in mature dialogue with the ‘claims making’ of Muslim communities racialised by the War on Terror (Modood, 2011). There is a fine line between the civic nationalism of FBVs and the simplistic incitements of nativist ethno nationalism, as the teachers’ accounts show. What is at stake here, I argue, is the project of a pluralistic education that recognises and valorises social, cultural, religious and ethnic difference, that is, ‘difference –in-itself’, as opposed to the civic nationalism of FBVs which requires alignment to its Norm ‘Britishness’, and judges teacher and student bodies by the degree to which they deviate from its racial standard (Farrell, 2021). Government denunciation of multiculturalism places FBVs in conflict with pluralistic RE as the teachers’ narratives demonstrate.

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Personal and Professional Positioning Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’. This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science (Wright Mills, 2000: 8). C. Wright Mills understood the dialectic between the personal and the public. He recognised that it was in the space where the boundaries between the ‘personal and political, public and private’ (David, 2002: 251) blur and overlap that the sociological imagination was at its most generative. It is, therefore, disingenuous to separate the personal from professional life history. Teachers’ lives are not hermetically compartmentalised, there is a ‘crucial interactive relationship between individual’s lives, their perceptions and experiences, and historical and social contexts and events’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001: 2). As a former RE teacher and RE teacher educator, I share the same questions over teacher identity, pedagogical purpose, and political positioning as those articulated by the teachers who contributed to this study. Like many RE teachers who qualified to teach in the late twentieth century, my subjectivity was shaped by pluralistic phenomenological Religious Studies. So, in the spirit of Bullough’s assertion that ‘to understand educational events, one must confront biography’ (Bullough, cited in Sikes & Everington, 2001: 10), I will use my life story to explore some of the reasons for this study and to understand the social and educational transformations brought about by the ‘death of multiculturalism’ (Slack, 2006) and the introduction of civic nationalist FBVs into education policy and practice.

Lancaster Religious Studies My story begins with a reflection on my time at Lancaster University where in 1983 I was a first year Religious Studies undergraduate student. The first lecture I attended was delivered by Professor James Richardson to a large cohort of year one students and the focus of his talk was Ninian Smart and Phenomenology. Richardson began the lecture by examining the claims made by Vienna Circle logical positivists that all metaphysical claims were meaningless because they failed the verification principle. Richardson countered these arguments and introduced us to the ideas of Professor Ninian Smart, the influential founder of the Religious Studies

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department at Lancaster University. To my relief, I had managed to follow Richardson’s exposition and began to relax and enjoy what I was hearing—this was an approach that was ‘sympathetic and sensitive’ to the way religious and non-religious worldviews such as Humanism, lived and thought (Smart, 1968: 104). Smart’s approach, known as Phenomenology, made a lasting impact on my thinking and shaped my subjectivity as an educator, researcher and as a person. Phenomenology combined methodological agnosticism with empathy to enter into the experiences and intentions of religious participants, it ‘is the attitude of informed empathy’ (Smart, 1996: 2). The Lancaster approach was pluralistic, non-dogmatic and it took the religious way of being in the world seriously. Importantly, Smart’s approach privileged the viewpoint of the religious subject ‘it tries to bring out what religious acts mean to their actors’ (Smart, 1996: 2). It was also an approach that recognised the dynamic intersections of religion with non-religious worldviews. I will never forget listening to Paul Heelas’ and Andrew Rawlinson’s pioneering research on new religious movements such as EST (Werner Erhard seminars) and their connections with neoliberalism. Smart’s approach was transformative, lifting students and academics alike out of the narrow confines of confessionalism into the expansive, interesting and diverse realm of beliefs and worldviews to investigate how they shaped human experience. In 1985 Smart’s approach received the endorsement of the Swann report, ‘Education for all’ which made the case for religious education as an essential component of inclusive multicultural pedagogy. In 1989 I trained as a secondary teacher of religious education (RE) and took my phenomenological pedagogy into the classroom.

Teaching RE Teaching RE was, of course, not without its challenges. Like most RE teachers I found myself dealing with a range of responses from interest to indifference and occasional hostility, particularly when religion was wilfully conflated with race. Experience quickly showed me that RE was not just a vehicle for transmitting knowledge, it was also a resource for citizenship, and the religious literacy required by young people to understand their diverse communities. To accomplish my aims in RE I used

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experiential learning methods, including visits to faith communities and visiting speakers to engage my students and trigger their curiosity. Teaching in the nineteen nineties was a relatively stable period for RE, as Grimmitt states ‘the challenge to assert the subject’s educational value had been successfully met and an open, multi-faith RE had been enshrined in law … Various pedagogies were available … based on a phenomenological method of study. None required students to be of religious faith nor necessarily agree with the orthodox teachings of the religions that they studied’ and ‘teacher training institutions remained central to spearheading a thorough understanding of the educational basis of RE and in improving the overall quality of provision’ (Grimmitt, 2010: 8–9). I remember this period with great fondness, but as Grimmitt argues, the start of the twenty-first century saw ‘a seismic shift in the social, political, religious and ethnic landscape of the UK’ in response to ‘world events and their consequences’ (Grimmitt, 2010: 9–10). Grimmitt identifies these events as the suicide terror attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the US on September 11, 2001, the British government’s ‘social and educational policies; and national and local issues and controversies’ (Grimmitt, 2010: 10).

A Seismic Shift After 9/11 ‘a new political language’ emerged across the political spectrum, centred on ‘integration, community cohesion and shared British values and identity’ (Hoque, 2015: 33). I remember 9/11. I was with a group of teachers on bus duty, standing outside the school gates when a colleague joined us. She was visibly alarmed and asked us, ‘have you seen what’s happened? Have you seen what they’ve done?’ She described the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, and I recall a sense of foreboding thinking about the potential racial backlash against Muslims. The fragile multicultural modus vivendi that I had established at my school seemed vulnerable and I knew that my colleagues and I would be faced with hostility from students and parents who were looking for reasons to withdraw from RE. Chris Allen (Allen, 2004: 2) notes with irony that the United Nation’s official recognition of Islamophobia took place a few days before 9/11 at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance’ held in Durban, South Africa. Anti-Muslim racism and discrimination were causing global concern prior to the 9/11 attacks, but the backlash the attack unleashed

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justified my anxieties as reports came through of Islamophobic violence directed at hijab-wearing women and bearded Muslim and Sikh men. Allen notes the brutality of an attack on a London taxi driver who was assaulted by his passengers because he had some Islamic religious symbols on display in his car (Allen, 2004: 5). The significance of this backlash is that it energised forms of racism that targeted religious and cultural difference leading to a ‘them’ and ‘us’ narrative in politics and the media. This climate of fear, hostility and suspicion was insidious, but it also served to strengthen my commitment to criticality and pluralism in RE as a technology by which stereotypes, and misconceptions could be challenged and corrected.

Fundamental British Values In response to 9/11, the 2001 riots in northern British towns and cities and the 7/7 bomb attacks in London, New Labour introduced its shared values and Community Cohesion policies (Education & Inspections Act, 2006: 154). It was during this period that I moved to a higher education institution in Northwest England, where I took up a post as a teacher educator with course leader’s responsibility for a secondary RE postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) in 2003. My pre-service student teachers, particularly the Muslim teachers, would tell me about their experiences dealing with anti-Muslim attitudes, but we had a collective sense of purpose and confidence that we could tackle these problems through RE and dialogue. We promoted debate, open, honest agonistic discussion to challenge parochial nativism, often working in partnership with our schools and the communities they served by holding conferences and workshops for their students. In 2010, the Conservative Liberal Coalition was elected, and New Labour left office. In 2012 FBVs were officially introduced in Part 2 of the new Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2011). As a teacher educator, I, like many of my colleagues, greeted FBVs with bemusement and exasperation. Such explicit nationalism seemed out of place in the professional guidance offered to teachers in a modern liberal democracy, leading me to question whether this was a political gimmick designed to satisfy the nationalistic appetites of the conservative electorate. It seemed atavistic, intrusive and out of place in professional documentation, with a jingoistic tone reminiscent of totalitarianism, as Osler notes, ‘it is only authoritarian states which have pursued this

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approach with rigour, and they have met with mixed success’ (Osler, cited in Grimmitt, 2010: 65). However, it was in 2014, in the wake of the Trojan Horse affair that I began researching the impact of FBVs on teachers. The Trojan Horse affair refers to an alleged plot to take over the governing bodies of several Birmingham primary and secondary schools to impose a ‘deeply conservative curriculum’ by hard-line Salafist Muslims (Miah, 2017: 3). The plot was revealed in an anonymous letter, leaked to the Sunday Telegraph in March 2014 (Allen, 2022). Birmingham City Council and West Midlands Police investigated the allegations and a no notice Section 8 OfSTED inspection of the school at the centre of the plot, Park View, was triggered. 21 other schools in the area were also inspected and their previous OfSTED grades were downgraded. Within just under a month of the publication of the letter, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, appointed Peter Clarke, the former Metropolitan Police head of Counter terrorism, to investigate the allegations. The arrival of a senior counter-terrorism official marked a significant shift in the enquiry, ‘Gove was making it clear that this was not just seen as an educational issue- it was an investigation into potential extremism’ (Allen, 2022). The letter was subsequently revealed as a fake, and the extensive OfSTED inspections were unable to reveal any evidence of extremism. However, on June 9, in a statement to the House of Commons, Michael Gove declared that all schools in England were to promote fundamental British values (Miah, 2017: 12). On 27 November 2014 the DfE published guidance on promoting fundamental British values as part of pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) development (DfE, 2014). The 2014 guidance strengthened and extended the requirement not to undermine FBVs (DfE) by stating that ‘maintained schools have obligations…to promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society’ (DfE, 2014: 3) and that by ensuring SMSC development ‘schools can also demonstrate they are actively promoting fundamental British values’ (DfE, 2014: 4). The new requirement effectively embedded FBVs throughout the curriculum through cross-curricular SMSC as the new civics of the War on Terror in education.

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Data Collection In 2014 I began to work collaboratively with the faculty’s newly appointed Head of Research. She had pioneered anti-racist research on initial teacher education and led a series of seminars and symposia for BERA (British Education Research Association) examining FBVs from a Critical Race Theory perspective. In our meetings, we began discussions about the impact of FBVs on our secondary preservice teachers and received approval from our ethics committee to begin research. However, on the 7th of January 2015, I received a letter addressed from the office of Lord Nash, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools to the SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education) I was a member of. The purpose of the letter was to emphasise the role of local authority SACREs in promoting FBVs through RE. It stated, ‘RE makes a significant contribution to pupils’ academic and personal development. It also plays a key role in promoting social cohesion and the virtues of respect and empathy which are vitally important in our diverse society. The recent events in some schools in Birmingham have highlighted the importance of promoting the crucial values of respect and tolerance in our schools’ (Nash, 2015). Alluding to the Trojan horse affair, the letter reminded SACRE that the teaching of a narrow interpretation of RE was inappropriate. It appeared that RE, a subject overlooked by the government and excluded from the national curriculum, was now being enlisted to the government’s war against extremism in education. In light of this, we organised a series of group interviews with my secondary RE PGCE cohort and began the first phase of data collection in February 2015. I followed up the February 2015 group interviews with a series of individual interviews and one paired interview with in-service teachers of secondary RE over the February–March period. In December 2015 we interviewed the next cohort of secondary RE PGCE preservice teachers, concluding this phase of data collection. In 2016 in the run-up to the UK government’s referendum to leave the European Union, popularly referred to as Brexit, I began to receive reports from teachers about parents and guardians wishing to withdraw their children from RE lessons because of lessons on Islam, and in some cases lessons on non-Christian religions. The teachers’ reports indicated that the emboldened racism of the Brexit campaign was built on the anti-Muslim sentiments of the war on Terror (Farrell, 2019). In 2017 I undertook research with PGCE secondary pre-service teachers and their

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Table 1.1 Data collection schedule February 2015 Group interviews December 2015 Group interviews February 2015 Individual interviews March 2015 Individual interview January 2017 Group interviews Roundtable Dec 2019

2014–2015 cohort: Pre-service secondary RE teacher groups 1&2 2015–2016 cohort: Pre-service secondary RE teacher groups 1&2 In-service secondary teachers of RE In-service teacher of RE 2016–2017 cohort: Pre-service teachers secondary RE teacher groups 1&2 In-service teachers, ITE tutors, Youth Leaders

Course Leader to investigate their experiences teaching RE in this febrile context. I was particularly interested in the teachers’ experiences’ of FBVs and Prevent in this volatile period. The final stage of data collection took place in 2019 with a group of faith and youth leaders who took part in a roundtable discussion to mark the end of another project investigating young peoples’ views of British identity and belonging. In total 52 people took part in the interviews (Table 1.1).

Methodological Choices The rich qualitative findings are presented in Chapters 8 and 9. Initially, the teachers’ narratives reveal bemusement, confusion and incredulity about FBVs. However, a key theme to emerge throughout the phases of data collection is the way in which the politicisation of Britishness troubled the Muslim teachers, for whom Britishness acted as a racial standard that they perceived as judgemental and exclusionary. Listening to the teacher’ accounts, transcribing and analysing their data required methodological tools capable of revealing the ways in which policy was shaping these teachers’ sense of identity, purpose and their practice. As a reflexive practitioner, I was troubled by these narratives and the implications for my practice and agency as an OfSTED-compliant ITE practitioner. Our biographies and the narrative of this research blurred and overlapped. I was a policy ‘subject and so were my ITE preservice teachers and in service teacher colleagues, we all belong to the community of the governed’ (Foucault, 2002a, 2002b: 474).

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Power, Discourse and Subjectivity Data analysis of the first transcriptions coincided with my reading of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1991a) and Power/Knowledge (Foucault, in Gordon, 1980) a collection of interviews and lectures. As I transcribed the data, I identified key themes that aligned with Foucault’s analysis of modern power and the technologies it used to shape social subjects. Three key theoretical frames emerged from this dialectical process of reading, researching and analysis that provided the tools I needed to interpret and analyse the teachers’ accounts. RE is the discursive site of this investigation, but the central focus of this book is power, discourse and subjectivity. My reading of Foucault produced a critical analysis that went beyond a consideration of the implications of FBVs for RE pedagogy, to a focus on the ways that the policy discourse was shaping the teachers’ subjectivities. Their narratives revealed evidence of the objectifying effects of the policy discourse and its divisive effects on the teachers and their students. Using Foucault’s conceptualisation of discourse as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 2002a: 54), the evidence of the teachers’ narratives revealed FBVs and Prevent as a discursive formation of considerable power at work to shape, divide and objectify both them and their students. My readings of Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1991a) led me to identify a type of normalising power was operating through the discourse of FBVs. Britishness operated as the Norm, as the standard against which both student and teacher identities were ranked and classified. Similarly, the power operating through Prevent was disciplinary in the sense that Foucault used this term, to refer to a form of surveillance. This sort of power operated as a way of governing both students and teachers. Foucault refers to these techniques of government, that ‘conduct the conduct’ of social subjects, as ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 2000: 219) leading me to conclude that there was a type of governmentality operating through FBVs and Prevent. Power relations, as opposed to states of total domination, presuppose resistance (Foucault, 1998). A key finding of this study was that the teachers were not without agency. Their narratives showed how they were fashioning themselves as ethical subjects in response to FBVs and Prevent. They were able to draw on their RE as a discursive resource to reassert their commitments to pluralism and criticality despite the restrictions of

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policy. Indeed, some of the teachers’ classrooms functioned as alternative spaces within the curriculum, liminal, heterotopic spaces (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986; Liddle, 2021) where the reductionism of FBVs was rendered fragile, disrupted and troubled. I use the term enactments to describe the way the teachers interpreted, translated, and reconstructed FBVs in their practice (Ball et al., 2012: 6) in recognition of the ‘dynamic and non- linear aspect of the policy process’ (Ball et al., 2012: 6) in contrast to a ‘top down’ model of implementation that denies teacher agency. During this febrile period of education policy making a small body of critical literature based on empirical and theoretical studies of FBVs and Prevent was published. Much of the literature confirmed my findings, but the value and generative capacity of Foucault’s critical frames enabled me to do more than simply report on what was happening in schools and settings. The Foucauldian perspective enabled me to offer a theory of teacher subjectivity, to theorise teachers as social subjects, navigating the ‘games of truth’ (Foucault, 2000: 281) about what it means to be British operating through the disciplinary truth game of FBVs and Prevent. Foucault’s theory enabled me to contribute to the growing literature by offering a theory of the subject and specifically addressing the power relations operating through the discourse and how they were governing teachers and students. My reading of Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1991a) acted like a threshold, a doorway into Foucault’s ideas and theory, discussed in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6, but a key idea in his account that has shaped the structure of this book, is his concept of genealogy. Foucault states that his aim in writing Discipline and Punish was to produce a critical history of the present. In other words, by using his genealogical method, his ‘gray and meticulous’ (Foucault, 1991b: 76) investigation of historical materials, he would produce a type of counter history that exposed the ways that seemingly benign modern institutions such as the clinic, the prison and the school, were exercising a form of normalising power to render people productive, docile and ultimately self-governing. Foucault mapped the transformations that occurred from the era of sovereign power, where the monarch’s authority was demonstrated by his power over life and death, the power to take life and to let live, right through to the modern era, where power operating through education, and human sciences such as psychiatry operated by normalising and

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reforming social subjects. Following Foucault’s method, I have endeavoured to trace the development of the British values discourse in British education policy history by examining its predecessors and precursors, beginning in the immediate post-Second World War period, tracing it’s evolution through the cultural restorationism of the Thatcher government to the security discourses of the post-9/11 era. Alongside this genealogical analysis of Britishness in policy, I provide an account of the relationship between RE and multiculturalism to show how the shift in educational governmentality from the multicultural accommodation of the late twentieth century to government disavowal of multiculturalism is a threat to the progressive pluralistic pedagogy that is needed if education is to meet the needs of a diverse democratic polity.

Structure of the Book The purpose of this book is to document the emergence of the FBVs and Prevent security discourse in education and critically analyse its effects on teachers, their practice and their identities. By sharing the teachers’ narratives and their accounts of the impact of FBVs on their sense of self and their students, the book highlights the symbolic violence, exclusions, divisiveness, and objectifying forces at work in education. Writing this book is an exercise in genealogy and a form of teacher activism as it opposes and seeks to unmask the objectifying and oppressive forces operating through the FBV discourse. I have chosen to use the term ‘assemblage’ to refer to the way in which FBVs and Prevent work in concert. Throughout the book I use the expression FBVs/Prevent assemblage. The concept of assemblage is associated with Foucault’s collaborators Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 2014: 39), so whilst it is not a term Foucault himself used, I use it in the spirit of his and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, which famously characterised theory as a tool to be used to unmask the ruses of power (Deleuze, in Lotringer, 1996: 76). Deleuze and Guattari use the term assemblage in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. An assemblage is a multiplicity, neither a part nor a whole, it is an arrangement of different elements, combining to function as an ensemble of various parts, and working in concert (Deleuze & Guattari, 2014: 39; Nail, 2017). FBVs and Prevent are an assemblage that mobilise a range of parts, law enforcement authorities, policy makers and policy agents at both local and central government level, teachers, governing bodies and Channel panels and

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ultimately the assemblage links to the military and security forces as parts of the CONTEST strategy. A book of this nature is also an assemblage. The teachers’ narratives and my narrative connect and link to the concerns of other critical scholars and minoritised teachers and students whose struggles should be heard and represented. Chapters 2–4 set out the story, the genealogy of the civic nationalist turn in education. Chapter 2 begins by examining the ways Britishness and national identity have been mobilised by successive post-war administrations and political parties to serve their agendas. The chapter covers the period from the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, to the liberal hour of the nineteen sixties, moving on to examine the cultural restorationism of the Thatcher government, New Labour’s short-lived Cool Britannia era to the post-9/11 retreat from multiculturalism, and the introduction of the shared values and community cohesion policies which laid the foundations for the introduction of FBVs. Chapter 3 is an account of the introduction of FBVs and the Prevent duty under the Conservative Liberal Coalition when New Labour left office after the election defeat in 2010. The Trojan horse enquiry is examined in detail and the chapter concludes with a consideration of the impact of Brexit, the recent culture wars in education under the government of Boris Johnson, the government disavowal of structural racism and the anti-asylum seeker stance of the current Sunak government. The chapter argues that the restrictions of recent government guidance on political impartiality in schools (DfE, 2022) have been made possible by the civic nationalist turn initiated by the introduction of FBVs in 2012 and that the illiberal liberalism of FBVs has become the bedrock of civic education. Chapter 4 addresses multiculturalism and its relationship to religious education to examine the factors that led to the putative ‘death of multiculturalism’ (Slack, 2006) in the era of FBVs and the War on Terror. Chapters 5–7 are a discussion of the theory, methodology and methods available to critical researchers investigating the workings of the FBVs/Prevent assemblage in education. Chapter 5 is a review of theoretical and empirical studies of FBVs. Chapters 6 and 7 build from the review of the literature to examine the contribution of a Foucauldian approach to this analysis through the theorisation of teacher subjectivity and the role of the power in shaping teacher subjectivity. Chapter 7 examines Foucault’s ethical theory and his concepts of free spokenness (parr¯esia)

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(Foucault, 2010) and the courage of truth (Foucault, 2011) as frames for conceptualising the teachers’ subjectivities and pedagogical practice. Chapters 8 and 9 present the teachers’ narratives collected through group and individual semi-structured interviews with pre and in-service teachers over the 2015–2019 period. In Chapter 8 the data is structured around two main themes, firstly, the teachers’ views of British identity and values and secondly their accounts of how they enacted and implemented the requirements. Chapter 9 presents interview data collected after the referendum to leave the European Union (EU) and provides an account of the teachers’ experiences of working with FBVs and Prevent during this period of heightened racial tension. Chapter 9 concludes with data collected from a roundtable group interview held in 2019 a few months before the first Covid 19 lockdown. The data presented in these chapters offers a rich insight into the empirical underlife of policy and the dilemmas faced by teachers, often working in challenging urban settings as they tried to mitigate the divisive effects of the FBVs/Prevent discourse on their students. The redundancy of FBVs and Prevent as policies that inhibit educational dialogue and informed empathy is made clear through the teachers’ accounts. The data also bears testimony to the teachers’ capacities to resist and counter the more polarising tendencies of the policies and to articulate themselves as ethical subjects engaged in risky counter discourse. Finally, Chapter 10 offers concluding reflections and considers where the cracks in the system might lie and what pockets of hope and resistance are available to researchers and activists through a consideration of teacher agency and the pedagogical possibilities of the Religion and Worldviews (Benoit et al., 2020) approach that is shaping current thinking in RE.

Conclusion The decision to write about the FBVs and Prevent discourse is an act of parr¯esia. The teachers’ accounts of this divisive governmentality provide a counter narrative to trouble the official government rationale for the introduction of unprecedented levels of security, surveillance and discipline into an already over-regulated and performative education sector. ‘Liberty’, Foucault argued ‘is a practice…liberty is that which is exercised’ (Foucault, 1991b: 245). As a project, the research and analysis presented in this book is a ‘work of freedom’, it aims to reveal and unmask the objectifying forces at work in the FBVs/Prevent assemblage but also to

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show how the teachers were able to ‘modify’ and ‘loosen’ the constraints of its discourse through the exercise of their ethical ‘telos’ (Foucault, 1992: 27). In the next chapter this enquiry into the crooked contours of civic nationalist education policy making in the fog war begins with an examination of Britishness as the plaything of politicians (Ward, 2004).

References Allen, C. (2004). Justifying Islamophobia: A Post 9/11 Consideration of the European Union and British Contexts. The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences., 21(3), 1–25. Allen, C. (2022). The Trojan Horse affair: Islamophobia Scholar on the Long Shadow Cast by the Scandal. Available at The Trojan Horse affair: Islamophobia scholar on the long shadow cast by the scandal (theconversation.com) Ball, S., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How Schools Do Policy. Policy Enactments. Benoit, C., Hutchings, T., & Shillitoe, R. (2020). Worldview. A Multidisciplinary Report. Available at https://www.religiouseducationcouncil.org.uk/wp-con tent/uploads/2020/10/20-19438-REC-Worldview-Report-A4-v2.pdf Brenkman, J. (2007). The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11. Princeton University Press. Cameron, D. (2011) PM’s speech at Munich Security Conference. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munichsecurity-conference David, M. (2002). From Keighley to Keele: Personal Reflections on a Circuitous Journey Through Education, Family, Feminism and Policy Sociology. British Journal of Sociology of Education., 23(2), 249–269. Deleuze, G. (1996). Intellectuals and Power. In S. Lotringer (Ed.), Foucault Live. Collected Interviews, 1961–1984. Semiotexte. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2014). A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury. DfE. (2011). Teachers’ Standards. Available at https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/104 0274/Teachers__Standards_Dec_2021.pdf DfE. (2014). Promoting Fundamental British Values as Part of SMSC in Schools. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/promot ing-fundamental-british-values-through-smsc DfE. (2015). The Prevent Duty. Departmental Advice for Schools and Childcare Providers. Available at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439598/prevent-duty-dep artmental-advice-v6.pdf

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DfE. (2022). Political Impartiality in Schools. Available at Political impartiality in schools—GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Education and Inspections Act. (2006). Available at https://www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/2006/40/contents Elton-Chalcraft, S., Lander, V., Revell, L., Warner, D., & Whitworth, L. (2016). To Promote or not to Promote Fundamental British Values? Teachers’ Standards, Diversity and Teacher Education. British Educational Research Journal., 43(1), 29–48. Farrell, F. (2019). Walking on Eggshells Brexit, British Values and Educational Space. Education+Training, 62(9), 981–997. Farrell, F. (2021). White Man Face, Order Words and Deviance Detectors: A Deleuzoguattarian Analysis of Fundamental British Values. Prism, 3(2). Available at https://doi.org/10.24377/prism.ljmu.0302202 Foucault, M. (1980). In C. Gordon (Ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 . Pearson Education Limited. Foucault, M. (1991a). Discipline And Punish. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1991b). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1992). The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality: 2. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1998). The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality: 1. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2000). The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Volume 1. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002a). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge. Foucault, M. (2002b). Confronting Governments: Human Rights. In J. Faubion (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Volume 3. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the College De France. 1982–1983. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2011). The Courage of Truth. The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the College De France.1983–1984. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22– 27. Goodson, I., & Sikes, P. (2001). Life History Research in Educational Settings. Oxford University Press. Grimmitt, M. (Ed.). (2010). Religious Education and Social and Community Cohesion. McCrimmons. Home Office. (2015). Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/6/contents/enacted Hoque, A. (2015). British Islamic Identity: Third-Generation Bangladeshis from East London. Trentham Books. Ignatieff, M. (1994). Blood & Belonging. Vintage.

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Liddle, A. (2021). Classroom as Heterotopia: English Lessons as a Space to Problematise War. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(7), 951–967. Miah, S. (2017). Muslims, Schooling and Security. Palgrave Pivot. Modood, T. (2011). Multiculturalism. Polity. Nail, T. (2017). What is an Assemblage? Substance, 46(1), 21–37. Nash, J. (2015, January 7). Communication to Rochdale Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education. Sikes, P., & Everington, J. (2001). Becoming an RE Teacher: A Life History Approach. British Journal of Religious Education, 24(1), 8–19. Slack, J. (2006, July 7). Why the dogma of multiculturalism has failed Britain. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-394631/Whydogma-multiculturalism-failed-Britain.html Smart, N. (1968). Secular Education & the Logic of Religion. Faber and Faber. Smart, N. (1996). Dimensions of the Sacred. Harper Collins. The Swann Report. (1985). Education for All. Available at http://www.educat ionengland.org.uk/documents/swann/swann1985.html Ward, P. (2004). Britishness Since 1870. Routledge. Wright Mills, C. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Britishness in Post-war Politics and Policy: Precursors to British Values

Introduction In this chapter I begin a critical history of Britishness in post-Second World War political discourse to disturb and reveal the antecedents of FBVs. I aim to demonstrate how politicised constructs of national identity have served as the ‘playthings of politicians’ (Ward, 2004: 93), setting the precedent for the introduction of fundamental British values (DfE, 2011) and the Prevent duty (DfE, 2015). Foucault discovered genealogy as a method to write his critical histories of the present (Foucault, 1991a). His aim was to retell the histories of social institutions such as the prison, the hospital and the school to trouble ‘official’ accounts of their purpose. Genealogy has two aspects, descent, and emergence (Foucault, 1991b; 80). Genealogy as descent (Herkunft) recognises the discontinuities, the multiplicity of factors, the errors and the accidents that lie behind the official account of events in policy texts and ministerial speeches. Emergence (Enstehung) is concerned with the ways in which modern forms of power constitute social subjects, so they become intelligible and governable. For Foucault official government narrative is ‘story, plot, myth and fabrication’ (Marshall, in Ball, 2012: 18). Genealogy as the descent is his method for uncovering these ‘crooked contours’ to reveal the strategic operations of power to contest them and think differently by producing a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_2

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‘counter memory’ that will help us to ‘recreate the historical and practical conditions’ of our present existence (Tamboukou, in Ball, 2019: 104). This chapter traces the crooked contours of British racial politics from the anti-immigration polemics of the 1950s to the end of the New Labour administration’s term of office in 2010. The chapter aims to demonstrate how the foundations were laid down for the introduction of FBVs by the Conservative Liberal Democrat Coalition in 2011, but the bigger picture is one where Britishness is shown to be the perennial plaything of politicians from all sides of the political spectrum. From Integration to Cultural Restoration Historically, patriotism has been the territory of conservatives, and in Britain, this mainly means the Conservative Party, however, appeals to Britishness and patriotism have also served the political left. In the 1920s and 1930s, Britishness represented opposition to the Fascism and Communism, as alien to the national character (Ward, 2004: 103). In the era of post-war reconstruction, the Labour Party associated patriotism with the welfare state. However, with the arrival of the Empire Windrush in June 1948, carrying new arrivals from the Caribbean, the right reappropriated Britishness. Throughout the late 40s and the 1950s arrivals of workers from the new commonwealth (African, Caribbean and South Asian) led to fearful political and populist backlash across the class spectrum, drawing from the legacies of nineteenth-century colonialism. In 1958 race riots triggered by racist assaults in Notting Hill, raised questions about policing and the assimilation of the new arrivals. By 1964 the extent to which race dominated politics was shown in the West Midlands in the Smethwick by-election where the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths used the slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour vote labour’ (Tomlinson, 2018: 5). After a snap election in 1966, the Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Harold Wilson were re-elected with a vastly increased majority and Labour regained Smethwick. The mid 1960s marked a liberal hour in British racial politics. The first Race Relations Act was passed in October 1965, banning racial discrimination in public places and making the promotion of racial hatred on the grounds of ‘colour, race or ethnic or national origins’ a criminal offence (UK Parliament, 1965). In 1966 the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins famously declared that Britain was to be a place of ‘Equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in

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atmosphere of mutual tolerance’ (Jenkins, in Tomlinson, 2008: 25). In 1968 the Race Relations Act was expanded to tackle discrimination in housing and employment to ensure that second-generation immigrants ‘who have been born here’ were given fair access to housing and jobs (UK Parliament, 1968). A discourse of pluralism, integration and equal opportunity appeared to have superseded the assimilationist narrative of the 1950s. However, as Tomlinson argues ‘evidence of white tolerance was hard to detect’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 26). By the late 1960s, Labour’s liberal stance faced fierce reaction from the political right in the form of the charismatic Conservative MP, Enoch Powell. Powell mobilised considerable popular support through the postimperial tribalism of his anti-immigrant rhetoric. He denounced new arrivals as ‘coloured, Negro and picanninies’ (Powell, cited in Tomlinson, 2018: 2) and in his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ 1968 speech at the Conservative Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area, Powell used the dramatic imagery of race war to describe the violence that would ensue if immigration was unregulated. He declared that ‘soon the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ (Powell, cited in Tomlinson, 2018: 2). Even though economic migrants from South Asia and the Caribbean accounted for less than one million, Powell forecasted up to 7 million by 2000 ‘and urged repatriation’ (Powell cited in Tomlinson, 2018: 2). Powell was demoted from the Shadow Cabinet by Prime Minister Edward Heath, but his defensive nationalism continued to influence the cultural restorationism of the New Right under future Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, with consequences for education. Ball characterises cultural restorationism as hard liners, opposed to multiculturalism, whose main interest was in the revalorisation of traditional forms of education (Ball, 1993). Notable members of this group included Thatcher’s ideological guru and mentor, Sir Keith Joseph and the authors of the Black Papers, Brian Cox, Tony Dyson and Rhodes Boyson. There are parallels between the cultural restorationism of the New Right and the ideology of FBVs, both are based on belief in, ‘A strong state to control the evils that an unregulated society is prey to. It regards custom and tradition as vital properties of an established order. Without them, the state is weakened, and subversion can grow in strength’ (Jones, cited in Ball, 1993: 196). Under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative party (1975–1990), the cultural restorationists regarded ‘cultural cohesion as an essential prop of state authority’ (Jones cited in Ball, 1993:

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196). Subjects such as English and History were key battlegrounds for the reassertion of the New Rights cultural restorationist agenda which ‘mourned the loss of our cultural canon’ and sought to reassert a ‘particular English identity, albeit within a British context’ (Phillips, 1996: 390). The consequences of this political Anglo-centrism were to produce a racialised hierarchy which excluded diverse forms of British identity, and drove the cultural restorationists’, ‘opposition to multi-cultural or antiracist education’ (Phillips, 1996: 390). The restorationist agenda had the full endorsement of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Phillips, 1996). In her 1987 speech to the Conservative Party, she referred to ‘trendy’ progressive teachers teaching children political slogans instead of ‘clear English’, adding that ‘children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values’ were ‘being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay’ (Thatcher cited in Ball, 1993: 200). New Right ideas about Race and Nation were evident in the 1988 Education Reform Act and the National Curriculum it established (Whitty & Menter, 1988). Emphasis on the ‘national’ in the national curriculum, national testing and exclusion of languages other than Welsh and English as first languages, all implied cultural bias towards a certain conceptualisation of Britishness, or Englishness (Whitty & Menter, 1988: 53). Anne Sofer of the Social and Liberal Democrats commented on the ‘draconian control’ exercised by Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education in the 1988 ERA, stating that, ‘The prevailing philosophy is that one does get excited about Christianity being absolutely predominant in RE, about the need to make sure British history prevails over other sorts of history and to stamp on anything that has the label anti-racism attached to it’ (Sofer in Whitty & Menter, 1988: 53). The ERA national curriculum was, therefore, an ‘ideological curriculum’ (Ball, 1993), which was used to discipline progressive teachers and to reinstate ‘real knowledge’ in the curriculum. The influence of New Right cultural restorationism on the national curriculum was particularly evident in their vision for History teaching, as Kenneth Clarke’s speech at the 1988 Conservative Party Conference demonstrates. Clark stated that children would be taught key events in British history, including ‘the spread of Britain’s influence for good throughout the world’ and that ‘we should not be ashamed of our history, our pride in our past gives us our confidence to stand tall in the world today’ (Clark in Ball, 1993: 203). As Ball notes, there was a kind of curricular revisionism at work in which Britain

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was represented as the benign bearer of justice and civilisation to the world, rather than a former colonial power. Thatcher may not have been a racist herself, but during her long tenure in government, she was able to mobilise xenophobia to outflank the National Front in 1977 by declaring that white British people were ‘really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture’ (Thatcher in Ward, 2004: 128). Her government used commitment to exclusive forms of Britishness by celebrating victory in the Falklands in imperial style and framing immigration policy along racial lines. Thatcher’s senior Cabinet Minister and Chairman of the Conservative party, Norman Tebbit remarked in 1989 that ‘Most people in Britain do not want to live in a multicultural, multiracial society…it has been foisted on them…the fear is that they will be swamped by people of different culture, history and religion’ (Tebbit in Ward, 2004: 129). Thatcher’s education, immigration and social policies utilised Britishness as a strategy to assimilate blacks and Asians into the British ‘way of life’. The 1983 election campaign poster used a picture of a black man in a business suit, with the message ‘Labour says he’s black, Tories say he is British’ (Ward, 2004: 130). The message was clear ‘be like us’, adopt conservative values and your ethnicity is no longer a mark of difference. Under Thatcher, to be British was to embrace individualism and upward mobility. The restorationist agenda received further impetus under John Major, Thatcher’s successor, and Prime Minister from 1990–1997. Ball describes Major’s version as a form of nostalgic Victorianism that drew from images of an imaginary Englishness, replacing the ‘uncertainties of change with cosy, sepia images of family, nation and school’ (Ball, 1993: 210). Major drew from nostalgic images to allay fears about membership of the European Union and to reassure the public that in 50 years time, Britain would still be a nation of ‘long shadows in county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and…old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’ (Major cited in Perraudin, 2014). New Labour: From Cool Britannia to Shared Values A landslide victory for New Labour in 1997, might have seen the end of politicised nostalgia, but the leaders of this new version of Labour also recognised the political value of national identity in political

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strategy. The new Labour PM, Tony Blair, attracted comparisons with the modernising labour leader of the 1960s, Harold Wilson. Blair, like Wilson before he invoked a ‘New Britain’ and a ‘patriotism of the Left’ (Ward, 2004). Anthony Giddens, philosopher of Blair’s ‘Third Way’ New Labour ideology also advocated for ideas of British identity in labour discourse, arguing that ‘national identity can be a benign influence’ (Giddens cited in Ward, 2004: 110). When Tony Blair reconstructed the party as ‘New Labour’ he again invoked ‘New Britain’ as Wilson had done before him. After the election victory in 1997, senior ministers put forward a new vision of multiethnic, multinational Britishness, labelled ‘Cool Britannia’ by the media, as Gordon Brown’s interview to the New Statesman in 1998 shows, ‘I understand Britishness as being outward looking, open, internationalist with a commitment to democracy and tolerance’ (Brown in Ward, 2004: 110). The left-leaning Think Tank Demos published ‘Britain: Renewing our identity’ in 1997 (Leonard, 1997), and ‘Reclaiming Britishness’ (Griffith & Leonard, 2002) in 2002. On the surface, it appeared that the New Labour movement offered a ‘cool’ and flexible patriotism of the left that was able to accommodate plurality. However, not all of this thinking was as fresh as it seemed, indeed there were ‘some decidedly old-fashioned tones to several of Blair’s statements’ (Ward, 2004: 111) as Ward notes, Blair’s speech to the labour party conference in 1996 is a celebration of empire and by implication, colonial power, ‘Consider a thousand years of British history and what it tell us. The first parliament in the world. The industrial revolution was ahead of its time. An empire, the largest the world has ever known. The invention of virtually every scientific device in the modern world. Two world wars in which our country was bled dry, in which two generations perished, but which in its defeat of the most evil force ever let lose by man showed the most sustained example of bravery in human history. Our characteristics? Common sense. Standing up for the underdog. Fiercely independent’ (Blair, 1996). The familiar tropes of British national identity are at work in this speech with its nostalgic references to the two world wars (Gilroy, 2006), serving to distance Britain, as the enemy of Fascism, from its imperial abuses, slavery and genocides. In 2000 Blair spoke again in a presidential-style address in which he framed ‘true’ Britishness in terms of ‘core values’ of ‘fair play, creativity, tolerance and an outward-looking approach to the world’ (Blair, 2000). However, the Britishness of Blair’s rhetoric would

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be tested. Two events in 2001 were to define the way in which British values became the tool of government. The first of these events were the summer riots that took place in towns and cities in the North of England in 2001, the second was the September 11th terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon by al-Qaeda. Parallel Lives The first of these events were riots in towns in the North of England, Burnley, Bradford and Oldham. These disturbances were the outcome of tensions caused by grievances towards the Police and racist aggravation stoked by far-right British nationalist party extremists who had gained a foothold in these towns. Decades of systemic structural and economic decline culminated in the riots, however, the Home Office report ‘Community Cohesion’ (Home Office, 2001) report published in the aftermath portrays minority communities as self-segregating problems. The report chaired by Ted Cantle, Associate Director of the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government paints a picture of deficit communities responsible for their own disenfranchisement, as the following extract shows, ‘Whilst the physical segregation of housing estates and inner-city areas came as no surprise, the team was particularly struck by the depth of polarisation of our towns and cities… separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges’ (Home Office, 2001: 9). The report argued that a lack of bridging capitals and an excess of the wrong sort of cultural capital led to minority ethnic communities becoming excluded. The exclusion was to be addressed through interventions based on the concept of community cohesion, but critics argued that the ‘Community cohesion’ discourse functioned by blaming communities living at the sharp end of social and economic decline (Farrar, 2012). As Kundnani argues (Kundnani, 2007), the Cantle report failed to ask what the government and society were doing that produced the exclusion of poorer communities of Muslim and South Asian origin in the northern towns and cities. Social problems were being framed in terms of ethnicity and race rather than in structural terms.

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Either ‘You Are with Us or You Are with the Terrorists’ The events of 11 September 2001 in which Islamist hijackers took control of four passenger planes, ultimately led to the policy discourse that produced fundamental British values in opposition to ‘radical Islam as a threat to liberal democracy’ (Revell & Bryan, 2018: 7). The attacks ‘propelled’ an intense focus on Muslims in Britain (Farrar, 2012). The 9/11 attack was orchestrated by the Islamist network al-Qaeda, under the auspices of Saudi national Osama bin Laden, a former US-backed mujahidin fighter who had opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The al-Qaeda network bin Laden belonged to consisted of perpetrators, who drew ‘support from a reservoir of bitterness and anger over US policies in the region of the Middle East’ (Chomsky, 2011: 45). On September 20, US President George Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and the nation in which he stated the intentions of the US government in response to the attacks, ‘And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’ (Bush, 2001). Less than a month after the attacks, an international coalition, led by the US and the UK invaded Afghanistan with the objective of eradicating al-Qaeda and tracking down bin Laden. In 2003, a US–UK Coalition invaded Iraq, on the grounds that the Iraqi Ba’athist dictator Saddam Hussein, was harbouring weapons of mass destruction and was a key player in a so-called axis of evil that supported and included international Islamist terrorist organisations. Both allegations could not be substantiated and the UK government’s evidence for weapons of mass destruction was discredited as a ‘dodgy dossier’, ‘sexed up’ for political purposes, much of it copied from an unreliable internet source (McSmith, 2016). The UK’s involvement in what seemed like the most unlikely collaboration between the militaristic neoconservative hawks of Bush’s republican party and new labour, was driven by Blair’s post-cold war ‘ethical interventionism’ and his ‘muscular Christianity’ (Dumbrell, 2006: 465). In 2004, almost a year since the war began, Blair reaffirmed his commitment to not letting, ‘an evil dictator go unchallenged’ (Blair cited in Dumbrell, 2006: 464). However, the consequences of Britain’s involvement in campaigns in the Middle East were to reverberate with dire consequences. The joint intelligence committee itself had warned that the threat of al-Qaeda terrorism ‘would be heightened by military action

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against Iraq’ (Rai, nd) and on 7 July 2005 British-born Islamist terrorists detonated explosive devices on three underground trains and a bus travelling through the London underground in the rush hour. 38 people were killed and 700 injured, making the attack the worst terrorist attack in UK history (Muir & Cowan, 2005) Mohammed Sidique Kahn, the terrorist ringleader made a video statement, a last will and testament, that was shown on the Al Jazeera television network in which he justified his actions on the grounds of perceived injustices perpetuated by the West on Muslim communities in the Middle East, Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment, and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war, and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation. (Intelligence & Security Committee, 2006: 12)

It was at this point that Blair and senior government ministers began to stress the role of education in tackling radicalisation and ‘uniting the nation’ (Osler, 2008: 11). Both Blair and Brown gave speeches in which British values, patriotism and education featured, emphasising cohesion and the necessity of common values to oppose extremism. The values policy discourse was making the crucial step towards equating lack of commitment to British values as the key factor in making individuals vulnerable to radical Islam or far-right extremism. Since 2003, the British government’s long-term strategy for countering terrorism was CONTEST, divided into the four strands of PREVENT, PURSUE, PROTECT and PREPARE (HM Gov, 2006). In 2006, in the aftermath of the 7/7 terror attacks, the government published its response to the attacks identifying education as central to the processes of deradicalisation. The Strategy acknowledged structural disadvantage as a factor, but the overall message is one in which Muslim youth are presented as at risk, in need of reform, or as Miah argues (Miah, 2017), the document constructs a Muslim problematic to be remediated by ‘community cohesion’,

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Many Muslims suffer high levels of disadvantage, and work has been underway for some time on addressing the inequalities they experience…In particular, the strategy includes actions being taken to help Muslims improve their educational performance, employment opportunities, and housing conditions’. (HM Gov, 2006: 11)

Throughout the Strategy document education is identified as a key site for the enactment of community cohesion policies, In particular, the strategy includes actions being taken to help Muslims improve their educational performance, employment opportunities and housing conditions. (HM Gov, 2006: 11)

The Muslim Council of Britain’s decision not to take part in Holocaust Memorial Day in 2006 on the grounds that the memorial excluded nonJewish victims of genocide, provoked Ruth Kelly, minister for Communities to announce that Muslim organisations that refused to defend ‘core British values’ and failed to take a ‘proactive’ role in the ‘fight against extremism’ would lose access to millions of pounds of government funding (Helm, 2006). In 2007, the Department for Communities and Local Government published ‘Preventing Violent Extremism: Winning Hearts and Minds’ detailing the governmental strategy for creating communities that were able to ‘challenge robustly the ideas of those extremists who seek to undermine our way of life’ (DCLG, 2007: 4). Education and shared British values were central to the enactment of community cohesion. On page 4, it stated that the ‘Government is committed to working in partnership with the vast majority of Muslims who reject violence and who share core British values in doing this’ (DCLG, 2007: 4) and on page 5 a section headed ‘promoting shared values’ states that the defence and promotion of ‘our shared and non-negotiable values’ is required. A picture is created of a polarised society split between those who uphold and those who transgress shared values (DCLG, 2007: 5). Core British values are also mentioned, predecessors of what would become FBVs under the Coalition. The report references Sir Keith Ajegbo’s, 2007Diversity and Citizenship Review (DfES, 2007) which also promotes British values as a subject for debate and discussion. Ajegbo recognised the contested nature of the term British, but the message is clear, education as a tool of governmental power is the instrument government will

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use to enforce its values discourse. What is excluded from these documents is any recognition of the role played by systemic racism or the UK’s foreign policy agenda in creating an environment where a values deficit can be posited as the principal threat to social cohesion as opposed to structural decline. The emerging values curriculum exhibited all the characteristics of soft disciplinary power, placing responsibility on teachers and students to reform themselves through enactments of the values curricula. Britishness in Decline In this period of the New Labour administration, the emerging British values discourse began to take shape in texts, speeches and policies that position intersecting issues of Islamic extremism, urban decline, political apathy, and the failure of multiculturalism as the causes of social disintegration in British society. The impact of the northern riots and the terror attacks was to foreground questions of national identity, belonging and social cohesion in policy making. In 2005 the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) published a report entitled ‘Citizenship and belonging: what is Britishness?’ (CRE, 2005), which captured the concerns of policy makers and the wider public about ‘perceived differences’ between British Muslims and people of white British backgrounds because of the belief that some British Muslim’s loyalties ‘lie beyond the British nation state’ and lie in a ‘worldwide Islamic network’ whose values were at odds with those of Britain (CRE, 2005: 11). In 2006 a further report was published by the Commission for Racial Equality, ‘The Decline of Britishness’, a research study which referred to the distress of ‘white’ participants at the perceived decline of Britishness. The familiar themes of immigration, ‘unfair claims’ on the welfare state made by ethnic minorities, moral pluralism and ‘political correctness’ (CRE, 2006: 4) were cited as the causes of national decline according to the participants. In 2007 Ruth Kelly and Liam Byrne, Labour Minister for Immigration produced a pamphlet for the Fabian Society, ‘A Common Place’ in which they outline a picture of the ‘fragmentation of society’, and the end of ‘old certainties about our national identity’ (Kelly & Byrne, 2007: 12). To address the threats outlined in their pamphlet Kelly and Byrne argued

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for a points-based ‘earned citizenship’ system for immigrants, the development of a ‘British’ Islam and the introduction of a ‘national Britain day’ (Kelly & Byrne, 2007: 19). The civic-thickening discourse of New Labour was also to find expression in governmental retreat from multiculturalism. In 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett declared that he was weary of ‘unbridled multiculturalism which privileges difference over community cohesion’ (Blunkett in Mathieu, 2018: 47–48). Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government also criticised multiculturalism, stating that the ‘near uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism’ belonged to a bygone era (Kelly in Mathieu, 2018: 47–48). Multiculturalism, she argued, was a causal factor in ‘separateness’ (Kelly in Mathieu, 2018: 47–48). Alongside government retreat from multiculturalism, another development was the assertion of the role of Christian faith schools and ministerial endorsement of Christianity and Christian values. In a speech given to the Christian Socialist movement, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that ‘Church schools are a true partnership between the churches and the government. They are a pillar of our national education system…all your local and social activity is driven by your values and beliefs and the spiritual dimension of your faith…In a world of uncertainty, rapid change and technological transformation, I believe these underpinning values are becoming more not less relevant’ (Blair in Jivraj, 2013: 325). In his previous role as Education secretary David Blunkett gave a speech to the Anglican Diocesan Directors of Education in England and Wales in which he stated that church schools had an ethos that he wished could be ‘bottled’ so it could be shared with other schools (Blunkett in Jivraj, 2013: 324). This amounted to a tactical form of governmentality in which Christian values were co-imbricated with de-theologised secular British values and Christian faith schools was positioned as ‘exemplars of social capital production’ (Jivraj, 2013: 327). Tony Blair left office in 2007 and was replaced by Gordon Brown, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer. In February 2007, 4 months before he became Prime Minister, Brown offered his vision of Britishness in a speech to the Commonwealth Club. He announced, I’m here to listen, because recent weeks have seen a renewed focus on what it is to be British and what we value about the British way of life. (Brown, 2007)

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He went on to argue that what people admire most about Britain and the British are, ‘our values’, which he defined as, ‘British tolerance, the British belief in liberty and the British sense of fair play’ (Brown, 2007). Brown invoked the image of British values as a ‘golden thread’ running through British history, from the Magna Carta to the stand against fascism in the Second World War. The context of this speech was clearly set out in terms of ‘how we respond to Muslim fundamentalism’, the role of Britain in the EU and the recovery of a sense of ‘national purpose’ (Brown, 2007). One of Brown’s first actions on becoming Prime Minister in June 2007 was to publish a Green paper, ‘The Governance of Britain’ (Select Committee on the Constitution, 2007) which set out proposals for constitutional reform, described as the ‘first step in a national conversation’, including a review of citizenship to include a ‘British statement of values’ and consideration of a ‘British Bill of Rights and Duties’ (Select Committee on the Constitution, 2007: 3). As a result of these proposals ‘Citizenship: our common bond’ (Goldsmith, 2008) was published which outlined a clear role for schools in enacting new Labour’s citizenship curriculum with a strong emphasis on British values as a key component of young peoples’ civic participation and education. The Citizenship report stated that schools should prepare ‘citizenship manifestos’ to forge links with their communities and proposed the introduction of a ‘national day’, to coincide with the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee, to ‘provide an annual focus for our national narrative’ (Goldsmith, 2008: 7). The Blair–Brown era concluded in 2010 with Labour leaving office and a Conservative Liberal Democrat Coalition, led by Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, formed the new administration. This was the first coalition in British politics since Churchill’s cross party wartime ministry of 1945. The new labour years had been marked by a contradictory discourse of national identity, which offered the symbolism of a cool Britannia that reclaimed the Union Jack from Far-Right nationalists and enabled foreign secretary Robin Cook to use chicken tikka masala as an analogy for British inclusivity, alongside an increased emphasis on patriotism and social cohesion. Cook’s speech asserted that pluralism, ‘is not a burden we must reluctantly accept…It is an immense asset that contributes to the cultural and economic vitality of the nation’. He went to on to declare, ‘Chicken Tikka Massala is now a British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. Chicken Tikka is an Indian dish. The Massala sauce was added

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to satisfy the desires of British people to have their meat served with gravy’ (Cook, cited in Habib, 2018: 14). Habib notes that this symbolic multicultural alliance was in essence, political, and governmental, ‘exclusively white and male dominated’ (Habib, 2018: 14). By 2010 when the Cameron-Clegg Coalition entered government, trite tikka masala pluralism was up against the biopolitics of managing waves of dislocated refugees, asylum seekers and migrants seeking refuge from the sectarian wars of the Middle East, and the former colonies of the global south. The political paradigm shifts away from the multiculturalism of Roy Jenkins, and the Swann report was made explicit in the policies and the policy discourse of the Coalition and subsequent Conservative government that took office in 2015.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to trace the emergence of the British values discourse through an examination of the ways in which Britishness has served as a political ‘plaything’. New Labour created the political foundations for the new civic nationalism that the Coalition was able to build upon and strengthen leading to the introduction of fundamental British values. In the next chapter, this genealogical descent moves into an account of the racial crisis events (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991) and the steps that were taken by the Coalition and the Conservative administrations to introduce FBVs and the introduction of the Prevent duty and considers the place of British values in the post-Brexit era. The analysis discovers moving sands, ‘fragmented and incoherent events, with faults, errors, omissions, faulty appraisals, and pious claims and aspirations’ (Marshall, in Ball, 1990:19) revealing, ‘the hazardous play of dominations’ (Foucault, 1991b: 83) in the politicised truth game of British values.

References Ajegbo, K. (2007). Curriculum Review. Diversity and Cit.nship. http://www. educationengland.org.uk/documents/pdfs/2007-ajegbo-report-citizenship. pdf Balibar, E., & Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Verso.

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Ball, S. (1993). Education, Majorism and the ‘Curriculum of the Dead.’ Curriculum Studies., 1(2), 195–214. Blair, T. (1996). Leader’s Speech. Blackpool 1996. http://www.britishpoliticalsp eech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=202 Blair, T. (2000). Tony Blair’s Britain Speech. The Guardian. Tony Blair’s Britain Speech|British Identity and Society|The Guardian Brown, G. (2007, February 27). Full Text of Gordon Brown’s Speech. The Guardian. Full text of Gordon Brown’s Speech|Politics|The Guardian. Bush, G. (2001). President Bush Addresses the Nation. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transc ripts/bushaddress_092001.html Chomsky, N. (2011). 9–11. Was There an Alternative? Seven Stories Press. Commission for Racial Equality. (2005). Citizenship and Belonging: What Is Britishness? http://www.ethnos.co.uk/pdfs/9_what_is_britishness_CRE.pdf Commission for Racial Equality. (2006). The Decline of Britishness. A Research Study. http://www.ethnos.co.uk/pdfs/10_decline_of_britishness.pdf Department for Communities and Local Government. (2007). Preventing Violent Extremism- Winning Hearts and Minds. http://www.tedcantle.co. uk/publications/021%20Preventing%20violent%20extremism%20%20winn ing%20hearts%20and%20minds,%20.pdf DfE. (2011). Teachers’ Standards. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/104 0274/Teachers__Standards_Dec_2021.pdf DfE. (2015). The Prevent duty. Departmental advice for schools and childcare providers. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439598/prevent-duty-dep artmental-advice-v6.pdf Dumbrell, J. (2006). Working with Allies: The United States, the United Kingdom and the War on Terror. Politics & Policy., 34(2), 452–472. Farrar, M., & Valli, Y. (2012). Multiculturalism in the UK: A Contested Discourse. In S. Robinson & P. Wetherly (Eds.), Islam in the West: Key Issues in Multiculturalism. Palgrave. Foucault, M. (1991a). Discipline And Punish. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1991b). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Penguin. Gilroy, P. (2006). Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia University Press. Griffith, P. & Leonard, M. (Eds.). (2002). Reclaiming Britishness. The Foreign Policy Centre. https://fpc.org.uk/publications/reclaiming-britishness/ Goldsmith. (2008). Citizenship: Our Common Bond. https://image.guardian.co. uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2008/03/11/citizenship-report-full.pdf Habib, S. (2018). Learning and Teaching British Values. Policies and Perspectives on British Identities. Palgrave Pivot.

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Helm, T. (2006, October 12). Back British Values or Lose Grants, Kelly Tells Muslim Groups. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ 1531226/Back-British-values-or-lose-grants-Kelly-tells-Muslim-groups.html HM Government. (2006). Countering International Terrorism: The United Kingdom’s Strategy. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/counte ring-international-terrorism-the-united-kingdoms-strategy Home Office. (2001). Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. https://www.belongnetwork.co.uk/resources/community-cohesion-areport-of-the-independent-review-team/ Intelligence and Security Committee. (2006). Report into the London Terrorist Attacks July 7th 2005. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rep ort-into-the-london-terrorist-attacks-on-7-july-2005 Jivraj, S. (2013). Interrogating Religion Christian/Secular Values, Citizenship and Racial Upliftment in Governmental Education Policy. International Journal of Law in Context., 9(3), 318–342. Kelly, R., & Byrne, L. (2007). A Common Place. https://fabians.org.uk/public ation/a-common-place/ Kundnani, A. (2007). Integrationism: The Politics of Anti-Muslim Racism. Race & Class., 48(4), 24–44. Leonard, M. (1997). Britain Renewing our identity. Demos. https://www. demos.co.uk/files/britaintm.pdf Mathieu, F. (2018). The Failure of State Multiculturalism in the UK? An Analysis of the UK’s Multicultural Policy for 2000–2015. Ethnicities, 18(1), 43–69. Marshall, J. (2012). Foucault and Educational Research. In S. Ball (Ed.), Foucault and Education. Disciplines and Knowledge. Routledge. McSmith, A. (2016, July 5). Chilcot? Chaff? Dodgy Dossier? Here’s an Iraq War Glossary. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/pol itics/chilcot-chaff-dodgy-dossier-here-s-an-iraq-war-glossary-a7119996.html Miah, S. (2017). Muslims Schooling and Security. Springer International Publishing. Muir, H., & Cowan, R. (2005, July 8). Four Bombs in 50 Minutes- Britain Suffers Its Worst Ever Terror Attack. The Guardian. Four bombs in 50 minutes - Britain suffers its worst-ever terror attack | UK news | The Guardian. Osler, A. (2008). Citizenship Education and the Ajegbo Report: Re-imagining a Cosmopolitan Nation. London Review of Education., 6(1), 11–25. Perraudin, F. (2014, June 10). How Politicians Have Struggled to Define Britishness. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/ jun/10/how-politicians-have-struggled-to-define-britishness Phillips, R. (1996). History Teaching, Cultural Restorationism and National Identity in England and Wales. Curriculum Studies., 4(3), 385–399.

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Rai, M. (nd). Boris Johnson Believes Britain’s Wars Fuel Terrorism. The Morning Star Online. Boris Johnson believes Britain’s wars fuel terrorism | Morning Star (morningstaronline.co.uk) Revell, L. & Bryan, H., (2018). Fundamental British Values in Education. Emerald Publishing. Tamboukou, M. (2019). Writing Genealogies: An Exploration of Foucault’s Strategies for Doing Research. In S. Ball (Ed.), Foucault and Education. Putting Theory to Work. Routledge. Select Committee on the Constitution. (2007). The Governance of Britain. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldselect/ldconst/ 158/158.pdf Tomlinson, S. (2008). Race and Education: Policy and Politics in Britain. McGraw-Hill International. Tomlinson, S. (2018). Enoch Powell, Empires, Immigrants and Education. Race Ethnicity and Education., 21(1), 1–14. UK Parliament. (1965). Race Relations Act 1965. Available from: https://www. parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relati onships/collections1/race-relations-act-1965/race-relations-act-1965/ UK Parliament. (1968). Race Relations Act 1968. Available from: https://www. parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relati onships/collections1/1968-race-relations/1968-race-relations-act/ Ward, P. (2004). Britishness Since 1870. Routledge. Whitty, G., & Menter, I. (1988). Lessons of Thatcherism: Education Policy in England and Wales: 1979–1988. Journal of Law and Society., 16(1), 42–64.

CHAPTER 3

Crisis Racism and the Introduction of Fundamental British Values

Introduction In this chapter I document the introduction of FBVs and the Prevent duty. The analysis builds on the previous chapter by showing that what New Labour had begun in response to the northern riots and the 7/7 bombings, received fresh and aggressive impetus under the Coalition. The discussion opens with an account of the first iteration of FBV, framed as FBV 1, leading into a detailed discussion and critical analysis of the Trojan horse enquiry and the strengthening of FBVs, framed as FBV 2; the enactment of the Counter-Terror and Security Act (2015) and the introduction of the Prevent duty. These policies are framed as episodes of ‘crisis racism’ (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991). The chapter concludes by considering the implications of Brexit and the Black Lives Matter movement for education in an environment made hostile to difference by the civic nationalist policy in our schools and colleges. This ‘history of the present’ is future oriented, aiming at a historical ontology of ourselves and the conditions that make us think we are people of a certain kind so we can ask ‘What is

The original version of this chapter was revised: Reference and citation have been updated. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_11 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_3

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happening now? …What is this now within which all of us find ourselves?’ (Tamboukou, 2019: 104). The Coalition Take Office The Coalition government led by David Cameron for the Conservatives as Britain’s 52nd Prime Minister and Nick Clegg, representing the Liberal Democrats as Deputy Prime Minister, brought Gordon Brown’s premiership and New Labour’s thirteen years of rule to an end. After extensive negotiations to build a progressive partnership failed, Clegg agreed to form a coalition with the Conservative party, provoking bitter recriminations from both Labour and Liberal Democrat members. Cameron, Britain youngest Prime Minister since 1821, declared, ‘This is going to be hard and difficult work’ admitting that his government were facing ‘deep and pressing problems, a fiscal crisis in the form of a huge deficit and “deep social problems”’. (Cameron, in Wintour, 2010)

In education any hopes that the Liberal Democrats might temper the more radical tendencies of the Conservatives were soon revealed to be false, as the new Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, announced his ‘radical’ vision for urgent reform of the education system outlined in the white paper, The Importance of Teaching (DfE, 2010). Under the Coalition the Department for Education (DfE) replaced New Labour’s Department for Children, Schools, and Families (DCSF) and the Training and Development agency (TDA) was replaced with the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL). Building on New Labour’s City Academy programme, the Coalition also announced their version of the academies programme and the introduction of a new type of start-up academy, modelled on Swedish free schools and US Charter schools, to be called free schools. The processes of deregulation started under New Labour, where state provision is redistributed to private interests, was catalysed at unprecedented speed by the Coalition. These policies marked the end of the welfarist settlement achieved through cross party consensus in 1944 and a new phase in the neoliberal education project initiated by Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (Arthur, 2015: 312). The 2010 academies act, passed just 76 days after the election, ended ‘the link between LAs and schools that had begun in 1902’ (Ball, 2017: 132). ‘Broken Britain’ was to be repaired through educational partnerships between the state and non-state policy actors ranging from business,

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faith organisations, community and parent groups that Cameron called the ‘Big Society’. However, as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams observed, this ambitious rejection of big government in favour of local partnerships and local solutions benefited individuals and groups with the economic, social and cultural capitals to take greatest advantage of the reduced state. For Williams, the Big Society was a ruse ‘designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable’ (Helm & Coman, 2012). Amidst the bold narratives about raising standards through academisation, a distinctly neoconservative discourse emerged alongside the neoliberal rhetoric. City academies would raise academic standards, but they would also bring back discipline and instil responsibility. ‘Broken Britain’, Cameron argued, needed to be saved from its ‘slow motion moral collapse’ starkly evidenced by the 2011 riots prompted by the police shooting of Mark Duggan in London on August 4, which spread across the nation. Government response emphasised the lack of the rioters’ morality. For Cameron the rioters were, People showing indifference to right and wrong. People with a twisted moral code. People with a complete absence of self-restraint. (Cameron, in Stratton, 2011)

Those sympathetic to the government’s view, such as historian David Starkey dismissed any suggestion that the riots may have been linked to structural factors or the actions of the police. Responsibility was laid at the feet of individuals in need of reform and correction. In an interview given to the BBCs Newsnight programme Starkey went as far as to racialise the rioters, stating, The problem is that whites have become black. (Starkey in Quinn, 2011)

Political discourse appeared to be targeting problem urban populations, those deficient in values and in need of correction, resonating with earlier reports, such as Cantle’s Parallel Lives (Home Office, 2001). Starkey’s racialisation of the rioters is revealing. He identifies the constituencies that are targeted by fundamental British values, conflating ethnic minority youth and the White working class as the subaltern constituencies of neoliberal governance requiring reform and rehabilitation.

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‘In Defence of Our Way of Life’: Munich Security Conference Speech, 2011 It was against the backdrop of unease that on 1 February 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron addressed the Munich Security Conference with a hard-hitting speech that set out the Coalition position on security and the terror threat, in defence of ‘liberty’ and ‘our way of life’ (Cameron, 2011). Cameron framed his speech around a binary opposition between the ‘West and the Rest’ (Miah, 2017: 74). The speech is a racial crisis moment in which history is discursively reconstituted to present the West as rational, liberal and under attack by the forces of Islamist unreason. The speech is significant because Cameron makes politically explicit what was often implicit in New Labour’s rhetoric—extremism, multiculturalism and passive tolerance are the causal factors of domestic terrorism, The biggest threat that we face comes from terrorist attacks, some of which are sadly, carried out by our own citizens.

Cameron qualified this statement by adding, ‘Someone can be a devout Muslim and not be an extremist’, but ‘In the UK, some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practised at home by their parents…but these young men also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity’. Cameron identified ‘state multiculturalism’ as the cause of cultural segregation. His rhetoric took no account of the fact that there has never been an official state sanctioned ‘doctrine of multi culturalism’, however, this fact is irrelevant to the political purpose of the speech, Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.

This section picks up the narrative of Parallel Lives (Home Office, 2001), but it amplifies the alleged incompatibility of the segregated with those who live according to majoritarian values. To combat these social deficiencies, Cameron adopts a masculinist pose in which he disavows the soft liberalism of previous governments, stating,

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Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law, we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. (Cameron, 2011)

The speech clearly set the tone of the Coalition’s policy making and it drew immediate support and condemnation alike. Labour MP for Tooting, Sadiq Khan accused Cameron of writing ‘propaganda for the EDL’ whilst EDL members claimed that Cameron ‘was coming around to our way of thinking’ (Helm et al., 2011). Cameron’s Munich speech is a rhetorical feat that sutured liberal values to an exclusionary civic nationalism which positioned Muslims as a singular threat to a besieged Britain, marking a new phase and a hardening of the values discourse begun under New Labour. He had set the scene for the introduction of FBVs as an instrument of biopolitical governmentality designed to manage the putative threats posed by the ‘outsiders within’. Fundamental British Values: Phase 1 In July 2011 the DfE published a new set of Teachers’ Professional Standards, for use in schools in England, to replace the TDA professional standards. The Teachers Standards are the regulatory professional framework designed to ‘define the minimum level of practice expected of trainees and teachers from the point of being awarded qualified teacher status’ and more generally to assess ‘the performance of all teachers with QTS who are subject to The Education (School Teachers’ Appraisal) (England) Regulations 2012’ (DfE, 2011: 3). In contrast to the 33 standards contained in the previous TDA model, there were only 8 DfE standards in Part One of the new standards, grouped under the section ‘Teaching’ however it was the introduction of a new section, Part Two that marked the biggest shift in policy. Part Two, titled Personal and Professional Conduct states that teachers must ‘demonstrate consistently high standards of personal and professional conduct’ and ‘uphold public trust in the profession and maintain high standards of ethics and behaviour, within and outside school’ (DfE, 2011: 14). It is this section of the standards that was controversial as it extended the regulatory gaze from the classroom to the private lives of the teachers whose conduct it sought to govern (Bryan & Revell, 2021; Revell & Bryan, 2018). The boundaries of professional conduct

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were effectively redefined, as Revell & Bryan argue, ‘This new legislation interrupts the contract between the individual in the private sphere and the professional in the public domain’ (Revell & Bryan, 2018: 85). Page 14 of Part Two of the new Standards states that teachers must uphold ‘consistently high standards of ethics and behaviour’ in their public professional lives and in their personal, private lives. Teachers were required to demonstrate these attributes by, Not undermining fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. (DfE, 2011: 14)

On first reading, British values appeared to be uncontroversial, but the note on terminology/glossary on page 9 included a definition of fundamental British values linked to the government’s anti-terror strategy, Prevent. It reads, ‘Fundamental British values’ is taken from the definition of extremism as articulated in the new Prevent Strategy, which was launched in June 2011. It includes ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’. (DfE, 2011: 9)

As stated in Chapter 2, the Prevent Strategy was a strand of New Labour’s CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy developed in 2003 and reactivated in response to the 5 July 5 2005, 7/7 London bombings (Thomas, 2016). It was followed up by the Education and Inspections Act which placed a duty on schools to promote ‘community cohesion’. Phase 1 of the Prevent Strategy (DCLG) ran from 2007 under New Labour. A new phase, Prevent 2, began when the Coalition took power. Both versions established a clear association between Muslim identity and the ‘terrorist threat’ (Thomas & Sanderson, 2011: 1030). Under the Coalition, the DCLG was removed from its role in delivering Prevent initiatives, with responsibility transferred to the security focussed Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism. The programme was increasingly securitised with a greater focus on training educators and health professionals to spot the signs of radicalisation in young people for referral to the government’s new de-radicalisation scheme: Channel. The Prevent Strategy was revised (HM Gov, 2011) and included reference to fundamental British values, outlined in the glossary under the definition of Extremism,

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Extremism is vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also include in our definition of extremism calls the death of members of our armed forces, whether in this country or overseas. (HM Gov, 2011: 109)

British values were constructed through a definition of extremism. No open public debate or democratic conversation about the complexities of British identity and citizenship took place, they simply appeared in a brief note in the final pages of the UK government’s revised counter-terror strategy. Fundamental British values, it would appear, were defined ‘in the fog of war’ (Brenkman, 2007: 1). It is interesting to note that when FBVs were introduced both the Daily Telegraph (Paton, 2011) and the Daily Mail (Loveys, 2011) stressed their role in disciplining teachers with extremist right-wing affiliations. Kate Loveys for the Mail wrote, Teachers will face the axe if they stage lessons that undermine “fundamental” British values…It comes after a teacher and BNP member was cleared of religious intolerance last year by the General Teaching Council and allowed to keep his job despite describing immigrants as “filth”. (Loveys, 2011)

Notwithstanding this alarmist presentation of the far-right extremist teacher, a simple word search of the revised 2011 Prevent Strategy shows that the principal actors it targets are Muslim. Right-wing terrorism has 27 mentions, whereas the terms Islam, Islamic, Islamist, Islamists, Islamism, Salafi, Al Qa’ida and jihad share 190 mentions, primarily in the context of terror attacks and plots. Education, it could be argued, had been drawn into the domestic front line of the War on Terror, and the implication of Part 2 of the new Standards was that some teachers’ private conduct required regulation. Graeme Patton for the Daily Telegraph stated that the standards were ‘an attempt to establish clear boundaries for staff in all state schools, commenting on the low numbers of student teachers who failed their training’. In the same article Gove contrasted the new DfE Standards with the ‘bland statements and platitudes’ of the TDA Standards, stating that the new Standards had ‘real teeth’. Both Patton and Kate Loveys for the Daily Mail emphasised that the new Standards gave Heads new powers ‘to sack teachers with extremist

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beliefs’ (Loveys, 2011). Patton wrote, ‘teachers face being barred from the classroom for failing to uphold British values and proper discipline under rigorous new standards’ (Paton, 2011). The tenor of these articles resonates with the attacks of the New Right in the Black Papers (Ball, 2017). They perform a ‘magical metonymy’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011) that transforms the signifier ‘teacher’ into unBritish suspect and an ‘enemy of promise’ (Gove, 2013). The governmental logics at work in the new Standards are also revealed in a later article written by Patton in June 2012, which focusses on the concerns of the DfE that private schools, particularly independent Islamic schools were advocating anti-Western views and would therefore be required to promote fundamental British values. Policy, Ball argues, always has a target. In this instance Teachers, Muslims and multi-racial urban youth were all clearly in the governmental sights of this defensive discourse of suspicion and surveillance. British Values and Christian Values As if to add theological legitimacy to FBVs and their muscular reassertion of ‘our way of life’ (Cameron, 2011) the Coalition weaponised Anglican Christianity as a symbol of British values and national identity. In November 2011, Michael Gove, Education Secretary, announced that the government would be sending a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country, complete with a foreword by Mr Gove himself. In December 2011, Cameron gave a speech to Church of England clergy to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible where he equated British values with Christianity, echoing Blair and Blunkett’s endorsement of Christianity and Christian education to produce an exclusionary civic and theological defence against the discontents of political Islam. The themes of the Munich speech reappear, reaffirmed in a defensive rhetoric to offer consolation to a country besieged by the forces of irrationalism. In his address to the clerics, Cameron implied that multiculturalism and religious plurality led to moral collapse. ‘Britain is a Christian country, and we should not be afraid to say so’. He continued, arguing that a return to Christian values would counter the county’s ‘moral collapse’, singling out ‘passive tolerance’ as the cause of the summer riots and Islamic extremism,

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And when it comes to fighting violent extremism, the almost fearful passive tolerance of religious extremism that has allowed segregated communities to behave in ways that run completely counter to our values has not contained that extremism but allowed it to grow and prosper. (Prime Minister’s Office, 2011)

The ‘Trojan Horse’ Enquiry In their analysis of the role of the media, Lentin and Titley (2011) discuss the political utilisation of racial crisis events as mobilising symbols for neoliberal racism. They provide several examples, such as the Swiss minaret referendum of 2009 in which the Swiss electorate voted by a majority of 57.5% for a constitutional amendment to ban the construction of minarets, despite the fact there were only four minarets in the country, but the minaret had been ‘mediatised’ as the symbol of illiberal Islam. To allow further minarets would be the next step on the slippery slope of the Islamification of Switzerland. Similarly, the French government’s prohibition of the face veil in 2010 provided a powerful symbol of the triumph of Western Liberalism over the racialised Muslim Other, conveniently ignoring the statistical fact that a mere 0.1% of the French Muslim population wear the niqab, ‘an ultra- minoritarian practice’ (Le Monde, cited in Lentin & Titley, 2011: 176). At the time the ban was proposed, the French President Nicholas Zarkosy combined his attack on the veil, with a commitment to toughen up on ‘criminal immigrants’ and the Roma. These are examples of a transnational racial assemblage at work, where the ban on the niqab in France reflects the ban on the minaret in Switzerland and is indexed to other racial ‘integration events’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011). The integration event that catalyzed the next phase of FBV policy in the UK became known in the news media as the Trojan Horse affair. In the British context it functioned in the same way as the Swiss minaret’s referendum and the face veil ban in France, as a mediated spectacle that constructed British Muslims as a security threat. The Trojan Horse affair concerned an anonymous photocopied letter (Iqbal, 2019) sent to the Birmingham Mail and Birmingham City Council detailing ‘an alleged plot by Islamic fundamentalists to take over Birmingham schools by ousting head teachers and staff through dirty tricks campaigns’ (Oldham, 2014). The letter mentioned six schools, allegedly the focus of the Islamist agenda. The primary schools were Adderley

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School, Regents Park Community School, Highfield School and Springfield School. The secondary schools were Park View Academy and Saltley Specialist Science College (Iqbal, 2019: 25). As a result of the photocopied letter alleging a Jihadist plot to take over certain Birmingham city schools, the city’s ‘education chiefs’, West Midland’s police and OfSTED launched investigations. The operation became dubbed as the ‘Trojan Horse’ (Oldham, 2014), a ‘metaphor for a deceiving plan that allow a target to invite an adversary into a secure place’ (Miah, 2017: 8). The Sunday Times broke the story of the Trojan Horse on 02 March 2014, reporting An apparent plot by Muslim fundamentalists to destabilise and take over state schools in England is being investigated by council officials and monitored by police. (Kerbaj & Griffiths, 2014)

The Times stated that, ‘Park View Academy in Birmingham is being investigated by the Department for Education for allegedly side-lining non-Muslim staff and trying to teach Islamic studies, despite not being a faith-based school’ (Kerbaj & Griffiths, 2014). The article states that the letter appeared to have been written by ‘disaffected Muslims’ (Kerbaj & Griffiths, 2014) and that it was not known whether Birmingham City council had established who the authors of the documents were. The Sunday Times report was quickly followed up by the Birmingham Mail who published an article on 7 March 2014 stating that the letter purported that ‘jihadists’ were targeting schools and ‘orchestrating false allegations against staff’ to ‘install its own supporters in key positions’ to promote a curriculum based on ‘strict Islamic principles, including the segregation of boys and girls in some lessons’ (Oldham, 2014). According to the Birmingham Mail, the plot involved the recruitment of Salafi parents and staff, ‘hard line followers of Islam’ to spread allegations that Christian prayers and sex education were being taught to Muslim pupils (Oldham, 2014). The letter suggests that the plotters were taking advantage of the freedoms of Academy status to ‘get rid of more head teachers’ and take over their schools. The plot is described as an act of Jihad, requiring spiritual effort as this extract from the alleged letter shows,

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Whilst sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things you must remember this is a ‘Jihad’ and as such all means possible to win the war is acceptable. (Oldham, 2014)

The ‘partial, anonymous and unaddressed’ (Mogra, 2016: 444) letter also claimed that the plotters were working in concert with others in Manchester and Bradford to achieve similar school take overs. Andrew Gilligan for the Sunday Telegraph, a paper with a politically conservative orientation like the Times, published extensively on the Trojan Horse affair. Miah notes that between 09 March and 15 February 2015 Gilligan produced 20 articles dedicated to the Trojan Horse affair averaging an article a week between 09 March and 18 April (Miah, 2017: 9). Gilligan’s 22 March 2014 article contains detailed accounts of interviews with staff and parents associated with the Trojan Horse schools. Focussing on Oldknow Primary School and Park View Academy, it paints a visceral picture of ‘Islamisation’ with allegations of bullying and criminal damage including slashing the tyres of a teacher’s car. Gilligan’s report describes assemblies in which Christianity and Christmas were ridiculed and children were, Led in anti-Christian chanting…

Gilligan’s report draws attention to Islamic religious practices conducted in the school, Weekly Friday prayers…three trips to Mecca subsidised from public funds…It also runs its own madrassah, or religious school. (Gilligan, 2014).

The Spectator also joined the ranks of media outlets constructing the moral panic around British Muslim communities, by publishing a special edition in June 2014. The front cover featured an image of a Muslim school boy holding a Quran in one hand and a sword in the other. As Lentin and Titley (2011) argue, there are disturbing parallels between the construction of the Jews as the insidious enemies within the German state and this presentation of the Muslim ‘Other’ in the UK media. The lead article in the June 2014 edition of the Spectator was written by Douglas Murray, a neoconservative ideologue and advocate of Samuel Huntingdon’s clash of civilisations thesis. In 2006, in a speech delivered

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in the Netherlands, a liberal democracy noted for the anti-Muslim politics of Geert Wilders, Theo Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn, Murray declared his support for the Eurabia thesis. He described the Muslim community of Europe as a ‘ticking time bomb’ stating that ‘all immigration from Muslim countries must stop’ (Murray, cited in Miah, 2017: 20). In his Spectator article, entitled, ‘save the children: when will we stop the Islamists trying to control the minds of a generation of pupils?’ Murray dismisses claims that the letter was a hoax and concludes that British Muslim children, Risk having the worst possible start in a life-being born in a country where they should have access to any and every opportunity, where instead their ‘own’ community will seek to cut them off from wider society. (Murray, 2014)

The mediatisation of the Trojan Horse affair portrayed east Birmingham as ‘another country’ and Muslims as politically ‘Other’, ‘untrustworthy, irrational and above all dishonest’ (Miah, 2017: 22). The media discourse had taken on a life of its own, appealing to racisms fuelled by the War on Terror, taking no account of reports that questioned the credibility of the letter. Richard Adams, writing for the Guardian in June 2014, pointed out that the letter referred to ‘Events in Birmingham going back years’, concluding that ‘The irony is that the Trojan horse may not be the supposed Islamist plot that it describes but the very letter itself. Gove and Wilshaw…could turn up in a future GCSE history syllabus remembered more for a crude witch-hunt’ (Adams, 2014a). The significance of the Trojan horse controversy as a governmentality event is that it created the crucial entry point for government to implement and enact changes to education policy and practice in statute that fundamentally altered the educational contract between schools, teachers, their students, and the communities they serve. The dubious letter had been utilised by government ‘to fulfil a broader agenda in relation to its Muslim communities’ (Iqbal, 2019: 25) and to legitimise the intensification of its counter-extremism strategy in education. Operation Trojan Horse Adams suggests that if anyone wanted a British version of the US crime drama ‘The Wire’, the Trojan horse affair had all the same ingredients,

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race, politics and education, but the big difference was in Birmingham, no one had acted illegally, ‘in fact there’s not much evidence of anything’ and, ‘the most bizarre element’ of the affair was that it had, ‘thrown 21 Birmingham schools into the heart of a cabinet row over how to tackle extremism’ (Adams, 2014a). The Trojan horse enquiry triggered multiple investigations and led to the publication of several reports. The first investigation was led by Peter Clarke, former head of the London Metropolitan Police CounterTerrorism unit, which investigated the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings. Gove commissioned Clarke to lead an investigation for the DfE. This appointment was received with concern by Chris Sims, West Midlands Chief constable who pointed out that the investigation could damage community relations as it conflated the allegations of the Trojan horse letter with terrorism (Iqbal, 2019; Miah, 2017). The second investigation was commissioned by Birmingham City Council, led by former headteacher, Ian Kershaw as Independent Chief Advisor. Michael Gove ordered OfSTED to inspect 5 of the 6 schools. 1. Adderley School (Primary) 2. Regents Park Community (Primary) 3. Highfield School (Primary) 4. Park View Academy (secondary) 5. Saltley Specialist Science College (Secondary) Park view, the school at the centre of the affair got a no notice inspection to take place 5th–6th March. This was quickly followed up with Michael Gove’s instruction for additional inspections of 16 other schools, ‘their only “crime” appeared to be that they served majority Muslim pupil populations’ (Iqbal, 2019: 25). The inspection schedule had been extended from the schools mentioned in the letter, to additional schools in Birmingham and then, to schools outside Birmingham with high Muslim Bangladeshi populations in Tower Hamlets and East London. Miah comments that the underlying assumption of these investigations was based on a ‘racialised over generalisation’ which reified Muslim pupils as deviant or even criminal (Miah, 2017: 29). Collectively, none of these investigations produced any evidence to support the allegations made in the Trojan Horse letter, but as an exercise in governmentality, the investigations were focussed less on the quality of

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learning and teaching than they were on evidence of religious or cultural practices that might make children vulnerable to extremism. As Miah (2017), Iqbal (2019) and Mogra (2016) show, the reports were primarily focussed on section 10 of the Prevent Strategy and not the OfSTED inspection framework. The schools were discursively transformed by OfSTED and the DfE into pre crime spaces. This metonymical magic is made even more extraordinary when the educational successes of the inspected Birmingham schools is considered. Mogra points out that the achievements of the schools in an area of high deprivation where 72% of the children were on free school meals (Baig in Mogra, 2016) and yet achieved some of the highest pass rates with 75% A*-C in the city, received ‘scant attention’ in the reports (Mogra, 2016). Park View Academy, the school at the centre of the controversy was downgraded from an OfSTED ‘outstanding’ judgement to ‘inadequate’ and placed in special measures. Ironically the school had been praised in 2012 by OfSTED Chief Sir Michael Wilshaw, who held it up as an example of outstanding practice in an area of deprivation and a model for schools in similar circumstances. Under the leadership of Tahir Alam, Park View had increased GCSE outcomes from just 4% 5 A*-C to 76%, leading to an OfSTED rating of ‘outstanding’. For Sir Tim Brighouse, former Chief Education Officer for Birmingham (1993–2002), it was, ‘beyond belief that schools which were judged less than a year ago to be “outstanding” are now widely reported as “inadequate” despite having the same curriculum, the same students, the same leadership, and the same governing body’ (Adams cited in Iqbal, 2019: 30–31). In his in-depth study of education and religion ‘in the land of the Trojan horse’, Iqbal (2019), provides a useful comparison of the OfSTED reports pre-2013 and post-2014 for Oldknow Primary school, another school at the heart of media (Gilligan, 2014) and DfE scrutiny. Iqbal notes that in 2013, OfSTED inspectors described Oldknow’s safeguarding procedures as ‘rigorous’, but in the 2014 inspection they were rated ‘inadequate’ and ‘unable to ensure that pupils are kept safe from any radical views they encounter’ (OfSTED, cited in Iqbal, 2019: 31). In 2013 the school’s provision of spiritual, moral, social, and cultural education (SMSC) was praised and the school was described as ‘a friendly and racially harmonious place’ (ibid.). In 2014, the inspectors stated that the school, ‘does not promote tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions’ (OfSTED, cited in Iqbal, 2019: 31). In 2013 the

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school was praised for a pupil trip to Saudi Arabia. OfSTED described the trip as ‘a life changing event’. In 2014 the trip was criticised due to ‘inadequate risk assessments’ (OfSTED, cited in Iqbal, 2019: 31). The Impact of the Trojan Horse Enquiry The way the Trojan Horse affair was handled by the DfE and OfSTED has been heavily criticised for its portrayal of British Muslim communities as ‘suspect’ and ‘enemies within’. OfSTED appeared to be operating a strategy of destabilising governing bodies in Muslim majority schools ‘through snap inspections’ caricaturing them as driven by ideological convictions (i.e., religious values), ‘rather than student needs’ (Kahn cited in Iqbal, 2019: 30). Iqbal cites an Anglican vicar based in Sparkbrook who chaired a CE school with a majority Muslim pupil intake who stated that ‘at grassroots, many school leaders feel that the process has been manipulated to achieve an ulterior end of exposing Islamification of schools’ (Sudworth cited in Iqbal, 2019: 30). For many critical commentators, the conduct of OfSTED undermined any pretensions to neutrality and impartiality. The way the inspections were carried out suggested government was directing the process and led to complaints by staff who noted comments by inspectors about Muslim male teachers’ beards, inspectors questioning staff about homophobia and asking pupils if they were forced to wear hijabs (Miah, 2017: 36). It would be reasonable to conclude that the inspectors were looking for trouble, they had acted like the letter was real (Iqbal, 2019: 24). At the end of the investigation OfSTED and Birmingham City Council were unable to report any evidence of radicalisation or extremism in the schools. Birmingham City Council’s report concluded that there was ‘no evidence of direct radicalisation or violent extremism’, but some schools were deemed to be teaching a narrow curriculum (Iqbal, 2019: 29) and 5 of the schools were judged inadequate and placed in special measures. The 5 schools placed in special measure were the focus of the allegations made in the letter. They were, Park View, Golden Hillock, and Nansen (all part of the Park View Academy Trust), Oldknow and Saltley. The House of Commons Education Committee considered the evidence provided by the OfSTED and city council reports and it also interviewed Peter Clarke, Sir Michael Wilshaw, and Ian Kershaw. The House of Commons Education Committee report concluded that there was,

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No evidence of extremism or radicalisation, apart from a single isolated incident, was found by any of the inquiries and there was no evidence of a sustained plot nor of a similar situation pertaining elsewhere in the country. (Education Committee, 2015: 2)

Michael Wilshaw was called to give an account of the inspections before the Education Committee in which he stated that ‘We did not see extremism in schools’, going on to qualify this by adding that what ‘we did see’ was the promotion of a culture that would have made children vulnerable to extremism if it went unchecked (Wilshaw cited in Iqbal, 2019: 25). Wilshaw’s testimony reveals the ‘standard gripes’ (Iqbal, 2019). He deploys tropes of Muslim self-segregation and incompatibility with Western values to legitimise the inspections with little regard for the damage done to community relations. Abbas observes the irony in the way in which OfSTED and the DfE made no reference to the educational efforts of the schools to ‘empower’ their students to ‘appreciate the depths and nuances of Islam’ to provide them with the theological knowledge, ‘courage and wisdom to counter the narratives propounded by…Islamic State’ (Abbas, 2011: 439). Similarly, structural factors were not acknowledged by any of the governmental actors ‘70 years of post war immigration, settlement and adaptation’ were ignored as was the social and economic location of a structurally vulnerable community whose futures were ‘precarious in a neoliberal, post-Brexit vote environment’ (Abbas, 2011: 427). OfSTED were now faced with the challenge of reversing perceptions that they were ‘anti-faith’ and ‘anti-Muslim’ (Mogra, 2016: 460). However, as an exercise in disciplinary neoliberal governance, the Trojan Horse inspections had achieved their goal. In an interview with Iqbal, Tim Boyes, former Birmingham Head Teacher and CEO of Birmingham Education Partnership, a body commissioned by Birmingham City Council to implement its post-Trojan horse enquiry through a £11.7 million school improvement plan, stated that there was a ‘broader agenda’ to the enquiry, To the secretary of state Michael Gove and the Head of OfSTED (Michael Wilshaw), Birmingham is only about Trojan horse …And that is not because of Tahir Alam…but because of Paris and Islamic State…it was

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about terrorism; Syria and Prevent. The Prevent agenda is huge. (Boyes, cited in Iqbal, 2019: 27).

Education policy for Boyes was ‘out of touch with places such as Birmingham’ and the Trojan horse was a proxy ‘for any challenge from the Muslim community’ (Boyes, cited in Iqbal, 2019: 27). In an interview for the Birmingham Mail (McKinney, 2015), Boyes echoed the criticisms of others, such as Tahir Alam, former Chair of Governors at Park View Academy who felt relationships and trust had been violated by the investigations (Alam cited in Iqbal, 2019: 40). Boyes told the Mail that the city’s education sector had suffered ‘irreversible damage’ and that a lot of people had been hurt, stating that ‘a lot of fears and myths’ had been fuelled and, alluding to Alam and his colleagues, he adds, The people that are feeling most hurt from the other side of the fence are the people who cared a lot about education and under achievement in the Muslim communities and wanted to change that. (Boyes, in McKinney, 2015)

Implications for Academisation Contradiction and paradox are well documented characteristics of neoliberal education policy (Adams, 2014b; Arthur, 2015). The Trojan horse enquiry is a notable example of the contradictions between policy rhetoric and the regulation of policy, as Kerbaj and Griffiths were quick to point out in their article on the alleged Islamist take over in 2014. As the story broke, the ‘revelation’ was described as ‘a further setback for the government’s academies and free schools programme’ (Kerbaj & Griffiths, 2014). Freedom from local authority control was the solution to driving up standards, improving choice and teacher autonomy, the 2010 DfE White Paper had claimed, and yet these new freedoms appeared to be the very cause of the issues the DfE were investigating. The Coalition’s Academies policy allowed the Park View Trust new academy freedoms, sanctioned, agreed and endorsed by the DfE and the trustees, but in the process of removing Local Authority support the school lost the input of education advisors, with local knowledge and understanding of the communities the school served, thus swapping collegial light touch monitoring to ‘make schools accountable’ (Arthur, 2015: 325) for the disciplinary interventions of an ideologically driven DfE and

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OfSTED agenda. A central point in both Boyes and Iqbal’s analyses of the affair is that the government’s free market approach to school provision had backfired and what inner city-communities based in locations such as east Birmingham needed were community owned, community led schools ‘where the Head teacher has a good sociological understanding’ (Boyes, in Iqbal, 2019: 38). Similarly, Tim Brighouse also commented that communities like Birmingham were treated like a ‘colonial outpost of London’ (Brighouse, in Iqbal, 2019: 38). Both Peter Clarke’s DfE report and Ian Kershaw’s Birmingham City Council reports agreed that academisation was a contributory factor in the Trojan horse affair (Iqbal, 2019). The Political Construction of the ‘Muslim Problematic’ Writing in 2007, 7 years before the Trojan horse, Kundnani outlined the dynamics of the new integrationism operating through post-9/11 UK government policy. The fault lines of the new agenda he stated were ‘the perceived incompatibility between British society and Muslim communities in which supposed alien values are embedded’. Racism, he argued had been turned on its head, no longer simply institutional, but culturalist, the outcome of segregation and alien values rather than caused by segregation and structural inequality. Muslims, in this new integrationist discourse, are transformed into the perpetrators of their own misfortune (Abbas, cited in Abbas, 2005: 4). In 2004 Liz Fekete, writing for Race and Class, described the new racism as xeno racism ‘the precise term’ coined by Sivanandan to target ‘those who, displaced and dispossessed by globalisation, are being thrown up on Europe’s shores’ (Fekete, 2004: 4). Muslims, she argued ‘are caught up in the ever-expanding loop of xenoracism’ as the ‘enemy within’ leading to assimilationist policy and counter terror laws formulated ‘under the guise of patriotism’ as wholesale antiIslamic racism ‘which threatens to destroy the fabric of the multicultural society’ (Fekete, 2004: 4). As a racial governmentality event (Goldberg cited in Miah, 2017), Miah has argued that the Trojan horse affair was a decisive moment in the construction of a Muslim ‘problematic’ (Miah, 2017: 17). As a tactical move, the Trojan horse enquiry legitimised the government’s aim of pushing through an assimilationist policy agenda and its new counter-extremism strategy. The Trojan horse, Iqbal concludes, was about security, not education (Iqbal, 2019, 25) and the consequence has

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been ‘insecurity’ for teachers and students within heavily regulated state schools. Miah argues that the discursive shift from education attainment and social inequality to security is ‘one of the crucial legacies arising from the OfSTED rulings’ carried out in the Birmingham inspections (Miah, 2017: 139). Miah identifies five important outcomes of the Trojan horse enquiry, Firstly, the Trojan horse functions as ‘a metaphor of disruption’ positioning Muslims as a threat to the secular, liberal consensuses of the UK’s social, cultural, political and public space. Secondly, the Trojan horse became an ‘empty vessel’ in which prejudices and racialised misconceptions about Islam were ‘poured into’, so, the enquiry homogenised Muslims as a racialised abstraction. Miah gives the example of the racialising of sexual and gender politics referring to a Today Programme BBC interview in which Conservative Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, ironically a committed Christian who had voted against gay marriage, characterised homophobia as ‘extremism’. The implication was clear— conservative Muslims do not accept homosexual relationships and are therefore, extremist. Thirdly, the Trojan horse enquiry legitimised uncritical acceptance of ‘truths’ about Muslims that serve to justify state securitisation of Muslim communities and way it governs them. Fourthly, the Trojan horse affair draws from Orientalist tropes that construct Muslims as ontologically ‘different’ from the secular, liberal and rational west. The fifth outcome is the reduction of the highly diverse Muslim community to a simplistic stereotype. In summary, as a governmentality event, the Trojan horse enquiry reframed racial relations through a pathologisation of Britain’s Muslims, transforming socially conservative communities into extremists and suspects. Systemic structural disadvantage was repackaged by government community cohesion discourse as spatial and cultural segregation effectively transforming the schools and the communities into pre-crime spaces, installing a security agenda at the heart of urban schooling. Fundamental British Values: Phase 2 Regardless of the lack of OfSTED or Birmingham City Council findings to confirm the existence of an extremist Islamist agenda, the Trojan Horse enquiry provided the rationale for a strengthened fundamental British values requirement and the introduction of the Prevent duty through

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the enactment of the ‘controversial’ (Miah, 2017: 60) UK Counterterrorism and Security Act 2015 which made the definition of extremism as opposition to FBVs, statutory. As the Trojan Horse enquiry progressed, Cameron took opportunities to reassert the themes of the Munich and King James speeches. Writing for the Daily Mail in June 2014, Cameron framed his article around the ‘big debate about British values’ (Cameron, 2014), asserting that FBVs were as, British as the Union Flag, as football, as fish and chips

The article continued by reaffirming the government’s commitment to muscular British values, Sometimes in this country we can be a bit squeamish about our achievements, even bashful about our Britishness. We shouldn’t be

And, We have been in danger of sending out a worrying message: that if you don’t want to believe in democracy, that’s fine; that if equality isn’t your bag, don’t worry about it; that if you’re completely intolerant of others, we will still tolerate you. As I’ve said before, this has not just led to division, it has allowed extremism-of both the violent and non-violent kindto flourish. So, I believe we need to be far more muscular in promoting British values … and as we announced this week, we are changing our approach further in schools.

Cameron concluded by revealing the next phase in the development of the FBV policy, We are saying it isn’t enough simply to respect these values in schoolswe’re saying that teachers should actively promote them. They’re not optional; they’re the core of what it is to live in Britain. (Cameron, 2014)

The additional FBV requirement was introduced on November 27th, 2014, when the DfE published ‘Departmental advice for maintained schools on Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools’ (DfE, 2014). On page 3 it states,

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Maintained schools have obligations under section 78 of the Education Act (2002) which requires schools, as part of a broad and balanced curriculum, to promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental, and physical development of pupils at the school and of society. This guidance relates specifically to the requirements to actively promote fundamental British values in schools and explains how this can be met through the general requirement in the 2002 Act. (DfE, 2014: 3)

The FBV requirement strengthened and expanded the requirement outlined in Part 2 of the 2012 Teachers’ Standards. Not only were teachers to ensure that their professional and personal conduct supported FBV by not ‘undermining the FBV’ (DfE, 2011), they were now expected to ‘actively promote FBV’, which became the discursive bedrock of cross curricular SMSC installing FBVs across the curriculum as the new civics. On 7 January 2015 the SACRE I was a member of received a letter from Lord Nash, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools (Nash, 2015). The letter made several references to the Trojan Horse affair as the rationale for the inclusion of FBVs in SMSC and outlined the special role RE and SACREs could play in implementing FBVs. As another milestone governmentality event, the letter marks the point at which RE was enlisted as an educational ally in the domestic War on Terror. The unsubstantiated allegations made in a hoax letter were now being deployed as justification for policy making and policy regulation. Lord Nash’s letter adopts a defensive tone, painting a picture of a society and education system under attack. The third paragraph of the letter states, RE makes a significant contribution to pupils’ academic and personal development. It also plays a key role in promoting social cohesion and the virtues of respect and empathy which are vitally important in our diverse society. The recent events in some schools in Birmingham have highlighted the importance of promoting the crucial values of respect and tolerance in our schools. (Nash, 2015)

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The same point is reiterated in the fifth paragraph, The recent events in Birmingham schools have also highlighted the importance of all schools promoting the fundamental British values of the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. In some schools in Birmingham, inappropriate religious education teaching and a distorted school ethos served to undermine those fundamental British values. (Nash, 2015)

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act and Prevent 2 The second governmentality milestone to follow the Trojan Horse enquiry, was the enactment of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Home Secretary Theresa May proposed the Counter-Terror and Security Act in 2014 and it was granted Royal Assent in February, so it was in the planning stages in 2014 at the end of the Trojan Horse enquiry. In May 2015, in a speech to the NSC, intended to prepare the way for the CT&S Act, Cameron reaffirmed the messages of his earlier speeches, singling out multiculturalism in allowing passive tolerance ‘that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance’. The CT&S Act, he claimed, would ‘conclusively turn the page on this failed approach’ and bring the nation together by ‘actively promoting certain values’ (Wintour, 2015). In June 2015, a month before the CTS Act came into force, a terror attack in the Tunisian tourist resort of Port el Kantaouai by an alleged IS gun man, resulted in the death of thirty British tourists. In response to the attacks Cameron stated that Islamist extremists ‘Have declared war on Britain’ (Wintour & Graham-Harrison, 2015) and used his speech to turn the focus back on the UK to legitimise the unprecedented levels of securitisation the CTS would introduce. The Act gave authorities powers to inspect and retain travel documents, including passports and tickets belonging to those suspected of travelling abroad to engage in terrorist activities and to detain uncooperative individuals (Blackbourn & Walker, 2016: 845). In addition, Part V of the Act ‘Risk of Being Drawn into Terrorism’, placed a legal duty on teachers to ‘have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ (Home Office, 2015). Section 36 of the CT&S Act set out the duty on local authorities to

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‘provide support for people vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism’ (HM Gov, 2011) to be met through provision of a Channel panel which adopts a multi-agency approach to assessing risk and provision of support to those at risk of radicalisation. In its first year of operation, over 7000 young people were referred to Channel panels, with the majority coming from the education sector (Home Office, 2017: 4). Blackbourn and Walker (2016) argue that the rationale of Part V of the Act, was to put Prevent and Channel on a ‘statutory footing’ and the implementation of the objectives of Prevent on a statutory basis, stating that ‘legal interventions’ such as inspection of provision by the regulator OfSTED ‘permits greater standardisation and transparency through the checking of outputs and their quality’ (Blackbourn & Walker, 2016: 859). Jerome et al. (2019: 823) state that the introduction of the Prevent duty established an integral link between counter-terrorism and the promotion of FBV. However, the requirements of the duty were met with considerable opposition by critics. The duty positioned teachers as the de facto instruments of state security and surveillance, fundamentally altering the pastoral relationship between teachers and students (EltonChalcraft et al., 2016). The human rights organisation Liberty argued that the introduction of the statutory Channel provision ran the risk of undermining the work of teachers and those in ‘sensitive positions of trust’ with ‘obligations of confidentiality’ by requiring them to report on those under their care who might express ‘dissenting views’ (Liberty, 2015, in Miah, 2017: 61–62). The University and College Union (UCU) passed a motion at its 2015 Congress condemning the Prevent duty as a threat to academic freedom and expressed profound reservations with the Government’s definition of extremism. UCU and National Union of Students (NUS) raised concerns about the effects of the duty on academic freedom and campus activism and the disproportionate focus on Islamic terrorism, arguing that the duty would normalise anti-Muslim racism (Gilmore, 2017: 514). In June 2015 the DfE published ‘The Prevent Duty departmental advice for schools and childcare providers’ (DfE, 2015). The guidance made a significant step towards the embedding and the normalising of the surveillance and security requirements of the domestic war on terror in the daily routines of education professionals by making an equivalence between the duty and teachers’ routine safeguarding roles,

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Protecting children from the risk of radicalisation should be seen as part of schools’ and childcare providers’ wider safeguarding duties and is similar in nature to protecting children from other harms (e.g., drugs, gangs, neglect, sexual exploitation), whether these come from within their family or are the product of outside influences. (DfE, 2015: 5)

As Edwards states, these developments mark the ‘naturalisation’ (Edwards, 2020: 47) of the duty and for Dresser, this amounts to a ‘mutation’ of the teachers’ role (Dresser, 2018: 125) in which the detection of radicalisation is guided by teachers’ ‘intuitive professional expertise’ (Dresser, 2018: 142) running the risk of being subjective, ‘arbitrary and capricious’ (Dresser, 2018: 142). The Impact of Prevent 2: Recalibrating the Role of the Teacher The Trojan horse enquiry and the introduction of the Prevent duty in schools positions teachers as the agents of ‘pre-emptive criminal regulation’ (Jerome et al., 2019: 821) and the curriculum as a site for the enactment of counter-extremism through the active promotion of FBVs. The implications of this policy shift amounted to a structural redefinition of the role of the teacher as the point of articulation of government counter-terror policy in the lives of children and young people. Busher et al. (2017) summarise the policy shift from Prevent 1 to Prevent 2 as a move from the responsibilisation of Muslim communities in the fight against domestic terrorism to the responsibilisation of ‘front line’ professionals working in health, education and welfare institutions and expecting them to assume responsibility for counter-terrorist efforts and surveillance (Busher et al., 2017: 31). Busher et al. (2017) research, along with the study undertaken by Jerome et al. (2019) present a complex picture that shows how the localised and situated contexts of a research site are central to understanding the ways in which teachers translate and enact policy. Busher et al., study (2017) collected qualitative interview data from 70 education professionals across 14 schools and colleges in West Yorkshire and London, 8 local authority Prevent practitioners working in schools and colleges in a support capacity and a national online survey of school and college staff which produced 225 responses. The report’s findings offer valuable insights into the ways in which education professionals

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translate and mitigate the potentially negative effects of policy through enactments in their settings. The researchers found that Prevent requirements were integrated into ‘well established institutional safeguarding systems’ enabling the duty to be ‘grafted onto existing ways of working’ (Busher et al., 2017: 6). Teachers interpreted the duty in relation to all forms of extremism, although there was some scepticism about the extent to which this was operationalised in practice. There was less consensus on the role of FBV and ‘widespread discomfort’ regarding the specifically British character of the values and their function in an inclusive curriculum ‘indeed, the expectation to promote fundamental British values was one of the main focal points of the respondents’ criticisms of the duty’ (Busher et al., 2017: 6). Busher et al. found that most of the respondents were confident about their ability to implement the duty, interpreted as the product of teachers’ confidence in their skill and experience in pastoral and safeguarding matters, including making referrals. Not surprisingly, levels of confidence were lower amongst less experienced staff. A notable finding is that most respondents rejected criticisms of the chilling effects of the duty. Indeed, the data provides evidence that teachers were invigorating the curriculum through classroom debates. However, Busher et al. acknowledge that this could be accounted for as pre-emptive action taken by teachers to mitigate any negativity, suggesting evidence of policy translation through teachers’ enactments. However, there was criticism from predominantly BAME respondents who were concerned about the impact of Prevent on student relations because it was making it difficult to foster ‘An environment in which students from different backgrounds get on well with one another’ (Busher et al., 2017: 6). Similarly another ‘widespread’ concern was directed at its capacity to stigmatise Muslim students, but the data also demonstrates the lengths teachers were going to translate and interpret the policy in order to soften and reduce its divisive effects ‘by foregrounding democracy, active citizenship, equality and anti-racism in their activities designed to address the duty’ and ‘by seeking out materials that foster a balanced understanding of the threats posed by extremism, terrorism and radicalisation; by emphasising to students that AQ/ISIS inspired terrorism should in no way be seen to be representative of Islam or Muslims’ (Busher et al., 2017: 7). Elwick and Jerome’s (2019) Home Office funded project for the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT) offers insights into the enactment and translation of the requirements of Prevent in 10 schools. Elwick and

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Jerome characterise the tension produced by the duty as one between a security agenda that utilises schools and colleges’ capacity for intelligence gathering and an educational paradigm concerned with the exploration of beliefs and values to better understand terrorism and radicalisation. The findings of the study confirm much of Busher et al. (2017) evidence of teacher agency, translation, and reinterpretation of Prevent. Elwick and Jerome work with a conceptualisation of agency, not as something that teachers possess, but ‘as a composite of their belief about their capacity to act’ (Elwick & Jerome, 2019: 339). Theirs is an ‘ecological model of agency’ that draws from Biesta and Tedder’s view of agency as an interplay of individual actors, available resources, contextual and structural factors. In other words, this is an analysis that recognises the contingency and situatedness of policy enactments. This is significant as Elwick and Jerome state, interpretations, and translations of the Prevent duty are so contextual and localised it is hard to make any general claims or even to talk about Prevent as a ‘single phenomenon’ (Elwick & Jerome, 2019: 339). Elwick and Jerome argue that the interpretation and enactment of the Prevent duty can open educational possibilities as well as close down educational engagements depending on the context and local factors at work in a particular site. This analysis reflects Busher et al. (2017) findings and in my own empirical work (see Chapters 8 and 9) where structural factors operating within the communities schools serve exert a significant influence on teacher engagements. Elwick and Jerome also describe the way Prevent can close educational engagement in their case example of a Christian faith school with a high EAL and Muslim population. The school adopted an approach to Prevent that saw it primarily in terms of security, surveillance, and monitoring, for example, the teachers they interviewed framed the policy in relation to risk and concerns that ‘a small number of children might follow …older siblings’ examples to join armed conflicts overseas’ (Elwick & Jerome, 2019: 343). Their data also provided evidence of senior leaders’ influence on school culture where FBVs were presented as uncontested truths, with the effect of ‘closing down debate and ultimately of reducing a teacher’s agency’ (Elwick & Jerome, 2019: 344). However, most of the teachers in the research schools, demonstrated a diligent commitment to exploring other points of view and alternative explanations, for example Elwick and Jerome discuss the instance of a teacher who developed an entire scheme of work to explore reasons for the emergence of ISIS. In conclusion, echoing much of Busher et al. (2017) findings, they state,

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Our data shows that teachers can interpret and enact this policy in ways which seem to address the need to build young people’s understandings of terrorism and extremism, but we have also demonstrated…that the policy is open to more restrictive, and less obviously educational interpretations. (Elwick & Jerome, 2019: 351)

Both reports raise much to consider, particularly in respect of teacher subjectivity and enactment. However, inclusion of the reports in this chapter serves to provide readers with insights into the policy environment the Prevent duty has produced as an exercise in governmental power. The reports bear testimony to teachers’ capacities to reinterpret policy requirements and to soften its potentially alienating effects, but they also reveal the extent to which Prevent policy has become embedded, normalised and assimilated into school life through safeguarding policies, pastoral practice, and the curriculum, with implications for what can be said in subjects where students cut their political teeth through discussions about identity, race, religion, politics culture and ethics. Busher et al. acknowledge that demographics and school location influence the way Prevent is interpreted and received. This is an important finding, for example, they note that in some schools serving white majority communities, the focus of Prevent was on right wing extremism and racism, highlighting the ways in which the policy requirement functions as a governmental tool to discipline and govern white majority communities in structural decline as well as minoritised and racialised south Asian communities. The overall picture in their report suggests widespread absorption and acceptance of Prevent and FBV, with schools and colleges re-branding FBVs as ‘our college’ or ‘school values’, but the data collected from BME respondents and white majority schools in communities at the sharp end of economic decline illuminates the potentially divisive and stigmatising effects of the policy assemblage. Fear and anxiety have a spatial and geopolitical dimension, they are not distributed evenly. The Prevent policy assemblage targets communities made vulnerable by economic neglect and the racialising effects of the War on Terror by enacting ‘policies that further victimize them’ (Pain, 2010: 232). Busher et al. comment that their BME participants were ‘by and large, more pessimistic than their White British colleagues about the impacts of the Prevent duty in the openness of discussions between students and staff’, noting that a ‘disproportionate number who expressed concerns’ were Muslim (Busher et al., 2017: 52).

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Taking Back Control: Brexit and British Values Data collection for Busher et al. report was conducted over the 2016– 2017 period. Elwick and Jerome collected data for the ACT report over the period 2015–2016. There have been no new developments in Prevent policy, however, the wider social, cultural and political environment in which the policy assemblage was implemented has changed. On 23 June 2016, Britain voted to secede from the European Union (EU) by 52%. The campaign to leave the EU, known as the Leave campaign, was fuelled by febrile anti-asylum seeker, anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment. As Virdee and McGeever state, the case for leaving the EU, or Brexit ‘was intimately bound up with questions of race’ (Virdee & McGeever, 2017: 7), demonstrated through a spike in hate crimes targeting not just racial but religious and cultural difference. Komaromi (in Virdee & McGeever, 2017) found that more than 6,000 racist hate crimes were reported to the National Police Chiefs Council, a mere four weeks after the referendum to leave the EU was declared. The tide of reactionary populism, energised by collective ‘great again’ magical thinking, created an environment in which constructs such as British values had the potential to feed defensive ethno nationalism and to foment the very attitudes the policy purported to challenge. The xeno racism of Brexit intersected with the War on Terror security discourse now conflated Muslims with refugees ‘societal anti-bodies’ with antithetical values to the FBVs made statutory by the Prevent duty. In July 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron resigned. Following the success of the Brexit Leave campaign, Cameron a supporter of Britain’s EU membership, stood down to make way for a new Prime Minister and was succeeded by Theresa May. As outlined in this chapter, it was under Cameron’s leadership of both the Coalition and the Conservative administrations over the period 2010–2016 that FBVs and Prevent were introduced. Published in March 2016, the White Paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’ encapsulated the Cameron administration’s educational vision for ‘a knowledge-based curriculum… complemented by the development of the character traits and fundamental British values that will help children succeed’ (DfE, 2016: 88). Under Theresa May’s leadership no new FBV policies or changes to policy were introduced, but FBVs were referenced and reinforced throughout policy guidance and reports, perpetuated, embedded, and normalised. The promotion of FBVs as part of the inspection of

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schools was introduced in January 2015 (OfSTED, 2015) and referenced in all subsequent OfSTED inspection framework guidance documents becoming an established feature of inspection practice. Published in 2020, Ofsted’s Equality Objectives Progress Review, which covered the period of May’s premiership, 2017–2018, stated that ‘in making judgements, inspectors will consider whether those we inspect comply with their relevant duties set out in the Equality Act 2010 and, where applicable, the extent to which they promote British values and promote equality and diversity’ (OfSTED, 2020). Culture Wars In July 2019, Theresa May resigned after defeat in the Conservative leadership election by her former Foreign Secretary, and one of the architects of the campaign to leave the EU, Boris Johnson, who became Prime Minister. Under Johnson, nationalistic discourse showed no signs of softening. Johnson was on record as expressing racist views during his time as newspaper columnist, once referring to black people as ‘picanninies’ with ‘water melon smiles’ and alleging that Islam was responsible for putting the Muslim world ‘literally centuries behind the West’ (Perraudin, 2019) Johnson had also claimed that the MacPherson report, published after the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993, and found that that the Metropolitan Police were institutionally racist, had left the Police ‘cowed’ and unable to do their jobs because they were too busy attending race relations training (Perraudin, 2019). In education, Gavin Williamson, replaced Damian Hinds, becoming Secretary of State for Education. In 2019 the DfE introduced a Core Content Framework (CCF) (DfE, 2019) for ITT providers which claims to provide a minimum entitlement in five core areas of trainee teacher professional and pedagogical development, namely, behaviour management, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and professional behaviours. Essentially, the CCF is a prescriptive curriculum that must be adhered to by Initial Teacher Education providers to retain their license as accredited providers. Fundamental British values appear in the 2019 Core Content Framework in the section outlining Part 2 of the Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2019). The CCF states, ‘providers should continue to ensure that trainees have a clear understanding of the expectations regarding personal and professional conduct of a teacher and the ethics of the teaching profession. This includes how Fundamental British Values can be upheld in schools

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and the importance of showing tolerance and respect for the rights of others’ (DfE, 2019: 7). The CCF is a government mandated curriculum for teacher training which offers no scope for deviation from its prescriptions, thus reducing scope for teacher educators to innovate or offer any alternative to what the DfE has set out. Further evidence of the authoritarian turn in Johnson’s education department was the guidance published in September 2020 on how to ‘Plan your relationships, sex and health curriculum’ (DfE, 2020). The guidance rules out involvement from any external agencies who might demonstrate ‘a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow…capitalism’ (DfE, 2020). A few weeks before the document was published the government had added the environmentalist pressure group Extinction Rebellion to its list of extremist ideologies to be reported to the Prevent programme. Although this prohibition was withdrawn, the context of the guidance was characterised as a ‘culture war’ by its critics including former Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis and political scientist and activist Tariq Ali. For McDonnell, the guidance amounted to an ideological assault on a British political history that included reference to the trade unions and the Labour movement, who at various times had called for the abolition of capitalism. Varoufakis observed that the guidance would necessitate the removal of any references to British socialism, or the work of writers such as William Morris. Ali stated that the guidance was an ‘enhanced version of the Prevent strategy’ signifying ‘moral and political bankruptcy’ (Ali, in Busby, 2020), asking ‘how could both young and old people not read anti-capitalist analysis after 2008, or now with the virus going on and recessions looming all over the western world?’ (Ali, in Busby, 2020). On 14 April 2022, Johnson announced a new Government scheme designed to deter refugees and migrants crossing the Channel to enter the UK by deporting them to Rwanda for ‘processing’. However, the controversial policy was overshadowed by growing discontent with Johnson from within his own party after receiving police fines over lockdown parties in Downing Street and his mishandling of sexual harassment allegations against MP Chris Pincher. On the 7 July 2022, Boris Johnson resigned after the resignations of his health secretary, Sajid Javid, the chancellor Rishi Sunak and his ethics advisers, Alex Allan and Lord Geidt led to a declaration of no confidence by his own party. In the leadership campaign that followed, the xenophobic Rwanda asylum plan and British values were weaponised to generate popular

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support. Leadership contender former Chancellor Rishi Sunak claimed that Britain did not have control of its borders and his rival, the exForeign Secretary, Liz Truss, declared that she would see the Rwanda policy through to full implementation, stating that she would not ‘cower’ before the European convention on human rights to achieve her goal (Allegretti, 2022). Rishi Sunak took on ‘left wing agitators’ and woke culture, taking on the Black Lives Matter movement, accusing them of ‘bull dozing’ British values, ‘our fundamental values’, ‘Whether it’s pulling down statues of historic figures, replacing the school curriculum with anti-British propaganda or rewriting the English language so we can’t even use words like “man”, “woman” or “mother” without being told we’re offending someone?’ (Stewart & Allegretti, 2022). Liz Truss won the campaign and became the Prime Minister on the 6 September 2022, but after 45 days in office she was compelled to resign after a disastrous mini- budget crashed the UK economy (Walker et al., 2022). Her former rival, Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister on 25 October. As Britain’s first Asian Prime Minister, Sunak’s appointment might have seemed like a progressive victory, but privately educated Sunak, husband of non-domiciled Akshata Murty, the daughter of an Indian billionaire, is a traditional, small state Conservative ideologue. For commentators such as Nesrine Malik, politicians such as Sunak, former Home Secretary Priti Patel, and Kemi Badenoch, operate through ‘elite capture’, weaponzing their ethnicity to legitimise their meritocratic version of racial equality. Malik points out that the experiences of racism endured by most black and brown people happen at the ‘hands of the police, at the job centre, at the border—not at Eton, Winchester or the City’ (Malik, 2022). Sunak, she observes, is only too happy to engage in the biopolitics of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Britain besieged by migrants and ‘woke’ agitators threatening fundamental British values remain central to the current government’s messaging. In 2022, Britishness continues to be the plaything of politicians. The ideological attack on progressive politics, caricatured as ‘woke’, that has dominated government rhetoric from Johnson to Sunak builds on the discursive foundations created by eleven years of civic nationalist education. For Smith (2021) FBVs and Prevent amount to a form of ‘cultural engineering’, ‘widespread, repetitive and deeply ingrained across the education policy landscape, accompanied by legal and regulatory powers’ (Smith, 2021: 68).

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The FBV Prevent assemblage is riddled with contradictions and paradox exemplified by guidance documents emphasising equalities legislation whilst simultaneously surveilling academic practice and theory that doesn’t align to the values of its neoliberal fantasy of post-racial meritocracy. The Windrush scandal and the emergence of an energised and vociferous Black Lives Matter movement placed racial injustice sharply into the political arena. The irony that lies in the heart of the contradictions between government equalities rhetoric and the reality of racial injustice is highlighted by attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) by senior ministers, including the Equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch. In October 2020, Badenoch stated that teachers who presented the idea of white privilege as a fact to their students were breaking the law, describing Critical Race Theory as ‘an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression’ (Badenoch in Weale, 2020). In response to the government proscription of certain resources and views, including CRT, leading academics at the UCL IoE wrote a letter to the Guardian newspaper expressing their concerns. The letter included 80 signatories in support of the letter which stated ‘At a time when racism is on the rise, in Britain and globally, teachers and pupils can benefit from the tools and resources developed by Critical Race theorists to understand how racism operates across society, including in education…At a time when democratic institutions and hard won commitments to equalities are under threat from populist politicians, and when a human-made environmental crisis threatens communities and individuals, classroom should be places of creative, critical thinking and engagement with ideas that can help society move forward towards more just and sustainable ways of living’. The letter concludes by reaffirming the values of progressive, critical educational enquiry, stating that educators should be supporting learners ‘critical capacities and political agency through informed engagement with a wide range of resources. Attempts to limit the range of ideas on offer undermine this core educational and democratic goal’ (Weale, 2020). The UCL letter captures the concerns of progressive educators at a time of national and international crisis, in a so-called ‘post-truth’ age and begs the question, how has the national state education system arrived at a position where teachers’ professional status, autonomy and agency have been so reduced and a narrow, prescriptive ITT curriculum threatens to undermine the foundations of initial teacher education, the integrity of progressive research focussed higher education provision, academic freedom and the subjectivities of pre-service and in service teachers?

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Conclusion Chapters 2 and 3 have traced a critical history of the FBV/Prevent policy assemblage, setting out the political and discursive landscape that teachers and students negotiate. It documents what appears to be an unprecedented reconfiguration of the role of teachers from educational pastorate to the instruments of a governmentality of unease required to surveil and report on ‘suspect’ students and colleagues. In the next chapter, attention is focussed on one of the key targets of this civic nationalist discoursemulticulturalism. As Lentin and Titley argue, multiculturalism has become a political toxic gift that keeps on giving, enabling its detractors to sanction the ‘crisis racism’ that has culminated in FBVs and the Prevent duty (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 17). Chapter 3 traces a critical history of multiculturalism in post-war British education policy and looks at parallel developments in religious education to foreground the dilemmas faced by teachers of RE, which, offers possibilities to advance a pluralistic, critical education for a super diverse twenty-first-century Britain. On the face of it, government rejection of multiculturalism as ‘failed experiment’ suggest a radical break in policy, however from the governmentality perspective of this investigation, it represents a strategic shift in education discourse that targets ungovernable subjects. Education, as Foucault argues, is a site for the generation, propagation and selection of discourses, ‘a political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriateness of discourses with the knowledge and power they bring with them’ (Foucault, cited in Ball, 2012: 3). The shifts in the government of racial and cultural difference documented in this study have consequences for how individuals understand themselves, their possibilities, the inclusion, and exclusion of certain cultural, ethnic, and religious minorities. As a genealogical investigation, this critical history of the present aspires to offer ‘a major interrogation’ of what is accepted as ‘truth’ in the FBV discourse and reveal its exclusionary power.

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Gove, M. (2013). I Refuse to Surrender to the Marxist Teachers Hell-Bent on Destroying Our Schools: Education Secretary Berates the ‘New Enemies of Promise’ for Opposing His Plans. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailym ail.co.uk/debate/article-2298146/I-refuse-surrender-Marxist-teachers-hellbent-destroying-schools-Education-Secretary-berates-new-enemies-promiseopposing-plans.html Helm, T., Taylor, M., & Davis, R. (2011). David Cameron Sparks Fury from Critics Who Say Attack on Multiculturalism Has Boosted English Defence League. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/feb/ 05/david-cameron-speech-criticised-edl Helm, T., & Coman, J. (2012, June 24). Rowan Williams Pours Scorn on David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/ 2012/jun/23/rowan-williams-big-society-cameron HM Government. (2011). Prevent Strategy. https://assets.publishing.ser vice.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf Home Office. (2001). Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. https://www.belongnetwork.co.uk/resources/community-cohesion-areport-of-the-independent-review-team/ Home Office. (2015). Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015b/6/contents/enacted Home Office. (2017). Individuals Referred to and Supported Through the Prevent Programme, April 2015 to March 2016. https://assets.publishing.service.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/677646/ individuals-referred-supported-prevent-programme-apr2015-mar2016.pdf House of Commons Education Committee. (2015). Extremism in Schools: The Trojan Horse Affair. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/extremism-in-sch ools-the-trojan-horse-affair-report-together-with-formal-minutes-relating-tothe-report Iqbal, K. (2019). British Pakistani Boys. Routledge. Jerome, L., Elwick, A., & Kazim, R. (2019). The Impact of the Prevent Duty on Schools: A Review of the Evidence. British Educational Research Journal, 45(4), 821–837. Kerbaj, R., & Griffiths, S. (2014, March 2). Islamist Plot to Takeover Schools. The Sunday Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/islamist-plot-to-takeover-schools-655mhbw0vtc Kundnani, A. (2007). Integrationism: The Politics of Anti-Muslim Racism. Race & Class., 48(4), 24–44. Lentin, A., & Titley, G. (2011). The Crises of Multiculturalism. Zed Books.

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Loveys, K. (2011). School Heads to Be Given Powers to Sack Teachers with Extremist Beliefs. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art icle-2015024/Heads-schools-given-powers-sack-teachers-extremist-beliefs. html Malik, N. (2022, October 31). Yes, Sunak at No 10 is a ‘win’—In Exposing the Emptiness of Elite Diversity Rhetoric. The Guardian. www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2022/oct/31/rishi-sunak-win-emptiness-elite-diversityrhetoric-inequalities Miah, S. (2017). Muslims, Schooling and Security. Palgrave Pivot. McKinney, E. (2015). Trojan Horse One Year On: Headteacher Who Warned the Government Five Years Ago Reveals Plans to Create ‘Families’ of Schools. Birmingham Mail. https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/trojan-horseone-year-on-9095037 Mogra, I. (2016). The ‘Trojan Horse’ Affair and Radicalisation: An Analysis of OfSTED Reports. Educational Review, 68(4), 444–465. Murray, D. (2014). Save the Children: When Will We Stop the Islamists Trying to Control the Minds of a Generation of Pupils? The Spectator. https://www. spectator.co.uk/article/save-our-children-from-the-islamists/ Nash, J. (2015, January 7). Communication to Rochdale Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education. OfSTED. (2015). The Common Inspection Framework August 2015. https://ass ets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/828112/Withdrawn_common_inspection_framework.pdf OfSTED. (2020). Equality Objectives Progress Review 2019 to 2020. https:// www.gov.uk/government/publications/ofsteds-equality-objectives-2016-to2020/equality-objectives-progress-review-2019-to-2020 Oldham, J. (2014, June 9). Trojan Horse Jihadist Plot to Takeover Birmingham Schools. Birmingham Mail. https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/mid lands-news/trojan-horse-jihadist-plot-take-6782881 Pain, R. (2010). The New Geopolitics of Fear. Geography Compass, 4(3), 226– 240. Paton, G. (2011). Teachers Must Uphold ‘British Values’ to Work in Schools. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/863 8501/Teachers-must-uphold-British-values-to-work-in-schools.html Perraudin, F. (2019, December 9). New Controversial Comments Uncovered in Historical Boris Johnson Articles. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2019/dec/09/new-controversial-comments-uncovered-in-his torical-boris-johnson-articles Prime Minister’s Office. (2011). Prime Minister’s King James Speech. https:// www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-ministers-king-james-bible-speech

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Quinn, B. (2011, August 13). David Starkey Claims ‘the Whites Have Become Black’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/13/ david-starkey-claims-whites-black Revell, L., & Bryan, H., (2018). Fundamental British Values in Education. Emerald Publishing Smith, H. (2021). Britishness and the Outsider Within: Tracing Manifestations of Racist Nativism in Education Policy in England. Prism, 3(2), https://doi. org/10.24377/prism.ljmu.0302209 Stratton, A. (2011, August 15). David Cameron on Riots: Broken Society Is Top of My Political Agenda. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/ 2011/aug/15/david-cameron-riots-broken-society Stewart, H., & Allegretti, A. (2022 July 29). Rishi Sunak Seeks to Revive Faltering No 10 Bid by Attacking ‘Woke Nonsense’. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/29/rishi-sunak-liztruss-culture-war-woke-nonsense Tamboukou, M. (2019). Writing Genealogies: An Exploration of Foucault’s Strategies for Doing Research. In S. Ball (Ed.), Foucault and Education. Putting Theory to Work. Routledge. Thomas, P. (2016). Youth, Terrorism and Education: Britain’s Prevent Programme. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 35(2), 171–187. Thomas, P., & Sanderson, P. (2011). Unwilling Citizens? Muslim Young People and National Identity. Sociology, 45(6), 1028–1044. Virdee, S., & McGeever, B. (2017). Racism, Crisis, Brexit. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(10), 1802–1819. Walker, P., Crerar, P., & Elgott, J. (2022). Liz Truss Resigns as PM and Triggers Fresh Leadership Election. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/pol itics/2022/oct/20/liz-truss-to-quit-as-prime-minister Weale, S. (2020, November 13). Education Experts Counter Government Attack on Critical Race Theory. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/edu cation/2020/nov/13/education-experts-counter-government-attack-on-cri tical-race-theory Wintour, P. (2010, May 12). David Cameron and Nick Clegg lead Coalition into Power. The Guardian. David Cameron and Nick Clegg lead coalition into power | Conservatives | The Guardian. Wintour, P. (2015, May 13). David Cameron to Unveil New Limits on Extremists Activities in Queen’s Speech. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/ may/13/counter-terrorism-bill-extremism-disruption-orders-david-cameron Wintour, P., & Graham-Harrison, E. (2015, June 29). Tunisia Attack: David Cameron Pledges ‘Full Spectrum’ Response to Massacre. https://www.thegua rdian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/29/tunisia-attack-david-cameron-pledgesfull-spectrum-response-to-massacre

CHAPTER 4

Multiculturalism, Religious Education, and Fundamental British Values

Introduction Since the late 1990s multiculturalism has been ‘Blamed for everything from parallel societies to gendered horror to the incubation of terrorism’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 2) and in 2006, the Daily Mail declared that ‘multiculturalism is dead’ (Slack, 2006). Rejection of multiculturalism as ‘passive liberalism’ by successive New Labour and Conservative politicians and the media have placed RE teachers in a quandary, leaving them to reconcile the demands of government policy with the pluralism of multifaith RE, their self-understanding and their relationship to the pupils and communities they serve. In this chapter, I aim to critically trace the discursive shifts which have led to the putative death of multiculturalism. The analysis which follows demonstrates the complexity of both the multicultural project in education and its relationship to shifting government agendas. What we find is a history ‘without constants’ (Foucault, 1991: 87) discontinuity and ‘systematic reversals’ (Foucault, 1991: 86). Multiculturalism is a highly contested idea and its relationship to RE is complex. This analysis will show how at key points in post-war education policy history, RE has been closely aligned to policy makers’ visions for multiculturalism through claims made for its contribution to the preparation of children and young people to live in a multiracial society. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_4

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Since the mid-1970s the multicultural and phenomenological discourse of RE has shaped the outlook and subjectivities of RE teachers. The shift from liberal governmental multiculturalism to the defensive civic nationalism of British values and the Prevent duty, therefore, appears to be nothing short of an epistemic break in educational discourse, fundamentally negating the aims of an RE premised on intercultural understanding and phenomenological empathy. Defining Multiculturalism Multiculturalism is a difficult term to define, as Lentin and Titley note, it is a, Slippery and fluid term, and it has accrued a vast range of associations and accents through decades of political, contextual and linguistic translation. (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 2)

To set the scene for critical discussion, this section opens with an attempt at definition before proceeding to examine ways in which multiculturalism has been interpreted and contested. Historically, the term multiculturalism became part of political discourse in the 1960s as policies were formulated to govern an increasingly diverse post-war society. As a starting point, Max Farrar offers a neutral definition of multiculturalism as ‘a society characterised by the presence of many different cultures, where “culture” stands for ethnicity or “race”’ (Farrar in, Farrar & Valli, 2012: 7). Vertovec and Wessendorf acknowledge these diffuse conceptualisations of multiculturalism, describing it as ‘hard to pin down’ but identify its key tenets as a broad set of mutually reinforcing approaches, ‘concerning the incorporation and participation of immigrants and ethnic minorities and their modes of cultural/religious difference’ (Vertovec & Wessendorf, 2010: 4). No singular principle can be found across all of these measures, Vertovec argues, but multiculturalism usually involves a range of commitments such as: . Public recognition for ethnic minority organisations. . Educational provision sensitive to the values of ethnic and religious minorities, including curricula which promotes knowledge and understanding of minorities beliefs, language support and scope to

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establish religious minority schools, retraining on culturally sensitive practice for social services, police and health workers. . Public information provided in multiple languages, and the granting of cultural exceptions in the law, protection from discrimination and accommodation of religious practices and establishment of places of worship. In a paper written for Radical Philosophy, Bhikhu Parekh (1999) defined a multicultural society as a society which contains three or more forms of cultural diversity including subcultural diversity, perspectival diversity and communal diversity. The most common understanding of multiculturalism, Parekh suggests, refers to this third type, ‘communal diversity’ by which he means groups with distinctive beliefs and practices, such as religions. By virtue of globalisation most modern societies are culturally diverse, but a multicultural society makes a normative commitment to diversity by welcoming and cherishing plurality, making plurality central to its self-understanding, and respecting the claims of its diverse communities through their recognition in its laws and its social institutions, such as education. Parekh defines the term accordingly, Multiculturalism is not about difference and identity per se, but about those that are embedded in and sustained by culture; that is, a body of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of people understand themselves and the world and organise their individual and collective lives…culturally derived differences carry a measure of authority and are patterned and structured by virtue of being embedded in a shared and historically inherited system of meaning and significance…multiculturalism, then, is about cultural diversity or culturally embedded differences. (Parekh, 1999: 1)

In his report for the Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, ‘The Future of multi- ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report’, Parekh proposed a vision for Britain based on his concept of multiculturalism as a normative commitment. In the report he characterised Britain as a ‘community of communities’ (Parekh in Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, 2000: 105) and a community of citizens based on respect for difference and the right to be different in both the public and private domains with equal access to the polity.

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Similarly noted political theorists Will Kymlicka and Tariq Modood argue for pluralistic multiculturalism which offers protection for individuals and groups’ legal, civil and political rights and recognition of their distinctive identities and ethno cultural practices. Modood, a colleague of Parekh’s on the Commission for Racial Equality describes multiculturalism as a two-way process of integration arguing for ‘pluralistic integration’ and respect for distinctive group identities (Modood, 2011). At first sight, these definitions of multiculturalism seem uncontroversial, however the history of the of post-war multicultural policy tells a far less straightforward story. A qualitative change in the political dynamics of multiculturalism began in the 1980s with the influence of conservative cultural restorationists preparing the ground for government renunciation of multiculturalism in the noughties. Such was the scale of this backlash that in 2006 the Daily Mail was emboldened to pronounce that ‘Multi culturalism is dead’ (Slack, 2006). The implications of the death of multiculturalism for teachers of RE, a subject which aligns to the models of multiculturalism outlined above, are considerable. Indeed, the death of multiculturalism appeared to signal a profound epistemic break with the values of the entire liberal post-war education project in favour of a paradoxical ‘illiberal liberalism’ that accuses multiculturalism of creating ethnic segregation and being a ‘breeding ground for extremism’ (Osserwaarde, 2014: 174). Multicultural pluralism was repositioned as a threat to the liberal enlightenment values that constitute ‘our way of life’ (Cameron, 2011). To understand what took place on the way to the funeral critical consideration needs to be given to the development of post-war multicultural policy and its relationship to education and more specifically, to religious education as the discourse which shaped the subjectivities of the teachers interviewed for this project and is the discursive site of this study. Multiculturalism and Religious Education: Plowden, Working Paper 36 and the Birmingham Syllabus The Empire Windrush arrived in the UK in 1948, carrying on board a mere 492 Jamaican skilled workers. British government officials panicked, and the Privy Council issued a memo to the Foreign Office requesting that, ‘no special effort be made to help these people…otherwise it might encourage a further influx’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 19). The confused public and political reactions to the Windrush arrivals ranged from calls for them to go back home, to those of a half-hearted ‘liberal and business welcome’

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via ‘assimilation and integration’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 20). For Tomlinson, the 60s was a period of contradictions, but it set the tone for the debate about citizenship rights and educational entitlements that were to shape policy and curriculum up to the 2000s. This was the period in which political opinion shifted from favouring assimilation into an ‘undefined British way of life’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 20) to more progressive notions of integration and cultural pluralism. As will be demonstrated we can see these discourses being played out in the development of education and RE theory in a way that set the foundations for what was to become the dominant approach to the subject. Most discussions of multiculturalism in British political history start with reference to the 1965 Race Relations Act and Home Secretary Roy Jenkin’s 1966 speech in which he rejected assimilation as a ‘flattening out process’ (Jenkins, in Chin, 2017: 241). Jenkins argued for a policy of integration to promote ‘equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’ (Jenkins, in Chin, 2017: 241). Jenkins’ speech didn’t use the term multiculturalism, but he set out an aspiration for a pluralistic Britain based on peaceful coexistence between different cultures and ethnicities. The 1965 Act banned racial discrimination in public places making the promotion of hatred on the basis of ‘colour, race or ethnic or national origins’ (UK Parliament, 1965) an offence and was followed by the creation of the Race Relations Board in 1966. The Act was amended in 1968 making acts of discrimination in employment, housing, advertising, education and training an offence (UK Parliament, 1968). The colour bar was effectively outlawed by this legislation however the sixties was far from a golden age of progressive racial politics. The polarising and explicit racism of the fifties, was still in evidence, notoriously exemplified by Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech to describe the imagined threat posed by new commonwealth immigration. Sally Tomlinson (2008) argues that the politics of the Wilson administration were ‘contradictory’ driven by a concern to avoid the racial conflicts of the US, but the foundations had been set in this period for multicultural education policy. In 1969, commissioned by the IRR the ‘Colour and Citizenship’ report was published, and significantly, it called for educationalists to emphasise the value and extent of diversity in Britain. Tomlinson argues that in many respects the 60s was the ‘liberal hour’ in education establishing the policy direction that was to define practice right up into the early noughties. The report of the Central

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Advisory Council for Education (England) into Primary Education, that became known as the Plowden report, after its lead author, Bridget Plowden, was published in 1967. The report was an example of the sea change in educational theory and policy that was to become the foundation for progressive developments through its advocacy of child centred approaches, and its recognition of the needs of the children of new arrivals from the commonwealth and South Asian subcontinent. The Plowden report advised, ‘Colleges, institutes of education and local education authorities’ should ‘expand opportunities through initial and in-service courses for some teachers to train in teaching English to immigrants and to increase their knowledge of the background from which children come’. (Central Advisory Council for Education, 1967)

In relation to the RE required to meet the needs of the multiracial classroom, Plowden was tentative, but it signalled an important shift away from Christian instruction towards a recognition of the complexities of the religiously plural classroom of increasingly diverse schools. Plowden states, We welcome research which is trying to determine what religious subject matter and concepts are relevant to children’s interests, their experience of life…among the historical characters about whom the older children should hear, care should be taken to include sympathetically those who represent a non-Christian tradition.

Adding that, ‘teachers should be sensitive to the feelings of children of parents who are non-Christian, agnostic or humanist, as well as to those of Christian parentage’ (Central Advisory Council for Education, 1967). Thinking in religious education in the late 1960s also recognised the social realities of Britain’s post-war ethnic and cultural diversity as educationalists, teacher educators and Religious Studies academics began to develop new approaches to religious education. The 1944 Education Reform Act stipulated that ‘religious instruction shall be given in every county school and in every voluntary school’. Confessional Religious instruction (RI) meant instruction in Christianity and was instrumental in the moral and spiritual regeneration of the nation’s youth after the Second World War. Monocultural RI was designed to ‘impart the Christian faith in a Christian country’ (Priestley, 2006: 1006) and to inspire

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commitment to the Christian Church and Western democratic values in the ‘struggle against fascism and communism’ (Bates, 1996: 86). In his detailed survey of RE post 1944, Copley observes that, ‘If the sixties in Britain were years of breaking the mould, dismantling received tradition and seeking new answers, then all of this could be said to be reflected in RE’ (Copley, 2014: 86). Similarly, Parker & Freathy add that the 60s were significant because they mark the shift towards ‘dechristianization’ (Freathy & Parker, 2015: 9), paralleled in RE through new research which called into question the appropriateness of a predominantly Christian and Bible focussed RI curriculum. Plowden alluded to this research through comments about RE which addressed children’s interests, referencing the work of Edwin Cox ‘Changing Aims in RE’ (2018), Ronald Goldman’s Piagetian, ‘Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence’ (2022) and his famous, ‘Readiness for Religion’ (2018), which questioned the capacity of children to understand abstract religious concepts taught without contextualisation in their lives. Secularisation and immigration led to discussions between the DES and HMI about the capacity of the 1944 ‘settlement’ to meet the educational and cultural needs of pupils exposed to a wide of beliefs, including religious, non-religious, counter cultural and ideological world views. Parker & Freathy document how senior DES civil servants and HMI agreed that there was a need for a new form of RE that could respond to the ‘substantial number of children of other faiths’ and the related ‘problem of immigrant areas in some parts of the country’ (UK National Archives G. J. Spence to L. R. Fletcher, cited in Freathy & Parker, 2015: 20). The arguments for the new RE were twofold; immigrant children had the right to learn about their own faith, and secondly, they should ‘be given the opportunity to learn about the faith of the community within which they seek to integrate’ (UK National Archives, Jack Earl to GJ Spence cited in Parker & Freathy, 2012: 385). Separatist approaches were to be avoided as they could promote racial tensions. Newly appointed Labour Secretary of State for Education and Science, Edward Short, recognised the challenges for RE teachers steeped in RI, stating that post-war diversity and immigration should not be perceived as a ‘barrier’, but as ‘an enrichment’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 385– 386). ‘The problems which confront the teacher…are to inform himself …of the different faiths (and) to relate them to each other so that they complement rather than conflict’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 386).

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By the end of the 60s these developments were ushering in shifts in pedagogical thinking that were to produce the liberal, progressive RE that became the orthodoxy of the subject. Short organised a seminar that took place in Windsor, in 1969 attended by senior representatives from the Churches, LEAs, HMI, Colleges and Institutes of Education to address the need for change in RE. Proceedings from the seminar were published as a report, ‘Prospects and Problems for Religious Education’. One of its conclusions was, RE should ensure that ‘appropriate attention is paid to non-Christian religions’. Similarly, in 1967 the Church of England Board of Education and the National Society commissioned an enquiry into Religious Education, chaired by Ian Ramsey, Bishop of Durham to respond to the social and cultural changes of the era. The report of the enquiry entitled ‘The Fourth R’, published in 1970, concluded that RE should be conducted as ‘an exploration where no one viewpoint is considered automatically as invariably correct’ and pupils’ ‘sincere views’ would be treated with the ‘utmost seriousness’ (Copley, 2014: 97). The Fourth R even conceded that pupils might participate in the worship of faiths other than their own and even legitimately ‘decide against the claims of the Christian faith’, which as Copley argues, ‘was a radical view for an Anglican report of its time’ (Copley, 2014: 97). In attendance at the Windsor seminar was the Lancaster University Religious Studies academic and author of ‘Secular Education and the Logic of Religion’ (Smart, 1968), Professor Ninian Smart. Smart’s influence has been inestimable in RE, and it was his approach to the study of religion that provided theoretical and pedagogical direction to the subject. Freathy and Parker identify three key moments that define this period of reconstruction of RE. 1. The inauguration of the Shap Working Party in 1969, 2. Schools Council Working Paper 36 published in 1971, 3. The 1975 Birmingham Agreed Syllabus. It was Smart and his secularising non-dogmatic approach that was the catalyst for these developments. Smart’s methodology revolutionised the academic and critical study of religion. His approach drew from anthropology, cultural theory, and philosophy. Smart emphasised a

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value free, non-judgemental approach to the study of religion, using the phenomenological methods of suspension or bracketing (Époche) and eidetic reduction to gain insights into religious experience and phenomena. His neutral phenomenological method had a direct influence on the new pluralism of RE through the activities of the Shap Working Party, a group of academics brought together in 1969 to ‘foster the teaching of world religions at all levels’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 386). As its rationale Shap referred to the ‘prominence of discussions on immigrant questions’ and the value of studying world religions to the promotion of ‘tolerance and understanding’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 386). The second moment was the publication of the Schools Council Working Party’s report in 1971, Working Paper 36 Religious Education in Secondary Schools. The Working Party began its review of RE in 1969 under the Chairmanship of Professor Ninian Smart, completing it in 1971. Paper 36 made the case for the phenomenological or undogmatic approach (Schools Council, 1971: 21), with the aim of RE, ‘As the promotion of understanding’ using the tools of scholarship, ‘in order to enter into an empathic experience of the faith of individuals and groups. It does not promote any one religious viewpoint’ (Schools Council, 1971: 21). Copley identifies rejection of confessional teaching, which he defines as ‘teaching intended to produce a Christian world view and commitment on the part of the child’, (Copley, 2014: 101) as the feature of Smart’s approach which separated it from its predecessors. Working Paper 36 characterised confessional RE as ‘intellectual and cultic indoctrination’ in contrast with the objective and detached phenomenological approach (Schools Council, 1971: 21). Copley states, ‘it is hard to over emphasize the influence of Paper 36 on RE in the next two decades. It inspired many in RE to a view of the subject that could survive the apparent disintegration of a Christian society’ and ‘It enabled many teachers to feel that they could at last teach RE honestly without pretending to Christian or religious views they might not possess’ (Copley, 2014: 103). The third moment in the sequence was the publication of the Birmingham Agreed Syllabus in 1975. Birmingham, Copley notes, had changed more than most British cities during the 1970s because of the influx of workers from the commonwealth and south Asian subcontinent. By the mid-60s the migrant proportion of the city’s population had doubled from 11% in 1951 to 22% in 1966, raising questions about

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the role played by RE in community relations and ‘The socializing, Anglicizing and integrating role of schools in which teachers put across a set of Christian values’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 389). The Religious and Cultural Panel of the Birmingham Community Relations Committee had been meeting since March 1969 to discuss the RE required to address the needs of a religiously plural community. The panel included representatives from the Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish traditions and the Christian denominations. The Birmingham Agreed syllabus was published in 1975, a ‘milestone in English RE’ and a ‘total revolution in subject matter’ (Priestly cited in Parker & Freathy, 2012: 389). The syllabus reflected the multi-faith turn requiring children to study world religions alongside teaching on the ‘traditional religion of the land, namely Christianity’ (Copley, 2014: 107). In-depth study of one other religion was recommended, usually the personal faith of the child or young person. The panel recommended that multi religious schools offered an option system to accommodate this diversity. Controversially the syllabus also required children to study at least one non-religious life stance, including communism or humanism. The decision to include non-religious worldviews polarised opinion, for some, it represented ‘the displacement of the “positive teaching of Christianity” with agnosticism and scepticism, while for others, it represents the creation of a new form of RE’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 389). It provided the local and national press with material for sensationalist headlines, such as ‘Happy Marx’ and the ‘Communist textbook’ (Copley, 2014: 107). In response the conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse led the counterattack with her ‘Save Religious Education’ in State Schools campaign and Canon H.J. Burgess countered the new pluralism in RE in his call to ‘save Religion in State schools’, arguing that Christianity is ‘part of our national and cultural heritage…basic to our country’s history and culture’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 400). The RE community didn’t take these attacks seriously, but the newly elected leader of the Conservative party, Margaret Thatcher, took a cultural restorationist stand against multiculturalism and pluralism in education, which was to bear fruit in the provisions of the 1988 Education Reform Act, with consequences for RE.

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From ‘Education for All’ to the National Curriculum The late 70s and the early 80s was a period marked by rioting in the inner cities, where black and Asian Britons were concentrated. Tomlinson notes that the 80s were a decade in which immigration assumed less importance but the acceptance and rights of black communities as equal participants in a multi-cultural society became ‘the major contested issue’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 70). At the start of the 80s approximately 20 LEAs had produced multicultural education policies. The 1984 Policy Studies Institute Survey found some evidence of upward social mobility amongst minorities in Britain, but the general picture of their economic lives was depressing (Tomlinson, 2008: 72). In 1984 Bradford headteacher, Ray Honeyford was suspended after publishing articles for the Salisbury Review attacking multicultural education. However, progressive developments included the establishment of the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education which required all courses to include training for the delivery of multicultural education. The landmark development in the 1980s was the publication of the Swann Report, ‘Education for All’ in 1985 (Runnymede Trust, 1985). Tomlinson notes that it was the combination of riots in Toxteth, Liverpool, Brixton and reports such as the 1981 DES report, ‘West Indian Children in our Schools’ that led to recognition by government that whilst urban disadvantage was a factor, racial discrimination had also contributed, ‘There was …a more overt recognition that the racism and ignorance of the majority society needed combating and that education for an ethnically diverse society was now of importance’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 82). It was recognised that education was the key ingredient in strategies for creating a more racially harmonious society. A 1981 HMI report on the school curriculum concluded that, ‘learning in a multicultural society should help all pupils develop respect for religious values, tolerance of other races’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 83). When it was published, the Swann report acknowledged that effective multicultural education had to address the needs of ethnic minority students. For Tomlinson the 807-page in-depth report ‘constituted a high point’ in progressive multi-cultural education policy, offering ‘all pupils a good, relevant and up to date education for life in Britain and the world as it is today’ (Runnymede Trust, 1985: 315).

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Chapter 8 of the report specifically addressed the contribution of religious education in developing a democratic and pluralist society, stating that, A major task in preparing all pupils for life in the kind of harmonious pluralist society which we outlined at the opening of this report must surely therefore be to enhance their understanding of a variety of religious beliefs and practises thus offering them an insight into the values and concerns of different communities. (Runnymede Trust, 1985: 466)

The report provided a detailed assessment of the causes of racism in Chapter 2, but returned to what it refers to as the origins of racism in Chapter 8, stating that, Religious groups within the minority communities which vary from an assumed norm of Christianity and whose religious beliefs are manifested by various forms of dress or behaviour or by the celebration of particular festivals, may be subject to racism if their faiths are neither understood nor accepted in their own right. (Runnymede Trust, 1985: 466)

The next sentence specifically endorses the contribution of RE with respect to its role in ‘bringing about a greater understanding of the diversity of faiths present in Britain today can…play a major role in challenging and overcoming racism’. The method recommended by Swann was Smart’s neutral, pluralistic phenomenology with its emphasis on understanding, We find ourselves firmly in favour of the broader phenomenological approach to religious education as the best and indeed the only means of enhancing the understanding of all pupils, from whatever religious background, of the plurality of faiths in contemporary Britain, of bringing them to an understanding of the nature of belief and the religious dimension of human existence, and of helping them to appreciate the diverse and sometimes conflicting life stances which exist and thus enabling them to determine and justify their own religious position. (Runnymede Trust, 1985: 475)

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The National Curriculum Education for All marked a milestone in the articulation of a pluralistic RE that was integral to inclusive anti-racist multicultural education. For Copley, the significance of Swann lies in the fact that it was produced by a body outside the RE community which endorsed the subject and stressed the value of non-dogmatic teaching (Copley, 2014: 125). However, despite the progress made by Swann, the next major development to shape the direction of RE and multicultural education paid relatively little attention to RE. In 1988 the Education Reform Act was enacted, introducing a National Curriculum (Education Reform Act, 1988), set and regulated by government, consisting of three core and seven foundation subjects. RE was not included in the National Curriculum. RE remained locally determined and was included in the Basic Curriculum. A report funded largely by Anglican Trusts, a FARE deal for RE (FARE, Forms of Assessment in RE) commented on the isolated status of RE pointing out that the ERA ‘was inconsistent with the attention paid to the subject in numerous government reports…and especially Swann’ (Copley, 2014: 150). The 1988 ERA didn’t acknowledge RE as a force for social, cultural, and civic understanding. RE wasn’t ‘high’ on the agenda of Education Secretary Kenneth Baker whose memoirs indicate his primary concern was to ensure that the provisions of the 1944 Butler Act did not fall into ‘disuse’, stating, ‘I strengthened the 1944 Act by making it a duty for Heads, governors and LEAs to provide religious education’ (Baker, cited in Copley, 2014: 135). However, in actuality what Baker achieved was a reinforcement of provisions already placed upon schools and LEAs. In a BJRE editorial John Hull criticised the bill pointing out that all it did was offer a law that required teachers to follow laws already enacted! Hull’s anxiety is summed up by Copley, if the requirements of the 1944 Act were ignored, what confidence could the RE community have that this new requirement ‘to observe them will produce any better results?’ The debate the bill produced in readings in the House of Lords also reveals the persistence of notions of Christianising RI. Copley records how in the Lords debates Baroness Blatch argued for Christianity to be the core of the RE proposed in the ERA but did not want to see it subjected to educational assessments or tests as a National Curriculum subject. Lord Orr-Ewing similarly argued for Christian RE, accusing the

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government of undermining the 1944 Act by promoting multi-cultural, multi-faith RE! In the end the Education Reform Act, enacted on the 29 July 1988, made few changes to the 1944 provisions, although it is important to emphasise that it reinforced and enshrined RE’s place in the curriculum. RE remained a statutory and separate subject. It was not absorbed into other humanities subjects or watered down. Section 8 of the Act made the following provisions for RE in the basic curriculum, The religious education for which provision is required by section 2(1) (a) to be included in the basic curriculum for any particular maintained school shall be religious education of the kind required by such of the provisions of sections 26 to 28 of the 1944 Act…Any agreed syllabus which after this section comes to into force…shall reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain. (Education Reform Act, 1988: 6)

The 1988 ERA, was radical in so many respects, ending the era of teacher autonomy established by the 1944 ERA, ushering in a new phase of English education policy including devolved local management of schools, standards, competition and the use of metrics to enable parental choice. The introduction of the standardised national curriculum and standardised assessment tests was a paradigm shift, but one which left RE essentially unchanged, but excluded from the new curriculum framework. The Act confirmed the 1944 settlement, but it did introduce changes to nomenclature. RI was now legally replaced with RE reflecting the emphasis on education as opposed to Christian instruction. The Act required the compulsory establishment of local authority Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs) whose purpose was to advise on RE and produce locally agreed syllabuses whose content in county schools was to reflect ‘the fact that religious traditions in this country are in the main Christian, whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of other principal religions’ (Education Reform Act, 1988: 6). Tomlinson notes that the working groups that were formed to develop the subject content of the national curriculum were subject to considerable interference by right-wing political interests. In 1987 Margaret Thatcher announced plans for the forthcoming ERA and national

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curriculum at the annual Conservative Party conference, stating that the opportunity for ‘youngsters’ was ‘all too often snatched away from them by hard-left education authorities and extremist teachers. Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics, whatever that may be’ (Thatcher cited in Tomlinson, 2008: 95). The progressive multicultural agenda initiated by the Swann report was superseded by the provisions of the ERA as David Hargreaves commented, ‘The 1988 Act …should have looked forward with confidence and determination to a better multicultural, multilingual and multi-faith Britain entering a new relationship with itself and with the rest of the world. But it did not’ (Hargreaves, cited in Tomlinson, 2008: 96). Similarly, for some in RE, the privileging of Christianity in the ERA amounted to a reassertion of the hegemony of Christianity in the curriculum. Writing for the BJRE in 1994, Dennis Bates argued that the development of multi-faith phenomenological RE should have meant Christianity was ‘first among equals in a multicultural society’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 401). Instead, the ERA reaffirmed the dominance of Christianity, introducing an implicit hierarchy of religions to redefine ‘the relation between Christianity and other religions in English schools and society’ (Bates cited in Parker & Freathy, 2012: 401). Parker & Freathy warn against historiographies of RE which overstate the extent of the shift towards pluralism in Working Paper 36 arguing that the view of Christianity as the dominant culture remained resilient in the work of Smart and even the Birmingham Agreed Syllabus, which was developed with an ‘assimilationist intent’ (Parker & Freathy, 2012: 402). This analysis is commendable, and it guards against an oversimplification of the complexities of English education and RE policy during this period, however the 1988 settlement created an environment where the ‘other’ principal religions were taken into account thus legislating for their inclusion. As a concession to pluralism the provisions of the 1988 ERA created scope for Agreed Syllabus Conferences to produce multi-faith programmes of study and for schools to offer a range of world religions and non-religious worldviews at GCSE and A level in a way not possible previously. In 1993 John Patten, Secretary of State for Education, asked Sir Ron Dearing, Chair of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA) to undertake a review of the National Curriculum. Dearing included consideration of RE, emphasising the parity of RE, ‘Religious education is every bit as important as the subjects of the National

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Curriculum in that it should make a central contribution to the development of spiritual and moral understanding’ (The Dearing Review, 1994). Under Dearing, in collaboration with faith groups from all the Christian denominations and the ‘other’ principal religions, SCAA produced detailed model syllabi for use by SACRE Agreed Syllabus Conferences. The SCAA syllabi were the outcome of in-depth consultation with faith communities and in keeping with phenomenological RE, the content they produced for the models was based on the faith groups’ accounts of their beliefs and practices, organised around two attainment targets, learning about religion (AT1) and learning from religion (AT2). The models provided teachers and pupils with the type of non-dogmatic RE that Smart proposed in Working Paper 36. Following the Dearing Review, the DfE published circular 1/94 on religious education and collective worship which reaffirmed the equal standing of RE with National Curriculum subjects (DfE, 1994: 12) and underlined the nonconfessional legal character of RE as education as opposed to instruction by stating, The law has always stated that agreed syllabuses must be nondenominational…syllabuses must not be designed to convert pupils, or to urge a particular religion or religious belief on pupils. (DfE, 1994: 15)

And, crucially, ‘The relative content devoted to Christianity in the syllabus should predominate’, but ‘The syllabus as a whole must also include all of the principal religions represented in this country. In this context, the precise balance between Christianity and other religions should take account of both the national and the local position’. (DfE, 1994: 16)

The Golden Age of RE? Despite exclusion from the National Curriculum, the period that began with the Dearing Review and the SCAA model syllabi is regarded by two of the most prominent figures in recent English RE, Barbara Wintersgill, HMI and specialist subject adviser in RE until 2005 and HMI Alan Brine, National Adviser for RE up to 2012, as a ‘golden age’ (Brine and Wintersgill, cited in Gates, 2016). If increased pupil engagement with RE is

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taken as evidence for a golden age, Wintersgill and Brine are right. OfSTED’s, 2007 report, ‘Making Sense of Religion’ noted that ‘The number of students taking GCSE and A level examination courses in RE has risen substantially in the past 10 years. The total number of GCSE examination entries rose from about 110,000 in 1995 to about 400,000 in 2006. Of these, approximately 130,000 were for full course GCSE. More than half the Year 11 cohorts now gain a GCSE in religious studies, an unprecedented number and proportion. The number of pupils achieving an A level qualification has more than doubled since 1996’ (OfSTED, 2007: 16). The ‘golden age’ of RE was also a period of pedagogical innovation and theoretical creativity, notable for the contributions of RE theorists such as Andrew Wright, Clive and Jane Erricker and Robert Jackson. Wright developed a critical realist approach to RE which aimed at the development of religious literacy, ‘to empower children to make considered judgements for themselves in an informed and intelligent manner’ (Wright, 2004: 174) about the truth claims competing for their attention. Clive and Jane Erricker drew from postmodern theory arguing for a profoundly child centred pedagogy focusing on children and young people’s spiritual narratives and problematised the ideological power of ‘totalizing’ religious metanarratives (Erricker & Erricker, 2000). Robert Jackson’s work adapted ethnographic and anthropological methodologies to develop an interpretive approach to RE, which combined phenomenological concern for understanding with a more pragmatic constructivist emphasis on children and young people as meaning makers capable of interpreting and reinterpreting religious truth claims through reflexive dialogue (Jackson, 2004). Take up of RE during the ‘golden age’ demonstrated that there was a considerable appetite amongst young people for a non-dogmatic, open and pluralistic RE capable of providing them with the interpretive resources to make sense of the complexities of the ‘deeply rooted ontological and cultural pluralism’ (Wright, 2004: 169) of a super diverse postmodern society. The innovative and theoretically nuanced pedagogies developed in this period by Wright, Erricker and Jackson addressed the appetite for progressive RE amongst both teachers and their pupils, but outside of the post-Dearing RE community the rules governing political and educational discourse about race, culture, citizenship and belonging were changing as policy makers recognised the potential of RE to address governmental post-9/11 civic and social agendas.

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In 2004, the successor to SCAA, QCA, published a non-statutory national framework for RE, replacing the SCAA model syllabi as the blueprint for SACRE syllabi. In the section of the framework titled religion and beliefs, the framework’s authors outline the role RE should take to encourage pupils to reflect on, The significance of interfaith dialogue’ and ‘the important contribution religion can make to community cohesion and the combating of religious prejudice and discrimination. (QCA, 2004: 12)

Page 14 details the contribution of RE to pupils’ cultural development, stating, Religious education provides opportunities to promote cultural development through the promotion of, ‘racial and interfaith harmony and respect for all, combating prejudice and discrimination, contributing positively to community cohesion and promoting awareness of how interfaith cooperation can support the pursuit of the common good. (QCA, 2004: 14)

The role RE plays in the promotion of citizenship is identified as ‘significant’ in relation to its capacity to develop pupils’ knowledge and understanding of ‘diversity’ and the ‘need for mutual respect and understanding’ (QCA, 2004: 15). The community cohesion agenda outlined in the QCA was clearly aligned to the recommendations of the Cantle report 2001 suggesting that RE had been recruited to the government’s soft assimilationist programme for integrating structurally vulnerable communities living ‘parallel lives’. The community cohesion requirement was further strengthened in 2007, when schools were placed under a legal duty ‘to promote community cohesion’ (DCSF, 2007: 1) and in 2010, under New Labour, the DCSF published ‘Religious Education in English schools: Non statutory guidance’ which devoted a section to RE and community cohesion. The DCSF guidance restated and reinforced almost verbatim, the guidance found in the 2004 NSF, stating,

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RE makes an important contribution to a school’s duty to promote community cohesion. It provides a key context to develop young people’s understanding and appreciation of diversity, to promote shared values and to challenge racism and discrimination. (DCSF, 2010: 7)

In his article The Counter Terrorist Classroom, Liam Gearon examines the tensions between the political and educational agendas caught up in this convergence of educational and political interests, observing that many religious educators were ‘content’ to ‘comply with seemingly benign political agendas that, to put it crudely, have provided a post-9/11 boon for their subject’ (Gearon, 2013: 130). New ‘Cultural’ Racism To understand these political and epistemic shifts, consideration must be given to the relationship between neoliberalism and the ‘post racial’ condition (Goldberg, cited in Kapoor, Kalra & Rhodes, 2013: 16). The post racial, Goldberg argues, is neoliberal because it focuses on the individual and individualises responsibility, ‘it renders individuals accountable for their own actions…not their groups’ (Goldberg, cited in Kapoor, Kalra & Rhodes, 2013: 17), thus displacing responsibility for racial discrimination to the individual as opposed to social or structural inequalities that government is mandated to remove. In this neoliberal post-racial imaginary, racism becomes a mere ‘anomaly…an irritating residue to be gotten over as quickly as possible’ (Goldberg, 2013: 18). In the post racial, old biological racisms are superseded, but by no means erased, as religion and culture become the markers of racialised difference, ‘it is the cultural norms, values, traditions and lifestyles of outsiders which are now held to be problematic, rather than physiognomy’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 49). The events of 9/11 in New York, the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) and the 7/7 bombings in London were seismic in terms of the new post-racial cultural racism, as Kapoor and Kalra argue, As the turn of the twenty-first century marked a significant shift in geopolitical frameworks, namely from communism to Islamism as the target enemy of the West, together with the advancement of neoliberalism on a global level, so the politics of racisms in Britain entered a new moment…the 2001 riots in northern towns…the 9/11 attacks on the US came

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to denote a defining moment for the re-framing of race –relations policy in Britain. (Kapoor & Kalra, 2013: 1, cited in Kapoor, Kalra & Rhodes, 2013)

What had begun in the 1980s in the form of conservative cultural restorationism received new energy and legitimation in the post-9/11 context as Lentin and Titley argue, the twenty-first-century political context is a terrain of neoliberal ‘reclamation’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 13). But this reclamation of the political and educational multi-cultural terrain, once tantalisingly in reach through the concessions of the Swann report and the pedagogical sophistication of RE theorists such as Jackson and Wright, has come at a price. Whilst multiculturalism is itself a contested and problematic construction, and despite all the charges of paternalism and soft assimilation, ‘for racialized minorities, multiculturalism as governance and as a board coagulation of public values and aspirations, has…made many societies nicer and fairer places to live’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 14). The cultural racisms operating through FBVs place the blame and responsibility for the death of multiculturalism on minorities. The objectives of this post-racial racism are achieved through a type of metonymical magical thinking Lentin and Titley refer to as ‘reverse colonialism’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 55), exemplified in white backlash tropes found in the writing of journalists such as Melanie Philips who portrayed London as an ethnic colony and Rod Liddle, Sun newspaper columnist who declared that Muslims ‘Killed multiculturalism’ (Liddle, cited in Lentin & Titley, 2011: 18). Lentin & Titley argue this discourse of cultural racism amounts to the naturalisation of ‘an immutable entity termed Muslims’ who have become the metonymy for ‘bad diversity’ and ‘undesirable nonWestern migration’, the wedge that hinders social cohesion (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 29–30). This post-9/11 shift in politics finds its expression in education through the Prevent and FBVs requirements which are designed to inculcate shared values, ‘brought into relief by the identification of those who do not possess them and must be cultivated and coerced to respect them’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 14). The post-multicultural social and political landscape is the site of ‘liberal re-assertiveness’ which argues that multiculturalism is a permissive form of apologetic relativism which has come at the expense of ‘shared values’ and a ‘commitment to liberty of expression, women’s rights and sexual freedom’ (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 13). The post-multicultural post-racial moment has reneged on the egalitarian

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possibilities hinted at in the Swann report, returning to a model of liberalism that is suspicious of religion and unable to accommodate the claims of religious citizens within its polity. The classical liberalism of the enlightenment, as Parekh argues, was premised on a type of moral monism that elevates similarities over differences acting in concert with colonialism to provide its ideological justification by offering liberty, individualism and rationality to the peoples it enslaved and colonised. Parekh’s characterisation of the liberal discourse of colonialism could equally apply as a description of the ideological mission of the War on Terror and its enactments through social and education policies. RE in the Post Racial The muscular liberal post-multicultural policy environment poses a particular dilemma for RE. Because the subject matter of RE is religion, including nonliberal worldviews and beliefs, teachers of RE are immediately faced with the tension between fulfilment of their statutory duties and fair representation of the religions they are required to teach. Of the moves available to teachers one option is to teach liberal versions of the religions, reconstructions, adhering to the binaries of good and bad diversity, but the exclusions which follow constitute an impoverishment of both the curriculum and democracy, as Parekh argues, The secularist requirement that citizens should abstract away their religious beliefs is…unacceptable…and violates the principle of equal citizenship… (Parekh, 2006: 324)

The compatibility of Islam with Western values is at the core of the debate about multiculturalism in education, as Modood argues, ‘Muslims have become central to the merits and demerits of multiculturalism as a public policy in western Europe’ (Modood, 2011: 4), but this discourse reveals a ‘certain blindness’ which betrays a liberal ‘secularist bias’ (Modood, 2011: 27). Both Modood and Parekh acknowledge the post-Reformation modus vivendi but argue that it needs radical rethinking in the current juncture because it puts religious groups, especially Muslims outside unified, hegemonic, national public culture and ‘multiculturalism as a civic or policy idea’ (Modood, 2011: 30). Modood argues for a progressive reassessment of multiculturalism which addresses secularist blindness

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operating through the discourses of post-9/11 post-multicultural policy. He states, Accommodation of religion is not primarily about conscience, belief and faith…it can be about institutionalizing respect for different faith communities, based on the recognition that civil peace and other civic purposes require organized religions to be governmental interlocutors and partners in a routinized, institutional way. (Modood, 2011: 30)

The political and civic accommodation of religion in Modood’s reconstruction of multiculturalism for the twenty-first century necessarily requires the abandonment of the liberal moral monism of shared values and civic nationalism because it demands the forging of new and positive relationships with marginalised religious minorities, especially Islam. For Modood the answer to the current crisis of multiculturalism is not less multiculturalism, but more multiculturalism, but a multiculturalism that is not the straw man defined by post-race politics and civic nationalism (Modood, 2014). Modood’s answer is a multiculturalism based on the politics of positive difference, which repudiates the monism of shared values, through its commitment to the ‘transformation of difference into something for which civic respect can be won’ (Modood, 2011: 41). Modood’s vision goes beyond simply supporting difference, but envisages a multiculturalism that acts as a reformer, as opposed to a threat to national identity. He argues for a multiculturalism that can turn negative and stigmatised identities into ‘a positive feature of the societies they are now part of’ (Modood, 2011: 41), and this process would be twoway requiring recognition that, a ‘programme of racial and multicultural equality is not possible today without a discussion of the merits and limits of secularism…secularism is no longer “off limits”’ (Modood, 2011: 62). What is needed is ‘a careful analysis of…the public-private boundary’ (Modood, 2011: 72) if the cause of multicultural equality and inclusivity is to be advanced. Modood’s argument for an inclusive and self-critical multi-cultural polity is reflected in Parekh’s analysis of the relationships between politics, religion and free speech in modern liberal democracies. Parekh argues that the secular liberal strategy of ignoring religious and cultural difference is politically counterproductive because ‘religion is a fact of social life’ and ‘no state can remain indifferent to it’ (Parekh, 2006: 327). To absorb religious difference through governmental strategies such as community

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cohesion or shared values can only lead to resistance and to a sense that deeply held religious and moral commitments have been violated. Parekh, like Modood, argues from the position that religious citizens have much to contribute to political life, citing the anti-slavery movement and the religious fervour which drove the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements in the US and South Africa as examples. Like Modood, Parekh argues that in a critical multicultural society religion provides a ‘valuable counterweight to the state, nurturing sensibilities and values the latter ignores or suppresses’ (Parekh, 2006: 328). The political case for the contribution of education and RE to a multicultural society Parekh argues are strong. RE, he states, brings religion into the public domain and, ‘once we accept religion as one of the several respectable languages of political life, it is essential that future citizens should understand how a religious person thinks and reasons’ (Parekh, 2006: 331–332). The problem facing RE in England and Wales since the introduction of community cohesion policies, Prevent and FBV, is that the very medium through which those nuanced and open, agonistic debates about the social and political reality of religion have been subject to a bewildering range of political imperatives, ‘too many expectations’, with too few resources (Conroy et al., 2013: 41). Conroy et al.’s detailed ethnographic 2012 study ‘Does RE work?’ found that RE is at risk of becoming the vehicle for civic values and a bland curriculum for tolerance, as defined by the liberal and secular imperatives of government counter-terror policy. Conroy et al.’s critique of instrumental civic virtue RE connects to Parekh and Modood’s calls for the inclusion of religious citizens and recognition of their claims. Conroy et al., much like Modood and Parekh, argue that instrumental multicultural RE for tolerance runs the risk of failing to achieve its aims by presenting inauthentic ‘flimsy account of religious beliefs…disconnected from their theological and spiritual origins, at once making the other appear strange and without understanding’ (Conroy et al., 2013: 120), which amounts to a ‘failure to engage with the epistemic challenge of religion’ (Conroy et al., 2013: 124). Modood and Parekh’s visions for a critical multiculturalism through inclusion of the contributions of religiously minded citizens echoes Conroy et al.’s conclusions about the utilisation of RE for civic agendas. Conroy, like Modood and Parekh, argues for a committed pluralism as opposed to the political version of ‘good diversity’ expressed by government frameworks promoting an RE for tolerance. Conroy argues that

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when RE practice actively engages with the difficult and the dissonant aspects of the relationship between religion and society by acknowledging, ‘difference, complexity and change, enabling diverse groups to work together to realize a common good without putting aside their fundamental character…such pedagogies…act as midwife to the effective integration of social and civic aims’ (Conroy et al., 2013: 129). Conroy et al. advocate a ‘pedagogy of encounter’, informed by a ‘committed pluralism’ as opposed to a ‘pretended neutrality’ which takes ‘the reality of deeply held individual and cultural beliefs’ seriously, ‘without reducing religion to bland civic entailments’ (Conroy et al., 2013: 129). The contrast between Modood, Parekh and Conroy et al.’s dialogical and reflexive committed pluralism and the racially coded messages of Chief OfSTED inspector Amanda Spielman’s 2018 ‘Ties that Bind’ (Spielman, 2018) speech are striking. The speech opens with references to the uneven distribution of immigrant populations and recently arrived families whose children use ‘another language at home’ and proceeds to warn of the dangers of segregation and the threat this poses to integration. The speech refers to the dangers of tribalism, makes an obscure reference to ‘poorly managed economic dislocation’, the growth of the far-right and Islamist extremists who ‘prey on a sense of isolation and alienation in some minority communities’ (Spielman, 2018). Spielman positions education as the vehicle for ‘cohesion and integration’ stating that ‘The work of schools in promoting British values sits at the heart of that strategy’ (Spielman, 2018). In Spielman’s defensive vision of a polarised Britain, under threat by the ideological forces of illiberal religious fundamentalism and right-wing extremism, religious education is harnessed to help children’s understanding of diversity and ‘understand where values overlap and where they diverge’ (Spielman, 2018). The theme of Spielman’s speech is civic integration around shared values and RE is positioned as a vehicle for the mission of integration as opposed to an educational endeavour capable of engaging with the epistemic challenge of religion. In the ties that bind, education becomes the site in which a neoliberal governmental agenda sets the terms for admissible citizenship, belonging and what counts as good and bad diversity. The disciplinary and biopolitical agenda at work in this speech and the shared values discourse is made clear when Spielman’s claim to create a space ‘in which minority beliefs, lifestyles and cultures can exist freely and in harmony’ is juxtaposed with reports of OfSTED inspectors questioning Muslim school girls about their rights to wear the Hijab (Yousuf, 2018).

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As Yousuf argues, the brief of OfSTED appears to have extended beyond that of education regulator to regulator of religion, but in a way that risks marginalising peaceful religious communities and fails to engage with the sort of deliberative democracy government purports to promote. For Abbas, these governmental discourses are ‘a return to assimilationist thinking’ (Abbas, 2011: 107), and this is the paradoxical site occupied by the teachers in this study. Ghassan Hage argues that the political backlash against multiculturalism is an expression of Western governments’ recognition that it is no longer able to carry out its governmental functions in the current geopolitical context. Multiculturalism as a governmental technology has reached its limits because it is unable to ‘interpellate cultural subjects’ (Hage, in Ivison, (ed.) 2016: 235). From the perspective of Hage’s argument, the logics operating through FBVs, Prevent and Spielman’s mission of integration are a change in governmental strategy where it has come ‘face-to-face’ with, ‘the ungovernable’, which is embodied ‘in the figure of the Muslim immigrant’. Although writing in the Australian context, Hage makes reference to the UK and his arguments apply equally to the British context. Hage argues that the encounter with the unassimilable ‘ungovernable’ subjects of the post-9/11 and post-Brexit Britain, heralds ‘a dead end for an existing form of governmentality’ (Hage, in Ivison, (ed.) 2016: 236). This is nothing short of an ‘event’, Hage suggests. The 2001 riots, the terror attacks of 7/7 and the Trojan horse incident, have ‘put Muslims outside the realm of multicultural governmentality, because multiculturalism was always about finding a space for the culture of the Other in so far as this culture does not claim a sovereignty over itself that clashes with the laws of the nation’ (Hage, in Ivison, (ed.) 2016: 242). Hage’s analysis goes straight to the dilemma faced by teachers of RE because religion because religious and secular governmental truth claims are in competition, giving rise to the question how does one teach about religion when your substantive subject matter is the ungovernable and the un-British? The educational dilemmas created by these tensions are clearly demonstrated in Chapters 7 and 8 which bear testimony to the fragility of the multicultural modus vivendi as it plays out in the RE classroom.

Conclusion This chapter has mapped the journey from the liberal hour of the 1960s to the pluralism of the Swan report and the golden age of RE to the exclusionary civic nationalism of Spielman’s mission of integration. The

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discursive shift from the multiculturalism of Swan to FBVs appears to signify a break in policy making. Parker and Freathy (2012) note that the concessions made in Plowden, Swan and the multi-faith phenomenological RE didn’t go far enough, leaving the hegemony of Christianity in the RE curriculum unchallenged, but in the wider context of the educational politics of the domestic War on Terror, the evidence for a shift in governmental strategy to a governmentality of danger and unease is clear, as this chapter and Chapters 1 and 2 have demonstrated. Cameron’s public disavowal of multiculturalism and the politicisation of multiculturalism as a ‘failed experiment’ has allowed government to order and explain ‘anxieties concerning migration, globalization and the sociopolitical transformations’ it has wrought through invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The next chapter asks what critical tools and frames are available to researchers and activists investigating and interrogating the political and educational incitements of the policy agendas that produced FBV and Prevent and incorrigible binaries of the post-multicultural education environment.

References Abbas, T. (2011). Islamic Radicalism and Multicultural Politics. Routledge. Bates, D. (1996). Christianity, Culture and Other Religions (Part 2): F.H.Hilliard, Ninian Smart and the 1988 Education Reform Act. British Journal of Religious Education, 18(2), 85–102. Cameron, D. (2011). PM’s Speech at Munich Security Conference. https://www. gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference Central Advisory Council for Education (England). (1967). Children and Their Primary Schools. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/plo wden/plowden1967-1.html Chin, R. (2017). The Crises of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History. Princeton University Press. Commission on the Future of Multi Ethnic Britain. (2000). The Future of MultiEthnic Britain. The Parekh Report. Profile Books. Conroy, J., Lundie, D., Davis, R., Baumfield, V., Barnes, P., Gallagher, T., Lowden, K., Bourque, N., & Wenell, K. (2013). Does Religious Education Work? A Multi-dimensional Investigation. Bloomsbury. Copley, T. (2014). Teaching Religion: Sixty Years of Religious Education in England and Wales. Exeter University Press.

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Cox, E. (2018). Changing Aims in Religious Education. Routledge Library Editions: Education and Religion. DCSF. (2007). Guidance on the Duty to Promote Community Cohesion. https:// dera.ioe.ac.uk/8108/ DCSF. (2010). Religious Education in English Schools: Non-statutory Guidance. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/religious-education-gui dance-in-english-schools-non-statutory-guidance-2010 DfE. (1994). Circular Number 1/94. Religious Education and Collective Worship. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dfe/circular1-94.pdf. Education Reform Act. (1988). http://www.educationengland.org.uk/docume nts/acts/1988-education-reform-act.html Erricker, C., & Erricker, J. (2000). Reconstructing Religious. Routledge. Farrar, M., & Valli, Y. (2012). Multiculturalism in the UK: A Contested Discourse. In S. Robinson & P. Wetherly (Eds.), Islam in the West: Key Issues in Multiculturalism. Palgrave. Foucault, M. (1991). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Penguin. Freathy, R., & Parker, S. (2015). Prospects and Problems for Religious Education in England, 1967–1970: Curriculum Reform in Political Context. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 36(1), 5–30. Gates, B. (Ed.). (2016). Religion and Nationhood: Insider and Outsider Perspectives on Religious Education in England. Mohr Siebeck. Gearon, L. (2013). The Counter Terrorist Classroom: Religion, Education and Security. Religious Education, 108(2), 129–147. Goldberg, D. (2013). The Postracial Contemporary. In N. Kapoor, V. Kalra & J. Rhodes (Eds.), The State of Race. Palgrave Macmillan. Goldman, R. (2018). Readiness for Religion. Routledge Library Editions: Education and Religion. Goldman, R. (2022). Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. Routledge. Hage, G. (2016). Intercultural Relations at the Limits of Multicultural Governmentality. In D. Ivison (Ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism. Routledge. Jackson, R. (2004). Rethinking Religious Education and Plurality. Issues in Diversity and Pedagogy. Routledge. Kapoor, N., & Kalra, V. (2013). Introduction: The State of Race. In N. Kapoor, V. Klara & J. Rhodes (Eds.), The State of Race. Palgrave Macmillan. Lentin, A., & Titley, G. (2011). The Crises of Multiculturalism. Zed Books. Modood, T. (2011). Multiculturalism. Polity. Modood, T. (2014). Understanding ‘Death of Multiculturalism’ Discourse Means Understanding Multiculturalism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 9(3), 201–211.

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OfSTED. (2007). Making Sense of Religion. http://www.educationengland.org. uk/documents/pdfs/2007-ofsted-religion.pdf Osserwaarde, M. (2014). The National Identities of the ‘Death of Multiculturalism’ Discourse in Western Europe. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 93(3), 173–189. Parekh, B. (1999). Political Theory and the Multicultural Society. Radical Philosophy, 95, 27–32. Parekh, B. (2006). Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Palgrave. Parker, S., & Freathy, R. (2012). Ethnic Diversity, Christian Hegemony and the Emergence of Multi-faith Religious Education in the 1970s. History of Education, 41(3), 381–404. Priestley, J. G. (2006). Agreed Syllabuses: Their History and Development in England and Wales 1944–2004. In M. de Souza, K. Engebretson, G. Durka, R. Jackson & A. McGrady (Eds.), International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education. Part 2 Springer. QCA. (2004). Religious Education. The National Non Statutory Framework. http://www.mmiweb.org.uk/publications/re/NSNF.pdf Runnymede Trust. (1985). ‘Education for All’: A Summary of the Swann Report on the Education of Ethnic Minority Children. The Runnymede Trust. Schools Council. (1971). Religious Education in Secondary Schools (Working Paper 36). Evans/Methuen. Slack, J. (2006, July 7). Why the Dogma of Multiculturalism Has Failed Britain. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-394631/ Why-dogma-multiculturalism-failed-Britain.html Smart, N. (1968). Secular Education & the Logic of Religion. Faber and Faber. Spielman, A. (2018). Amanda Spielman’s Speech to the Policy Exchange Think Tank. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/amanda-spielmansspeech-to-the-policy-exchange-think-tank The Dearing Review. (1994). The National Curriculum and Its Assessment. Final Report. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1994/dea ring1994.html Tomlinson, S. (2008). Race and Education: Policy and Politics in Britain. McGraw-Hill International. UK Parliament. (1965). Race Relations Act 1965. https://www.parliament.uk/ about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/collec tions1/race-relations-act-1965/race-relations-act-1965/ UK Parliament. (1968). Race Relations Act 1968. https://www.parliament.uk/ about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/collec tions1/1968-race-relations/1968-race-relations-act/ Vertovec, S., & Wessendorf, S. (2010). The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses. Taylor & Francis.

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Wright, A. (2004). The Justification of Compulsory Religious Education: A Response to Professor White. British Journal of Religious Education., 26(2), 165–174. Yousuf, K. (2018, July 5). OfSTED Isn’t a Regulator of Religion. It Should End Its Campaign Against Headscarves. The Independent. https://inews.co. uk/opinion/comment/ofsted-headscarves-hijab-141069

CHAPTER 5

Research on Fundamental British Values

Introduction Chapters 2–4 outline the emergence of FBVs, their ‘eruption’, their ‘leap from the wings’, of New Labour policy ‘to centre stage’ as the bedrock of Coalition and Conservative civic education. Foucault argued that the role of genealogy is to record the ‘endlessly repeated play of dominations’ (Foucault, 1991: 85) operating through policy to uproot the ‘traditional foundations’ of the rationalisations offered in speeches, policy texts and curriculum frameworks. Knowledge, he argues, ‘is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’ (Foucault, 1991: 88). The aim of this chapter is to examine the body of critical literature written in response to FBVs. From the Foucauldian perspective of this study, a literature review fulfills several purposes. It offers researchers a range of theoretical tools to short circuit and disqualify the racial and disciplinary codes operating through FBVs, it makes visible ‘all the discontinuities that cross us’ (Foucault, 1991: 95) in the paradoxical form of an illiberal liberalism that excludes and divides. In doing so the literature undermines politicians’ appeals to a golden thread of British values as the civic bedrock of the nation. Genealogical critique does not discover the roots of our British identity, but ‘commits itself to its dissipation’ (Foucault, 1991: 95). The critical literature traces the uneven and often confused ways in which teachers have interpreted and enacted FBVs in their highly localised © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_5

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and situated contexts. This review addresses literature published between 2010 and 2021 encompassing New Labour’s policies on Britishness and shared values, through to early enactments of FBVs under the Coalition and later studies that evaluate the ways teachers have interpreted and accommodated Prevent and FBV. Literature based on grounded empirical studies of teachers draws from those at the sharp end of policy. Their narratives are subjugated knowledges (Foucault, 1980) that ‘play havoc’ (Marshall, cited in Ball, 2012: 19) with policy makers’ neatly articulated rationales. Genealogy as ‘descent’ enables researchers to gain insights into the ‘rich empirical underlife’ of policy as it is lived, struggled with, and enacted. This review is organised around the main themes and theoretical approaches adopted in the literature to analyse FBVs policy. The first section of the review considers papers which form the majority of the studies: qualitative empirical studies of teachers’ enactments and interpretations of FBVs. The review begins chronologically with publications that addressed Britishness in New Labour education policy before moving on to literature produced after 2011 when FBVs were introduced by the Coalition government. The next section addresses papers where allegiance to a particular methodology is adopted and forms the interpretive framework, such as post structuralism, post-colonial theory and critical pedagogy. In the final section I consider papers which highlight some of the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the illiberal liberalism of the FBV requirement. New Labour: Britishness, Citizenship, Community Cohesion and Shared Values Uvanney Maylor’s (2010) paper ‘Notions of diversity, British identities and citizenship belonging’ is one of the first to address the discourse of Britishness. Maylor’s study was designed to support the work of the Diversity and Citizenship Curriculum Review Group, led by Sir Keith Ajegbo. Maylor’s prescient critique goes straight to the core of the shared values discourse as it was emerging under New Labour. She highlights the lack of any consensus on what it means to be British, arguing that reductive constructions of Britishness cannot accommodate students with multiple religious and ethnic identities who do not share in the imaginaries of shared White British heritage. Maylor concludes that citizenship lessons on British diversity will not encourage pupils’ anti-racist

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understanding, arguing that it is ‘racism together with other experiences of rejection and/or acceptance within local British communities will undoubtedly influence perceptions and understandings about being British’ (Maylor, 2010: 250). Another early study is Jerome and Clemitshaw’s investigation of trainee teachers’ understanding of Britishness in the History and citizenship national curriculum (Jerome & Clemitshaw, 2012). Quantitative and qualitative data collected over the 2008–2009 period revealed ‘deep uncertainty’ about the teaching of Britishness. Jerome and Clemitshaw found that the trainee teachers were sceptical about ‘propaganda’ type messages and conceptualised Britishness in terms of diversity, and intercultural understanding, concluding that the pre-service teachers were resistant to civic nationalist agendas. Keddie’s (2013) paper ‘The politics of Britishness, multiculturalism, schooling and social cohesion’ similarly explores the impact of New Labour community and social cohesion discourses on teachers’ understandings of the relationships between Britishness and diversity in a large multicultural London comprehensive school. Keddie observes verisimilitude between the views expressed by the teachers she interviewed and the Cantle report which positioned minority groups as unassimilable. Like Maylor, Keddie concludes that Britishness is racialised as a signifier of social cohesion. Keddie argues that conceptualisations of Britishness must be broadened to focus on ‘ways of relating that reflect a sense of belonging, common humanity and solidarity’ (Keddie, 2013: 553). Fundamental British Values in Policy and Practice Empirical Studies: Teacher Interpretations and Enactments Once introduced in 2011, FBVs began to generate a critical response. One of the first studies to directly address the inclusion of FBVs in the teachers’ standards was Smith’s (2012) paper ‘A critique of the teaching standards in England (1984–2012): discourse of equality and maintaining the status quo’. Smith highlights the discursive shift in the 2011 standards, stating, that unlike previous sets of professional standards, the 2011 standards were ‘overtly assimilationist’ (Smith, 2012: 442). Smith argues that FBVs created an environment where some teachers might ‘feel justified in their quest for the development of Britishness in pupils … assuming that some are in deficit for not embodying Britishness enough’ (Smith, 2012: 443). Smith also points out that the security

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context could lead teachers to assume their Muslim pupils carried more deficit than others. Smith argues for the introduction of critical whiteness approaches, however, even at this early stage in the evolution of FBVs she acknowledges this would be a ‘tall order’ (Smith, 2012: 443). First published online in BERJ in 2016, Elton-Chalcraft et al.’s study ‘To promote or not to promote FBVs’ is one of the first empirical investigations of teachers’ responses to FBVs. The study was the outcome of a BERA SIG network meeting and led to further significant empirical work. In the BERJ study, data was collected over the 2012–2013 period from a total of 450 undergraduate and post-graduate pre-service teachers, to gain insights into their views of Britishness and fundamental British values. The student teachers completed an online questionnaire asking them about their values in teaching, what they considered to be British values and what they thought of the FBV requirement. Responses to the question on British values ranged from stereotypical cultural stereotypes such as patience, and respect for the monarchy, to more complex and nuanced insights which viewed British values as a construct. Responses to the question on the rationale for FBVs fell into two distinct categories, firstly, views of FBVs as a strategy to ‘regain patriotism’ and secondly as a form of ‘veiled racism’ (Elton-Chalcraft et al., 2016: 40). In their analysis Elton-Chalcraft et al. argue that responses fell into two distinct categories. Firstly, those who ‘uncritically’ accept FBVs and demonstrate ‘naïve and unsophisticated notions of Britishness’, and secondly, those who saw FBVs as othering and racialising, in ‘an attempt to centre whiteness’ (Elton-Chalcraft et al., 2016: 41). Elton-Chalcraft et al.’s conclusion sets out the implications of the FBV requirement that clearly recognises the disciplinary practices at work in the discourse. The cost of teacher educators ‘playing it safe’ and failing to adopt a critical perspective due to ‘fear’ of the negative consequences of an OfSTED inspection are stark, they argue, ‘without the opportunity to critique what it is to be British within the context of equality and diversity … the majority of student teachers will struggle to develop a sense of belonging among some BME pupils’ (Elton-Chalcraft et al., 2016: 45). The BERA SIG symposia that led to Elton-Chalcraft et al.’s study also resulted in the first special edited collection of research papers on FBV published by the Journal of Education for Teaching, JET, in 2016. The first two papers are considered in the next section as they adopt specific theoretical approaches, but the third paper by Maylor, ‘I’d worry

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about how to teach it’ (Maylor, 2016) British values in English classrooms’ argues for ITE as space to prepare student teachers to develop their understanding of Britishness as multi-ethnic and culturally diverse. She quotes senior teachers who question political constructions of shared values and reflects on the extent to which they will be able to help newly qualified teachers navigate the demands of FBV whilst promoting an inclusive British identity through their practice. Maylor’s paper is followed by Farid Panjwani’s small-scale investigation of Muslim teachers’ views of part 2 of the Teachers Standards. The study is notable because it was the first empirical examination of Muslim educationalists’ perspectives. Panjwani notes the centrality of British Muslims to the debate because of the reliance of British values upon the ‘incompatibility thesis’ and the ‘supposed binary opposition between Islam and the West’ (Panjwani, 2016: 330). 39 participants, all Muslim, working in community schools, responded to Panjwani’s questionnaire. Panjwani’s findings reveal the disruptive impact of FBVs on teachers who perceive no conflict between their religious values and British values but are aware that government and media discourses position them as suspect. Panjwani uses John Rawl’s theory of overlapping consensus, to interpret his findings. 27 of the 39 respondents reflected overlapping consensus, stating that ‘there was either no incompatibility or there was compatibility’ between Islamic and British values (Panjwani, 2016: 333). Others were more critical, pointing out the tensions between FBV and the actions of the British military in the middle east. One participant stated, ‘Fundamental British values? Do they really exist? To me the real British values seem to be … invading other countries and killing women, children and other noncombatants’ (337). Some teachers were concerned that they might be utilised as ‘anti-extremist watch dogs’ (337), with one teacher writing, ‘As a Muslim I am both suspected of extremism by the state and expected to be a guardian against it’ (337). Panjwani concludes that, ‘The sooner the securitisation approach is replaced by an educational approach the better’ (Panjwani, 2016: 338). Lynne Revell and Hazel Bryan’s paper, ‘Calibrating fundamental British values; how head teachers are approaching appraisal in the light of the Teachers Standards 2012, Prevent and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015’ (Revell & Bryan, 2016) investigated Head teachers’ interpretations of FBVs for the purposes of teacher appraisal. The introduction of FBVs and new performance management measures, they argue, act to intensify the managerial gaze on teachers within the

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new arena of counter-terrorism and security. Drawing from Baumann’s concept of liquid modernity, they argue that the dynamic and unstable nature of education policy and practice gives rise to a highly anxious environment in which school leaders have no vision ‘except to survive’ (Revell & Bryan, 2016: 346). It was clear from their findings that school leaders were dealing with policy initiatives in a pragmatic fashion focussing more on the requirements to actively promote FBVs rather than addressing teacher noncompliance with part 2 of the standards. When challenged by Revell & Bryan’s questions about identifying teacher behaviours that could be interpreted as undermining FBVs, no school leader could provide a ‘detailed answer’ (Revell & Bryan, 2016: 349). However, they did find that ‘school leaders … were fearful of the consequences of teachers in their school being politically active or of voicing opinions in class that were radical in tone’ (Revell & Bryan, 2016: 351), concluding that they had ‘little in the way of … sophisticated language with which to discuss the undermining of British values and, as such, an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty characterised their viewpoints’ (Revell & Bryan, 2016: 352). The final paper in the collection considers values education in the northern Irish context. FBVs are not a requirement of the Northern Ireland curriculum, and the authors argue that the sectarian divide is such that, ‘no Northern Ireland education minister … could assert that encouraging pupils to espouse exclusively British values should be part of the school curriculum. To do so would be to provoke a massive political reaction’ (McCully & Clarke, 2016: 360). The JET publication proved to be a highly popular and downloaded publication setting the context for further critical debate and the papers that followed it. Sant and Hanley’s paper, ‘Political assumptions underlying pedagogies of national education: The case of student teachers teaching ‘British values’ in England (2018) offers an empirical investigation of 11 student specialist English teachers’ views of FBV examining how their political understanding of national identity influenced their pedagogical interpretations. Sant and Handley uncover the teachers’ political assumptions revealed by their pedagogical orientations of ‘avoiding, rejecting, promoting or problematizing national identities’ (Sant & Hanley, 2018: 320). They describe avoidance as a strategy employed by the teachers in their sample who identify with a traditional white British identity and relate Britishness to ‘tradition, kinship … and ethnicity’ (Sant & Hanley, 2018: 321). Avoidance of debates about

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national identity stems from a primordialist identification with a powerful racial norm, which for the avoider, requires no discussion and stands opposed to ‘non-traditional’ British citizens (Sant & Hanley, 2018: 327). Similarly, the white majority ‘promoters’ of FBVs demonstrated uncontroversial cultural/civic understandings of Britishness in terms of being born here, silly traditions, tea, being friendly and being polite (Sant & Hanley, 2018). In contrast the student teachers who rejected FBVs did so on the basis that the values were not uniquely British with connotations of ethnic superiority, patriotism, and narrow nationalism. The teachers in this category were more willing to ‘promote alternative forms of citizenship (i.e., local, global), rather than British values’ (Sant & Hanley, 2018: 330). Others problematised FBVs and used the requirement to promote FBVs as the means by which they problematised rather than promote British values. These student teachers questioned essentialist ethno-symbolist constructs of Britishness, regarding Britishness as an open identity as one student remarked, ‘I don’t think there’d be a shared definition for Britishness, I think it’s all a personal choice’ (Sant & Hanley, 2018: 332). In alignment with the other studies of student teachers’ views, Sant and Hanley concur that teacher education has a key role to play in enabling students to question the requirements of FBVs concluding that if the student teachers grapple with the issue of national identity, then they might ‘create opportunities for their students to do the same’ (Sant & Hanley, 2018: 335). Bamber et al. (2019) paper ‘Beginning teacher agency in the enactment of fundamental British values: multi method case study’ (Bamber et al., 2019) examines enactments of the FBVs requirements by beginning primary school teachers. The study provides empirical evidence of the influence of context on the ways in which the teachers enacted FBVs. The study followed 12 beginning teachers working in a sample of six primary schools in partnership with the author’s ITE institution. The preservice teachers had undertaken a module that involved input from a local non-governmental organisation committed to decolonising and critical, radical approaches to education, with the aim of ‘integrating curriculum with community engagement’ (Bamber et al., 2019: 753). Bamber et al.’s findings have implications for understanding beginning teacher ontology and agency, as a key outcome of their investigation is that where schools and ITE providers offer, ‘deliberative spaces for the reinterpretation of

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policy enactment, there is evidence of a concomitant increase in agentive reflection by beginning teachers’ (Bamber et al., 2019: 756). Jane McDonnell’s (2020) paper, ‘How do you promote British values when values education is your profession? Policy enactment of FBV amongst teachers of RE, Citizenship Education and Personal, Social and Health Education in England’ highlights the tensions and the dilemmas faced by teachers of subjects concerned with values education when required to accommodate the demands of the FBV requirement. McDonnell emphasises the tensions entailed by the accommodation of FBVs in subjects with a pluralistic ethos, such as RE. She notes the relationship between FBVs and ‘character education’, ‘which involves the cultivation of specific moral virtues and incorporates the promotion of traits such as ‘grit’ and “resilience”’ (McDonnell, 2020: 379). Five teachers in a major northern conurbation formed McDonnell’s sample. In line with Bamber et al.’s paper, McDonnell’s study highlights teachers’ agency as they negotiate the highly regulated constraints of the curricular frameworks they are required to implement. A strength of her analysis is the focus on life history, for example, one teacher, Rebecca, drew from her ‘personal history of activism in relation to gender and sexuality in her interpretation of the policy’ (McDonnell, 2020: 384). Another teacher drew from her pedagogical knowledge of strategies taken from global citizenship education to translate policy that she felt had a ‘racist undertone’ (McDonnell, 2020: 386). McDonnell’s paper is a testament to the endless accommodations and reappropriation teachers make to remain compliant with government requirements and to meet the educational, personal, and social needs of the young people they serve. Vincent’s work, ‘Tea and the Queen’ (2019a) and ‘Cohesion, citizenship and coherence: schools’ responses to the British values policy’ (Vincent, 2019b) based on her Leverhulme Trust funded study (2016– 2019) draws from 56 interviews and 49 observations undertaken in nine case study schools, four primary and five secondaries, based primarily in Greater London. Vincent found that the promotion of FBVs in the case study schools revealed four main approaches, categorised as representing Britain, repackaging, relocating within school values and engagement with FBVs (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 23). Representing Britain, Vincent states, is reflected in posters and displays, often taking the form of ‘union jack- themed decoration’ (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 24). Repacking refers to the ways that nearly all of the schools absorbed FBVs into their existing activities. Relocation entailed a diffusion of FBVs through whole

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school ethos, such as its programmes for character education. Lastly, engagement with FBV reflects practice which took a critical approach to the values, for example, by ‘looking at the advantages and limitations of democracy’ (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 24). Vincent found the repackaging approach was a widespread practice functioning to ‘normalise’ FBVs by smoothing its ‘sharp nationalistic edges’ (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 24). Vincent comments on the ad hocery of delivery, driven by schools’ necessity to be OfSTED compliant, which she suggests is a reason for the ‘proliferation of union jack framed displays’ (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 25). She also notes how the translation of FBVs, is contingent on context. Vincent highlights the way ‘teacher perception’ of ‘pupils’ needs’, ‘led them to … gather in’ support for FBVs amongst the two main groups that teachers positioned as residing outside them—‘the white working classes and the potentially too- conservative Muslim populations’ (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 26). Vincent found that some teachers emphasised problems of insularity and prejudicial attitudes in their ‘white working class’ settings including instances of pupils conflating Muslims with terrorists (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 27). Vincent notes that most of the teachers she interviewed worked to mitigate the exclusionary effects of FBVs, but that attempts to generate civic understanding were undercut by the tendency to represent national identity through cultural tropes such as ‘tea and the Queen’ (Vincent, 2019a: 29). She concludes by suggesting that without a ‘critical engagement with notions of identity, belonging and citizenship, the risk remains that promoting FBV promotes an exclusivist approach to citizenship’ (Vincent, 2019a, 2019b: 29). Published in 2021, the special edition of the open access journal Prism is the most recent edited collection on FBV. The first paper in the collection, Bryan and Revell’s ‘School leadership and the civic nationalist turn: Towards a typology of leadership styles employed by head teacher in their enactment of the Prevent Duty and the promotion of fundamental British values’, investigates Senior Leaders’ interpretations of the requirements of Prevent and FBVs through leadership theory. Bryan and Revell draw from interviews with school leaders in forty-one primary schools and nineteen secondary settings. The data is revealing, highlighting tensions and contradictions entailed in education policy enactments. Many of the senior leaders interviewed by Bryan and Revell espoused a view of themselves as transactional leaders, ‘visibly affronted at the idea that an external agent could impose values on the school that had not been agreed by the community of the school’ (Bryan & Revell, 2021: 14). 75% of the

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respondents (Bryan & Revell, 2021: 43) expressed a style of leadership Bryan and Revell refer to as ‘stewardship’, presenting themselves as the ‘buffer between teachers and policy’ (Bryan & Revell, 2021: 15). However, when Bryan and Revell presented the school leaders with a series of counterfactual scenarios as examples of teachers undermining FBVs, the senior leaders’ responses revealed leadership styles that contradicted transactional approaches. When asked if a teacher who said they did not support the monarchy and whether a teacher who said that in some circumstances political violence was justified in the context of a classroom discussion most of the primary school leaders, ‘thought that both activities constituted undermining FBVs’. The smaller sample of secondary school leaders was more accommodating, but overall, Bryan and Revell’s finding revealed that school leaders’ interpretations were largely determined by concerns to protect the reputation of their school and relationships with parents and governors. Jerome, Liddle and Young’s paper, ‘Talking Tolerance: Being deliberative about fundamental British values’, explores ways in which FBVs requirements can be recalibrated in the secondary school classroom to create a more ‘deliberative’ environment for citizenship education. Data were collected in an 11–18 Church of England Academy, ‘with a sizeable Muslim minority’ in the north of England. A group of 14 students, aged 12–18 were asked to produce a draft resolution about religious freedom in their school. Students considered issues such as how to respond to religiously offensive remarks whilst maintaining freedom of speech. The Muslim students demonstrate a ‘situated pragmatism’ to navigate religious differences in a Christian setting. The most striking sequence in the data exemplifies what Jerome et al. refer to as ‘sympathy and the other’, noting that ‘one of the transformative effects of deliberative democracy is generated through … serious engagement … and this requires … the quality of sympathy’ (Jerome et al., 2021: 57). The students demonstrate recognition of the commonalities between faiths and sympathy for those students ‘who are questioning God’ (Jerome et al., 2021: 58), recommending a place for quiet reflection as an alternative to collective worship. Jerome et al. began their discussion by acknowledging the risks entailed by thoughtless ethno nationalist enactments of FBV. They take heart from the way the young people in the schools, ‘almost entirely avoid framing their discussion in an ethno cultural discourse …’ noting, ‘the discussions reflect a civic debate rather than a civic nationalist one’ (Jerome,

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et al., 2021: 58). They conclude that FBVs should be reframed within the tradition of critical citizenship education (Jerome, et al., 2021: 59). Taken together, the papers grouped in this section, provide valuable critical insights into the ways that teachers have translated and enacted the requirements of the FBVs policy. In the next section papers are considered which adopt specific theoretical perspectives which frame the policy as an expression of power and state racism. Post Structuralist Perspectives on Teacher Interpretations of FBVs The first paper in this category was published in the special edition of JET (2016). The paper ‘Why all of a sudden do we need to teach fundamental British values?’ (Farrell, 2016) is my examination of secondary RE pre-service teachers’ views of FBV and employs the Foucauldian analysis developed in this book. The interviews revealed the effects of the requirement on the Muslim teachers in the group who felt FBVs operated as a divisive racial Norm, reflecting Foucault’s characterisations of education as a site of normalising disciplinary power. All of the teachers in the group felt that the hegemonic policy requirements of FBVs conflicted with the pluralistic RE they wished to teach and expressed concern at the potential for ethno nationalistic misinterpretation of FBV. Bryan’s (2017) paper ‘Developing the political citizen: How teachers are navigating the statutory demands of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 205 and the Prevent Duty’ adopts a Foucauldian framework. Based on interviews with three senior school leaders Bryan utilises the concept of governmentality to argue that FBVs and Prevent enable the state to govern and regulate from a distance. All three ensured that their staff underwent and ‘exceeded’ Prevent training. None of the teachers questioned the legitimacy of Prevent and all three ‘adopted the Duty without question’ (Bryan, 2017: 223). Bryan concludes that these school leaders were taking on the role of the State to ‘normalise their school’s population behaviours’ and as governmentalised subjects the teachers were ‘self-regulating … permitting themselves to be both governed and govern’ (Bryan, 2017: 223). Published online in 2018 my co-authored paper with Lander, ‘We’re not British values teachers are we? Muslim teachers’ subjectivity and the governmentality of unease’, adopts a Foucauldian perspective and in common with Bryan, uses governmentality as a lens. Based on interviews with Muslim RE teachers, we found evidence of the chilling effects of

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the Prevent strategy and the confusion faced by teachers’ endeavouring to reconcile the statutory requirements of FBV with their pedagogical commitments to education for pluralism. An extended account of the interviews forms part of the material in Chapter 8, but the key point to emphasise in this review, is the way FBVs caused conflict for teachers forced to occupy the contradictory subject position of ‘suspect’ and instrument of state security. In an observation that exemplifies this governmentality of unease, one of the teachers, Adam reflected, ‘Maybe it goes back to George Bush’s original question … are you for us, or against us?’ (Farrell & Lander, 2018: 476). Published in the special edition of Prism, my paper ‘White man face, order words and deviance detectors: a Deleuzoguattarian analysis of fundamental British values’ (Farrell, 2021), offers a critical perspective based on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of difference and racism. Deleuze and Guattari argue that racism operates through assimilatory logics by establishing the degree of difference between subjects and the hegemonic racial norm they refer to as the ‘White man face’. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the standard to which all raced subjects is Western, European and, significantly, Christian. Deviant subjects who do not correspond to the normative standard set by the White man face are assimilated through technologies such as education, which operate through language, i.e., order words and deviance detectors, to establish the parameters of a socially admissible existence. Drawing from empirical data collected in interviews with teachers and students, I argue that FBVs operate as racial deviance detectors using Britishness as a transcendental signifier to which all raced subjectivities must conform. The data I present shows that for the Muslim students and teachers I interviewed, FBVs are experienced as a form of governmental surveillance, positioning them as suspect and ‘ones to watch’ (Farrell, 2021: 28). Post-Colonial and Critical Race Perspectives on FBVs The racial meanings of FBVs are recognised throughout the critical literature, giving rise to studies that have focused primarily on racial dimension through a variety of perspectives. Published in the JET special edition, Heather Smith’s study of pre-service teachers’ views, ‘Britishness as racist nativism; a case of the unnamed other’ situates the political and media discourse of Britishness within the analytic framework of racist nativism, defined as ‘intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its

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foreign connections’ (Smith, 2016: 300). Through an analysis of student responses to an audit of prior experience of ethnic and linguistic diversity, as a requirement of their PGCE programme, Smith identified uncritical compliance with FBV. A ‘them’ and ‘us’ binary emerged through comments such as ‘I think it is important to consider the way different cultures integrate into our society but also how accepting we are of them too’ (Smith, 2016: 309). Crawford’s (2017) paper, ‘Promoting fundamental British values in schools: a critical race perspective’ is one of the first papers to apply the frames of critical race theory to FBV offering a theoretical model for the adoption of a CRT analytic to problematise FBVs as an explicit expression of White power and supremacy. Crawford rephrases FBVs as ‘fundamentally (white) British values’ (Crawford, 2017: 199), arguing that the political claim that the values are British is ‘deeply troubling’ given that ‘Britain is a country founded upon colonialism, enslavement, and racism’ (Crawford, 2017: 199). FBVs are racially coded, she argues, citing Cameron’s claim that FBVs are as British as ‘Fish and chips’ as an example of a discourse designed to separate those perceived to ‘belong’ and those positioned as deficit. Muslims, she argues, positioned as the other, are the target of this policy. Crawford argues FBVs are a form of ‘relegitimised state racism’ (Crawford, 2017: 200), dangerously left in the hands of a white majority teaching force, likely to ‘inadvertently rely on imperialist constructions of Britishness’ to perpetuate the cultural supremacy associated with a British identity. British identity is contested, fluid and plural Crawford argues, and FBVs run the risk of excluding young people whose primary identification lies with their religious or cultural group (Crawford, 2017: 201). Crawford concludes that FBVs are a governmental racially biased prescription introduced to ‘treat’ the ‘supposed value deficit between the (white British) native over that of the non-native (Muslim other)’ in order to ‘reproduce and reinforce white hegemony’ through an assimilationist agenda (Crawford, 2017: 202). Papers by Winter (2018) and Winter and Mills (2018) offer further post-colonial critical interpretations of FBV and Prevent. Winter’s (2018) paper ‘Disrupting colonial discourses in the geography curriculum during the introduction of British Values policy in schools’ focusses on the contradictions in FBV policy through an analysis of the portrayal of Malawi in a geography textbook. At first sight, Winter argues, the textbook appears to contravene British values, but on further analysis, she concludes the textbook and FBVs are connected ‘through common

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colonial values’ (Winter, 2018: 456). The textbook was a well-known Geography text used in UK schools to prepare 13/14-year-old students for GCSE examinations. Winter asks whether the goal of promoting ‘tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions’ (Winter, 2018: 459) as outlined in the DfE guidance on the promotion of FBVs can be found in the textbook’s presentation of Malawi. The textbook portrayal of Malawi as deficit, Winter argues, is an example of geography’s imperial gaze, which divides the world along the lines that ‘West is Best’ where the only answer to Malawi’s under development is Western neoliberalism. Such portrayals feed into wider media and political discourses of xenophobia. FBVs in this context, exacerbate the West is Best binary because they are located within the wider discourse of anti-Muslim suspicion. What is at work in the textbook and FBVs, Winter concludes, is the normalisation of white supremacy through education. In her 2018 paper with Mills, Winter and Mills take up Foucault’s concept of the ‘ensemble’. The FBV ensemble ‘consists of policies, guidance/advice, politician’s speeches and tabloid news articles’ (Winter & Mills, 2018: 47). Winter and Mill’s focus on what they call the psychic life of BV policy, conceptualising Britishness as a psycho political imaginary. They argue that a ‘veiled and/or concealed’ racism operates through the FBV discourse to colonise the minds of teachers and students through a political fantasy ‘in a move that is amnesic of, and which therefore deflects, Britain’s violent colonial history and violently racialized present’ (Winter & Mills, 2018: 13). Drawing from Fanon, they argue that FBVs operate as a ‘psychic defence mechanism that protects and privileges whiteness’ in the War on Terror (Winter & Mills, 2018: 61). Interestingly both papers point out one of the most striking contradictions within FBVs policy, the contradiction between the claim that democracy is a British value and the Orwellian double speak of the texts and the speeches of the FBVs psy-security ensemble. In the 2018 paper, Winter uses Derrida to highlight the shifting play of words operating in FBV policy. Winter notes how DfE guidance on SMSC published in 2013 emphasises that where political issues are presented to pupils, they are offered as a ‘balanced presentation of opposing views’ (DfE, in Winter, 2018: 459), contrasting this earlier DfE text with the unfair presentation of Malawi in the geography textbook and the non-negotiable requirements of ‘British Values curriculum policy’ (Winter, 2018: 467). These contradictions are further evidenced in the speeches of one of the chief architects of FBVs in education, Michael Gove, who, in contradistinction

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to the BVs of respect for individual liberty and the rule of law called for ‘assassinations of terrorist suspects’ and a ‘temporary curtailment of liberties’ to oppose Islamism (Gove, cited in Winter & Mills, 2018: 56). Winter and Mills reinforce their point with reference to the systematic use of extraordinary extradition and the creation of states of exception by the British and US governments in their military campaign against political insurgents. Vincent’s observations of the banal nationalism at work in the representation of FBVs through cultural tropes is also reflected in Moncrieffe and Moncrieffe’s study, ‘An examination of imagery used to represent fundamental British values and British identity on primary school display boards’ (Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe, 2019). Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe analysed 27 primary school display boards and interviewed three primary school teachers to understand the role of FBV policy in producing portrayals of British identity. Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe found that more than 50 per cent of the images on the display boards could be classified as ‘cultural icons’, such as the Queen, Winston Churchill, a cup of tea, William Shakespeare and a red post box. Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe characterised these portrayals as ethno nationalist symbols ‘linked to an imperial past’ (Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe, 2019: 61). Similarly, they note the prevalence of images of mono cultural whiteness and evidence of othering or tokenism in the representation of minority ethnic groups, with one of their interviewees commenting that the ‘images of minority ethnic people have no clearly identifiable purpose’ (Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe, 2019: 63). Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe conclude that the images they analysed represented a white majority, ethnocentric, stereotypical British culture. Citing Gillborn they argue that uncritical enactment of FBVs requirements reproduce whiteness as normative, making this policy a ‘business as usual’ form of racism (Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe, 2019: 67). In Heather Smith’s contribution to the special edition of Prism (2021), ‘Britishness and the “outsider within”: tracing manifestations of racist nativism in education policy in England’, Smith includes discussion of the DfE’s framing of EAL in the FBV moment to illustrate her application of racist nativism. She notes how DfE guidance frames speakers of languages other than English as ‘deficit … as emanating from cultural backgrounds/communities with different expectations’ (Smith, 2021: 73). Smith’s paper is a fitting conclusion to the collection, as it traces the hardening of the civic nationalist discourse in recent government discourse and guidance. Smith’s analysis is a timely reminder of the

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divisiveness of governmental identity politics in contrast to attempts by some to rehabilitate or normalise FBVs as an opportunity for democratic deliberation in the classroom. Smith highlights attempts by the Johnson government to proscribe CRT, Black Lives Matter, and educational debate about structural racisms. Racist nativism, she argues, is already embedded in policies and discourse which position Muslims as the Other, what follows simply builds on this. Smith refers to the racial inequalities revealed by deaths in the covid pandemic to point out that the government response was a Race Inequality Commission led by Tony Sewell, on record as disavowing institutional racism and Black victimhood. In Smith’s analysis, the racist nativism underpinning policy since 2011 and culminating in 2021 in ‘government moves to withdraw educational theory as an emancipatory tool to dismantle the racist practices exacerbated by FBV’ (Smith, 2021: 76). Critical Pedagogy Sadia Habib’s work is a significant contribution to the FBV debate, standing out in the literature because of its focus on pedagogy as a resource to problematise conceptualisations of Britishness and national identity. Habib’s work is also noteworthy because of its inclusion of student views as well as those of teachers. Habib’s book, ‘Learning and Teaching British values’ published in 2018, is based on two empirical studies. The first is an analysis of a group of trainee art teachers’ views of FBV, based in a London ITE institution. The second took place in a South London secondary school and is a study of two GCSE Art classes and their teachers’ interpretations of British identity. It is the only investigation of pre- and in-service art teachers and their students’ views of FBV and critical pedagogy as an anti-racist approach to issues of national identity. Habib states that her intention was to make ‘hegemonic’ forms of normative subjectivity ‘strange’ to ‘counter’ monochrome depictions of Britishness dominating FBV discourse (Habib, 2018: 3). Habib foregrounds the voices of ‘ethnic minority and White working-class communities’ and their redefinitions of national belonging and identity (Habib, 2018: 3) to trouble the FBV requirement. Habib’s investigation of trainee art teachers’ view of FBV revealed that they regarded identity as ‘unfixed and difficult to capture concretely’ (Habib, 2018: 58). Reflecting their location within a super diverse city,

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the trainee teachers found the notion of Britishness, with its racial meanings, difficult to accommodate, particularly in the context of the Brexit referendum. One student, Elena, was anxious that teaching FBVs was about promoting exclusion, stating, ‘It seems the message is you have to be British, not that Britishness is about inclusion’ (Habib, 2018: 59). The discomfort was evident in other trainees’ responses, with one teacher, Terry, stating that they were ‘political propaganda’ (Habib, 2018: 65). Habib’s sample thought that education should trouble hegemonic notions of national identity and that ‘political art’ could be used to ‘explore cultures and belongings through innovative and imaginative ways’ (Habib, 2018: 66). Habib’s analysis is significant because it demonstrates the relationship between teacher enactments of FBV and the pedagogical orientation of their specialist subject, as one teacher stated, ‘Art is about difference’ (Habib, 2018: 67). In the second section of the book, Habib uses the frames of critical pedagogy to explore key stage 4 GCSE art students’ understandings of Britishness. Habib positions art as a site for reimagining’s and reenvisioning of identity in contrast to the banking model of curriculum where teachers deliver ‘uncritical pedagogies’ as ‘depositors of knowledge (officially sanctioned ‘correct’ deposits)’ (Habib, 2018: 88). The students’ articulations of identity through their art and their narratives reveal the interplay of class, race and their local community. One student, Joe, expresses a white supremacist understanding of a raced hierarchy in which White people are cast as the ‘first race’, but the art classroom becomes a space for the renegotiation of identity when Joe is challenged by his classmate Kadisha through her celebration of multicultural Britishness and her reminder that we all originated in Africa. Habib concludes the book by reaffirming the value of critical pedagogy. Habib argues that when teachers provide students with opportunities to explore multicultural Britishness and to explore identity, bonds critically and collaboratively between diverse peers are strengthened and students feel valued because their counter narratives have been validated (Habib, 2018: 159). Habib’s paper (Habib, 2021) in the special edition of Prism, addresses a gap in the literature by focussing on the way the Britishness discourse plays out in the cultural heritage sector. Drawing from her work as cultural heritage coordinator at Manchester Museum, Habib problematises the racial messages conveyed by museums as a ‘stalwart’ and ‘bolsterer’ of the

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racial imaginaries of the nation state. In line with her earlier work on critical pedagogy in art education, Habib adopts a critical museum educator pedagogy to enable young people to ‘critically interrogate the contemporary machinations and meanings of museums and … to describe how these institutions can … take the smallest steps to work towards dismantling a colonial legacy that impacts society even today’ (Habib, 2021: 36). Habib provides an account of her work with young people from the South Asian diaspora who contributed to the Our Shared Cultural Heritage Partnership Project. The project, a collaboration between the museum of Manchester, Glasgow Life and UK Youth was designed to enable young people to share South Asian cultural heritage and ‘develop new methods for museums to engage with people’ (Habib, 2021: 40). The young people ran social media campaigns and a blog to share their understanding of British identity. Like her art GCSE students, these young people also expressed attachments to local, national and transnational identities and their experiences of class and race within their communities. The relative autonomy and creativity afforded by the project contrasts with the disciplinary and governmental spaces of school but offers compelling strategies for belonging and agency as alternatives to the over regulated practice of schools. Habib outlines how the young people short listed staff for new posts, sat on recruitment panels and interviewed designers for the South Asia Gallery. There is much that education could take from these non-hierarchical practices as models of collaboration and co-production of what it means to be British that contrast with the imposition of a state sanctioned set of national values formulated as counter-terror policy. Conceptual Papers: Belonging, Social Cohesion and FBVs Mary Healy’s ‘Belonging, Social Cohesion and fundamental British values’ is a critical non- empirical paper which questions the political argument that FBVs are designed to promote social cohesion in response to the ‘fragmentation of belonging’ (Healy, 2019: 423). Healy argues that the requirement is unable to fulfil its espoused aims because it is informed by an ‘inadequate concept of belonging’ (Healy, 2019: 424). Healy troubles disingenuous governmental notions of social cohesion and belonging by introducing the concept of ‘perceived belonging’ (Healy, 2019: 428). She argues that for policies promoting social cohesion to work, belonging

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must mean more than legal rights, but must come from the mutual recognition of others, ‘by treating others as “one of us”: going from recogniser to recognised … and it is only when this mutual recognition is achieved that discussion of the “we” needed for cohesion becomes possible’ (Healy, 2019: 429). The problem with FBVs and Prevent is that it has left some to feel that the default position … questions their status, belonging and loyalty (perceives them as ‘other’ or ‘outsiders’), thus misrecognising them’ (Healy, 2019: 431). Healy is left questioning if social cohesion is the aim of FBVs, asking ‘is it appropriate’ that educational establishments should enact a policy that positions some pupils as not quite belonging or suspect? (Healy, 2019: 431). Although she doesn’t use Foucauldian terminology, Healy is arguing that FBVs are a governmental technology where the state has politicised the concept of national values, defined these values and makes the values, ‘the servant of the state’ (Healy, 2019: 432). To achieve social cohesion, Healy concludes, a ‘very different set of values’ unconnected to security legislation, is required (Healy, 2019: 435). Accommodations, Contradictions and Ambiguities The papers reviewed so far, take an unambiguously critical stance. An interesting exception published in 2017, is McGhee and Zhang’s paper, ‘Nurturing resilient future citizens through value consistency vs. the retreat from multiculturalism and securitisation in the promotion of British values in schools in the UK’. McGhee and Zhang characterise the civic integration policies of the FBV/Prevent assemblage as a retreat from multiculturalism, but they argue that the values discourse is open to ‘co-option and diffusion’ when schools and colleges ‘absorb the duty to promote British values into their existing structures and ethos which combine both elements of the multicultural respect for diversity with the promotion of a value system consistent with their mission of producing well-rounded, and resilient liberal citizens’ (McGhee & Zhang, 2017: 938). Their argument is supported with reference to three schools, All Hallows Catholic College in Macclesfield, the all-boys Kings School in Lincolnshire and Brackenbury Primary school in Hammersmith, who translate FBVs through their ethos, for example the Roman Catholic Christian values of All Hallows. The argument is interesting as it demonstrates the agency of the staff working in these schools, and suggests fragility within the discourse, but it is easy to overclaim both points.

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As Vincent and Jivraj show, Christianity as the dominant national religious ideology has been harnessed by the government as a source of endorsement for FBV, implicitly in opposition to the Muslim Other. Similarly, from a Foucauldian perspective, the apparent diffusion of the discourse could be taken as evidence of the governmental absorption of the schools’ own ethos into the FBV framework. McGhee and Zhang offer no acknowledgement of the relationships between Catholic Christianity and racist imperialism. What they mean by resilient liberal citizens goes unexplored and the terms are used without any critical discussion. In contrast to McGhee and Zhang’s argument, Vanderbeck and Johnson’s paper, ‘The promotion of British values: sexual orientation equality, religion, and English schools’, highlights the tension between the requirements of the OfSTED school inspection handbook and religious values of faith schools. The handbook requires schools to promote ‘fundamental British values’, which includes ‘tolerance of and respect for people of all sexual orientations’, however this requirement conflicts with religious values which prohibit same sex relationships. Vanderbeck and Johnson note that since the repeal in 2003, of Section 28 which specified that local authorities must not ‘intentionally promote homosexuality’ (Vanderbeck & Johnson, 2016: 293), there has been a radical discursive shift in government policy on same sex relationships. The promotion of sexual orientation equalities has not been a characteristic of political conceptions of nationhood, until David Cameron made it a ‘central feature of government rhetoric concerning the preservation of the nation’s core values’ (Vanderbeck & Johnson, 2016: 293). They point out that during the Trojan horse enquiry, DfE and OfSTED enquiries focussed on ‘gender segregation’ and ‘conservative Islamic practices’ in the Park View Academy Trust schools, citing the report which mentions ‘intolerance … towards those who are openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual’ and that ‘Park View governors and staff have displayed openly homophobic behaviour’ (Vanderbeck & Johnson, 2016: 302). Vanderbeck and Johnson conclude by asking if it is possible for faith schools to promote heterosexuality and be compliant with the requirements of FBV and OfSTED, stating that, ‘far from resolving questions regarding what it means to “promote” a particular sexual orientation, the current British values drive has brought them to the fore’ (Vanderbeck & Johnson, 2016: 314). This paper goes to the heart of the political aporia operating through FBVs, namely the conflict between parents’ rights to send their children to a faith school that promotes heteronormativity and

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the OfSTED handbook’s requirement that schools further tolerance of all sexual orientations. Vanderbeck and Johnson focus on the tension between FBVs and faith schools’ emphasis on heterosexual marriage, but they stop short of accusing the government of cynically mobilising FBVs as a disciplinary tool to highlight the incompatibility of liberal values with Islamic doctrine. They recognise that FBVs are part of the security agenda, but there is a danger that their argument could be used to defend FBVs as progressive safeguards against homophobia rather than against FBVs as a divisive governmental racialising tactic. Published in 2017, Struther’s paper, ‘Teaching British Values in Our Schools, but Why not Human Rights Values?’ makes the case for a human rights approach to the teaching of the values. Struthers offers the compelling argument that FBVs are not required because the UK is already a signatory and therefore subject to existing human rights obligations which mandate the teaching of values such as dignity, justice and freedom. She also points out the FBVs conflict with the human rights that the UK has accepted through its international obligations under the European Convention in Human Rights (ECHR) and the United Nations (UN) human rights treaty. Struthers argues that because FBVs were formulated in response to Islamist terror threats, such as the Trojan horse incident, they are ‘susceptible to subversive and discriminatory interpretation … likely to incite or perpetuate intolerance towards minority groups’ (Struthers, 2017: 90) thus perpetuating an anti-human rights sentiment. Referencing wider literature, Struthers expresses concerns for the potential of ethno nationalist interpretations of British values or reliance on cultural tropes. FBV guidance, she argues, would be more effective if it complemented rather than conflicted with the international Human Rights Education framework, arguing that an emphasis on the universality of human rights would mitigate the ‘strained linguistic interpretation’ (Struthers, 2017: 103) of Britishness in FBVs.

Conclusion There are obvious commonalities and overlaps in the literature I have surveyed. Throughout the literature, the notion of values defined by the British state as ‘fundamentally British’ is problematised as a divisive hegemonic norm, saturated with racial meanings. Papers adopting post-colonial, CRT, post structuralist and critical pedagogy perspectives highlight the racialising and othering effects of state sanctioned British

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values. The empirical studies detail the dilemmas faced by practitioners painting a picture of confusion felt keenly by teachers already minoritised by their faith and ethnicity. Where FBVs are enacted uncritically, as Sant and Elton-Chalcaft’s papers demonstrate, there is the danger that they become reduced to clichés, or even worse, ethno nationalism. A theme that can be traced from the earliest studies is the hope that there are spaces for resistance and reappropriation of the discourse. ITE courses are identified in several studies, as liminal resisting spaces where academics can reshape their pre-service student teachers’ views. In some of the studies, there are suggestions that FBVs can be rehabilitated, filtered and reinterpreted through schools’ own value systems or that lessons on FBVs can be utilised as opportunities to question British values or to engage students in more critical discussions about coexistence in a multi-faith, multi-racial democracy. There is merit in these studies and the arguments they propose. The capacity of teachers to exercise subtle forms of agency and adapt policy directives is well documented, but there is a danger of overclaiming the degree to which FBVs can be adapted to fulfil legitimate educational aims. The empirical literature I have surveyed in this chapter offers valuable insights into the microphysics of power as they operate in the classrooms and schools of the English education system. The Foucauldian analytic outlined in the next chapter contributes to the current body of literature in several ways. Firstly, a Foucauldian approach allows for a sharper focus on the types of power operating through FBVs and Prevent and secondly it enables the researcher to explore the ways in which power shapes teacher subjectivity. For Foucault, the forms of power the liberal state operates produce a ‘security society’ that relies upon the cultivation of fear, through a governmentality of unease he calls ‘Etat de peur’, the ‘state of fear’ (Foucault in Lemke, 2016: 48). In the next chapter, I make a case for Foucault’s analytics of governmentality as a heuristic through which to interrogate the discursive effects of the governmentality of security, by asking what type of policy rationality is at work in the discourse and what teacher and student subjects does it produce? In other words, to undertake a critical history of the present and to ask, ‘what are we now?’.

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References Bamber, P., Bullivant, A., Clark, A., & Lundie, D. (2019). Beginning Teacher Agency in the Enactment of Fundamental British Values: A Multi-method Case Study. Oxford Review of Education., 45(6), 749–768. Bryan, H. (2017). Developing the Political Citizen: How Teachers are Navigating the Statutory Demands of the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015 and the Prevent Duty. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 12(3), 213–226. Bryan, H., & Revell, L. (2021). School Leadership and the Civic Nationalist Turn: Towards a Typology of Leadership Styles Employed by Head Teachers Employed in their Enactment of the Prevent Duty and Fundamental British Values. Prism, 3(2). https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/index. php/prism/article/view/423 Crawford, C. (2017). Promoting Fundamental ‘British Values’ in Schools: A Critical Race Perspective. Curriculum Perspective, 37 , 197–204. Elton-Chalcraft, S., Lander, V., Revell, L., Warner, D., & Whitworth, L. (2016). To Promote or not to Promote Fundamental British Values? Teachers’ Standards, Diversity and Teacher Education. British Educational Research Journal, 43(1), 29–48. Farrell, F. (2016). ‘Why All of a Sudden Do We Need to Teach Fundamental British Values? A Critical Investigation of Religious Education Student Teacher Positioning Within a Policy Discourse of Discipline and Control. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(3), 280–297. Farrell, F. (2021). White Man Face, Order Words and Deviance Detectors: A Deleuzoguattarian Analysis of Fundamental British Values. Prism, 3(2). https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/index.php/prism/article/view/402 Farrell, F., & Lander, V. (2018). ‘We’re not British Values Teachers are We?’ Muslim Teachers’ Subjectivity and the Governmentality of Unease. Educational Review, 71(4), 466–482. Foucault, M. (1980). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 . Pearson Education. Foucault, M. (1991). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Penguin. Foucault, M., in Lemke, T. (2016). Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. Routledge. Habib, S. (2018). Learning and Teaching British Values. Palgrave Pivot. Habib, S. (2021). Horrible British Histories: Young People in Museums Interrogating National Identity Through Principles and Practices of Critical Pedagogy. Prism, 3(2). https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/index.php/prism/ article/view/477 Healy, M. (2019). Belonging, Social Cohesion and Fundamental British Values. British Journal of Educational Studies, 67 (4), 423–438.

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Jerome, L., & Clemitshaw, G. (2012). Teaching About Britishness? An Investigation into Trainee Teachers Understanding of Britishness in Relation to Citizenship and the Discourse of Civic Nationalism. Curriculum Journal, 23(1), 19–41. Jerome, L., Liddle, A., & Young, H. (2021). Talking Tolerance: Being Deliberative About Fundamental British Values. Prism, 3(2). https://openjournals. ljmu.ac.uk/index.php/prism/article/view/416 Keddie, A. (2013). The Politics of Britishness: Multiculturalism, Schooling and Social Cohesion. British Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 539–554. Marshall, J. (2012). Foucault and Educational Research. In S. Ball (Ed.), Foucault and Education. Disciplines and Knowledge. Routledge. Maylor, U. (2010). Notions of Diversity, British Identities and Citizenship Belonging. Race, Etnicity and Education, 13(2), 233–252. Maylor, U. (2016). ‘I’d Worry About How to Teach it’: British Values in English Classrooms. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(3), 314–328. McCully, A., & Clarke, L. (2016). A Place for Fundamental (British) Values in Teacher Education in Northern Ireland? Journal of Education for Teaching, 43(2), 354–368. McDonnell, J. (2020). How do You Promote British Values When Values Education is Your Profession? Policy Enactments of FBV Amongst Teachers of Religious Education, Citizenship Education and Personal, Social and Health Education in England, 51(3), 377–394. McGhee, D., & Zhang, S. (2017). Nurturing Resilient Future Citizens Through Value Consistency vs. the Retreat from Multiculturalism and Securitisation in the Promotion of Fundamental British Values in Schools in the UK. Citizenship Studies, 21(8), 937–950. Moncrieffe, M., & Moncrieffe, A. (2019). An Examination of Imagery Used to Represent Fundamental British Values and British Identity on Primary School Display Boards. London Review of Education, 17 (1), 52–69. Panjwani, F. (2016). Towards an Overlapping Consensus: Muslim Teachers’ Views on Fundamental British Values. Journal of Education for Teaching, 43(20), 329–340. Revell, L., & Bryan, H. (2016). Calibrating Fundamental British Values: How Head Teachers are Approaching Appraisal in the Light of the Teachers’ Standards 2012, Prevent and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(3), 341–353. Sant, E., & Hanley, C. (2018). Political Assumptions Underlying Pedagogies of National Education: The Case of Student Teachers Teaching ‘British Values’ in England. British Educational Research Journal, 44(2), 319–337. Smith, H. (2012). A Critique of the Teaching Standards in England (1984– 2012): Discourses of Equality and Maintaining the Status Quo. Journal of Education Policy, 28(4), 427–448.

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Smith, H. (2016). Britishness as Racist Nativism: A Case of the Unnamed ‘Other.’ Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(3), 298–313. Smith, H. (2021). Britishness and the ‘Outsider Within’: Tracing Manifestations of Racist Nativism in Education Policy in England. Prism, 3(2). https://ope njournals.ljmu.ac.uk/index.php/prism/article/view/503 Struthers, A. (2017). Teaching British Values in Our Schools: But Why not Human Rights Values? Social and Legal Studies, 26(1), 89–110. Vanderbek, R., & Johnson, P. (2016). The Promotion of British Values: Sexual Orientation, Equality, Religion and England’s Schools. International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, 30(3), 292–321. Vincent, C. (2019a). Tea and the Queen? Fundamental British Values. Policy Press. Vincent, C. (2019b). Cohesion, Citizenship and Coherence: Schools’ Response to the British Values Policy. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 40(1), 17–32. Winter, C. (2018). Disrupting Colonial Discourses in the Geography Curriculum During the Introduction of British Values Policy in Schools. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 50(4), 456–475. Winter, C., & Mills, C. (2018). The Psy-Security-Curriculum Ensemble: British Values Curriculum Policy in English Schools. Journal of Education Policy, 35(1), 46–47.

CHAPTER 6

Foucault and Fundamental British Values

Introduction In his 1982 essay, ‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault writes that the goal of his work ‘has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’ (Foucault, 2002a: 208). Foucault proceeds to identify three ‘modes of objectivation which transform human beings into subjects’ (Foucault, 2002a: 208). Firstly, he identifies the role of the modern ‘sciences’ in producing human subjects. He provides several examples, for instance, economics, which gives us the concept of the ‘productive subject’ (Foucault, 2002a: 208). Secondly, Foucault describes how once transformed into a subject, power, in its modern form, goes about the process of hierarchising, ranking and classifying the subject, through the imposition of ‘dividing practices’. Through these dividing processes, human subjects are objectivised, as, for example, ‘the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the “good boys”’ (Foucault, 2002a: 208). Thirdly, Foucault focusses on the ways in which human beings turn themselves into subjects, by working with the discursive resources available to them, through a set of practices called the technologies of the self. Through the adoption of a Foucauldian analytical framework, the aim of this chapter is to apply Foucault’s theory to FBVs and to ask, as a mode of objectivation, what teacher and student subjects does the FBV discourse produce? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_6

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From a Foucauldian perspective, FBVs have no basis in a collective body of knowledge, tradition and experience that is fundamentally British. There is no primordial origin, no ‘Ursprung’ of British values, they are a political construction, an ‘invention’, a ‘surface effect’ produced by the regimes of power/knowledge whose political purposes they serve (Foucault, 2002a: 8). Furthermore, educational knowledges and practices such as FBVs are central to the process of objectivation that constitutes human beings. Education normalises through the establishment of measurements, hierarchies, inspections and examinations ‘and regulations around the idea of a statistical norm within a given population’ (Ball, 2012: 2). In Foucault’s genealogy of the modern prison, Discipline and Punish, he writes about the emergence of the modern education system in the eighteenth century, drawing parallels between the practices of surveillance and normalisation operating in the prison and the army with developments in education. At the heart of these expressions of modern power, Foucault argues, is the practice of surveillance. He writes, The school became a sort of apparatus of uninterrupted examination…the examination enabled the teacher, while transmitting his knowledge, to transform his pupils into a whole field of knowledge…the examination in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed the movement of knowledge from teacher to the pupil, but it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved for the teacher. (Foucault, 1991a: 198)

By using Foucault’s conceptual tools and analytical frames I aim to demonstrate how FBVs, Prevent and the discourses operating through these policies give rise to a truth regime that functions as form of ‘uninterrupted examination’, to normalise, rank, classify and govern the teacher and student subjects of its discourse. To do so I will begin by considering what Foucault means by discourse as an instrument of power and how his conceptualisation of discourse can aid our understanding of FBVs. Following the discussion of FBVs as discourse I will consider what Foucault means by power and its various modern expressions as discipline, biopower and governmentality with reference to Foucault’s work on ‘the great instruments’ (Foucault, 1998: 141) of the modern state, such as the prison and the school. It is my contention in this book that Foucault’s analytical frames offer the sharpest insights into the manifold ways the discourse of FBVs shapes and positions teachers and students,

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enabling critical researchers to find out, ‘how the human subject fits into certain games of truth’, in this case the educational truth game of FBV (Foucault, 2000: 281). Archaeology and Genealogy Foucault’s work is typically thought of in terms of an early period in which he produced critical counter histories of the clinic and medical discourse, Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 2001), The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault, 2003), the emergence of the human sciences and the epistemic structures that shaped modern thought, The Order of Things (Foucault, 2009) and a summation of his methodological approach, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 2002b). In this first phase, Foucault is concerned with discourse, centring his analysis on ‘historically situated systems of institutions and discursive practices’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983: xxiv). The critical aim of the archaeologies was to analyse the discourses of material science, medicine, the arts, economics, philosophy and the human sciences, ‘to question the self-evidence of those things that appear to be inevitable “truths”’ and to ‘reveal the ways in which discourse imposes restrictions on what can be thought, said and done and show how the subject who “speaks” discourse is constructed by it, rather than being its originator’ (Fadyl et al., 2012: 481). In his archaeologies Foucault pays particular attention to the role of experts, such as the clinician in the ‘diffusion’ of medical discourse. As Dreyfus and Rabinow point out, by discourse, Foucault is not referring to everyday discourse, rather, his analysis is centred on ‘serious speech acts: what experts say when they are speaking as experts’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983: xxiv). Following the publication of the Archaeology, Foucault’s thought shifts away from a preoccupation with discourse, towards the development of a method for analysing the relationship between discursive conceptualisations of truth and the ‘social institutions and practices in which they emerged’, such as the modern prison and the education system (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983: xxv). Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow argue, did not abandon his earlier method, rather, he advances it to address questions relating to the power relations operating in social institutions, through a method he calls genealogy. Indeed, in one of his genealogical works, published in 1977, ‘The Use of Pleasure’, Foucault refers to the relationship between archaeology and genealogy, as his ‘dimensions of analysis’ (Foucault, 12), with archaeology functioning to identify and

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analyse discursive formations, such as medical discourse, and genealogy operating to provide a critical examination of how these formations came about to shape human beings through their power/knowledge truth regimes. Archaeology, therefore, serves genealogy (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983: xxv). Fadyl et al. describe the relationship between archaeology and genealogy. Archaeology, they argue, works to ‘Allow identification and examination of discursive formations’, with genealogy ‘providing analysis of how these formations come about and operate through knowledgepower relations…’. Foucault ‘investigated history to provide clues as to why our present discourses are as they are (and not otherwise); how we come to know ourselves and others as subjects of our present discourses (e.g. the roles and identities that we take on) and the relations of power that produce and maintain our present discourses’ (Fadyl et al., 2012: 481). Discourse Foucault described his theories as tools and his books as ‘little toolboxes’ offering them as a resource to the reader, ‘If people want to open them, to use this sentence or that idea as a screwdriver or spanner to short-circuit, discredit or smash systems of power…so much the better’ (Foucault, in Mills, 2004: 15). The term discourse, in Foucault’s work, offers considerable scope as a tool to ‘short-circuit’ the truth games operating within FBV policy. Discourse in Foucault’s work refers to more than simply linguistic signs, or a ‘stretch of text’ (Mills, 2004: 15). He describes his archaeological method as doing more than simply treating discourses, ‘as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 2002b: 54). Discourse is onto formative; it produces social reality and constitutes the objects of which it speaks. Foucault points out that it is self-evident that discourses are composed of signs, but they do more than signify in a neutral, disinterested fashion, ‘they do more than use these signs to designate things’ (Foucault, 2002b: 54) and, crucially, ‘it is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech’. The task of critical discourse analysis is therefore to ‘reveal and describe’ (Foucault, 2002b: 54) what makes discourse ‘more’ than just ‘signs’. Discourses, Foucault states, operate through rules, ‘proper to discursive practice’, rules that do more than define the ‘dumb existence of

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reality’ or provide the canonical use of a vocabulary, they are concerned with the ‘ordering of objects’ (Foucault, 2002b: 54). Discourses are ‘more than grammatical rules and a lexicon’ (Lynch, 2014: 120), they translate into practices that have material consequences for the human subjects they constitute and the lives they lead. From this perspective, dominant policy discourses in education become a ‘discursive formation’, the ‘organizing fulcrum’ (Lynch, 2014: 120), that Foucault refers to as ‘the archive’, that is, a set of statements that are correlated and follow certain rules and regularities. Hence, discourse constitutes a ‘network of statements’ that ‘forms a complex web’ (Foucault, 2002b: 112). It is this network that gives statements their status and coherence, but also functions to determine who can speak, what can be said, what can be thought and with authority, as Foucault states, ‘The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (Foucault, 2002b: 145). Discourse, and this is of particular significance in education, is integral to power relations and what Foucault came to refer to as power/knowledge. In the case of education policy and practice, politicians, inspectors and the agents of law enforcement speak with authority on matters relating to FBV and Prevent. Classroom practitioners are positioned as the enactors and translators of education discourse, and students are its objects, often the marginalised and discounted variable. Discourses, Lynch argues, define and delimit what counts as legitimate knowledge. In relation to FBV, it is discourse that defines what counts as an admissible British identity. The discourse of FBV and the instruments of its articulation, policy texts, lesson plans, non-statutory and statutory guidance determine what is taught in the classroom which becomes the discursive ‘space in which the subject may take up a position’ (Foucault, 2002b: 202). The possibilities and the constraints of education discourses, as Ball states, are ‘constituted by exclusions as well as inclusions…they stand in antagonistic relationship to other discourses, other possibilities of meaning, other claims, rights, and positions’ (Ball, 2012: 2). In the context of FBV, the Britishness discourse, mobilises a racial standard that includes those who align to it and the way it is enacted in schools, which, may take the form of the crudest cultural tropes, and excludes those who don’t identify with these symbols of racial belonging. The interviews presented in this chapter, offer empirical support for this analysis of FBV as discourse,

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revealing the extent to which some Muslim teachers and students felt targeted and excluded by FBV and the racial hierarchy it produced. Shamim Miah describes the way the ‘values discourse’ (Miah, 2017: 72) constructs Muslims as the ‘Other’, through political speeches, that form the discursive regime of FBV. Miah refers to Cameron’s, 2015 speech to the Bratislava Security Council (Cameron, 2015), where he creates a politicised dualism between ‘the forces of good and the forces of darkness; between Islam and Muslims and secularism and liberty’ (Miah, 2017: 71). In line with Foucault’s discussion of the constituting power of discourse, Miah argues that ‘Prevent policy uses the language of values and more crucially Fundamental British Values to help construct certain ‘truths’ about Muslim communities in Britain’ (Miah, 2017: 75). Cameron’s article for the Times published in 2016 provides another example of how British Muslims have been constructed by discourse. Cameron offers a caricatured image of the British Muslim community, asking his readers to consider a scenario where in, ‘school governors’ meetings …male governors sit in the meeting room and the women have to sit out of sight in the corridor. Young women (are) only allowed to leave their house in the company of a male relative’ and ‘religious councils discriminate against women and prevent them from leaving abusive marriages’ (Cameron, 2016). He goes to deliver the ‘shocking’ revelation, that this is taking place in Britain. His response is to position Muslim communities in opposition to British values, inserting them into the discourse as the un-British ‘Other’. The government, he states, has ‘a clear and positive policy agenda…We’re teaching British values in our schools…and we’ll end the forced gender segregation’ (Cameron, 2016). Miah concludes that this discourse works to essentialise the minority culture, constituting a binary between the West and the Rest (non-West, non-British and the un-British) (Miah, 2017: 74), which is translated, enacted, reinforced and reified through lessons which determine who is included and who is excluded by the discourse. As a conceptual tool, discourse works to reveal the social processes that produce meaning and mobilise truth regimes. In the context of FBVs and Prevent policy my aim is to show how educational institutions and education policy actors are both subject to discourse but also involved in its translation, propagation and selective dissemination, as Ball writes, educational sites are locations, ‘in which certain modern validations of, and exclusions from the ‘right to speak’ are generated’ (Ball, 2012: 3).

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Education is therefore an instrument of governmental power as Foucault states, What, after all, is an education system, other than a ritualization of speech, a qualification and a fixing of roles for speaking subjects, the constitution of a doctrinal group, however diffuse, a distribution and an appropriation of discourse with its powers and knowledges? (Foucault, 1981: 64)

Power In Foucault’s epistemological work, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 2002b), he recognises some limitations to his methodology in respect to its failure to fully get to grips with the power relations discourse brings into play. He states that the concept ‘discourse’ is an ‘asset’ that ‘poses the question of power’ because competing discourses are ‘the object of a struggle, a political struggle’ (Foucault, 2002b: 136). In the next phase of his work, the genealogical period, Foucault turned his attention to questions of power and the techniques of power that discourse mobilises and enables. The analytic grid developed in the genealogies is power/knowledge. As Marshall writes, this analytic has much to offer educational researchers, as the genealogies demonstrate, ‘schools enter as exemplifications of the exercise of power and the emergence of modern power’ (Marshall, 2012: 5). Gillies argues Foucault’s conceptualisation of Power is his strongest and most enduring achievement, but it can also be seen as one of his most controversial undertakings (Gillies, 2015: 50). When Foucault writes and talks about power, he is not referring to power as a thing, an object, as a separate entity that can be grasped or possessed. Power is better understood in terms of power relations that operate through networks, chains and systems. Foucault contrasts the way power is ordinarily understood with his view of power as productive and strategic. He rejects Marxist and neo-Marxist arguments for a society free from power relations as ‘utopian’ (Foucault, 2000: 298). When Foucault talked and wrote about power, he is not referring to a situation where there is no scope for resistance or agency, such as a totalitarian dictatorship. There are very limited power relations operating in a dictatorship, just a state of total domination. In a late interview Foucault described what he meant by power,

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Power is games of strategy…It seems to me that we must distinguish between power relations understood as strategic games between libertiesin which some try to control the conduct of others, who in turn try to avoid allowing their conduct to be controlled or try to conduct the conduct of others- and the states of domination that people ordinarily call “power”. (Foucault, 2000: 298–299)

When Foucault refers to power, he is referring to the ubiquitous and productive relationships that are an ‘omnipresent feature of modern society’ (Lemke, 2016: 19), ranging across the myriad ‘techniques of government’ that come into play at the highest level in the way the state governs its citizens, pedagogical institutions (Lemke, 2016: 298), and even in the way parents ‘conduct the conduct’ of their children (Lemke, 2016: 299). In ‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault offers his view of power as ever present, dynamic and unstable. Power and the complex web of discourses, which shape human existence, are all pervasive. From Foucault’s perspective there exists no social domain outside or beyond power relations, and no power-free form of interpersonal communication. Power relations are not exterior to society but are the very condition of the existence of society, Power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not a supplementary structure over and above ‘society’ whose radical effacement one can perhaps dream of. To live in society is, in any event, to live in such a way that some can act on the actions of others. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. (Foucault, 2002a: 343)

The diffuse and pervasive character of power relations in modernity are apparent in the ‘ensemble’ of institutions, texts and agents that constitute and enact the requirements of FBV and Prevent. Foucault calls this collection of elements the dispositif, in English, apparatus. His concept of the dispositif fits with the character of Prevent and FBVs as a collection of discursive and non-discursive objects, as his description of dispositif shows, What I’m trying to pick out with this term is a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions- in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus (dispositif). The

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apparatus (dispositif) itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, 1980: 194)

This characterisation of power relations as instrumentalised and deployed through the dispositif is evident in the ways FBVs are enacted through the regulatory requirements of the teachers’ standards, surveiled and examined by OfSTED, textualised by curricular frameworks, articulated as speech acts in lessons and incorporated in the architecture of educational institutions as displays and mission statements. The discourse and the dispositif of Prevent/FBV offer the critical researcher a compelling example of what Foucault means by power relations as a chain, a system, a ‘multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate’ (Foucault, 1998: 92). Given this situation, Foucault goes on to argue that the purpose of criticism, is for analysis to establish the strength or the fragility of power relations in a given society and to identify the conditions necessary for the abolition or transformation of power relations. Power, he argues is not an ‘inescapable fatality’, power relations can be undermined. The aim of this genealogical investigation and critique of FBVs and their discursive influence on the bodies and the souls of the teachers whose narratives are shared here, align with Foucault’s project of problematising power relations that have become normative and taken for granted, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the ‘agonism’ between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is an increasingly political task-even, the political task that is inherent in all social existence. (Foucault, 2002a: 343)

Foucault describes and analyses the different technologies of power that give rise to the power relationships in modern society in his genealogies. In the next section I will outline these power techniques and critically consider how they can be used to accomplish the political task of this analysis of FBVs. Discipline We will start with what is probably Foucault’s best-known work, his landmark 1975 study of the emergence of the modern prison, Discipline and Punish. Foucault claimed that Discipline and Punish would ‘serve as a

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background for various studies of normalization and the power of knowledge in modern society’ (Foucault, cited in Ball, 2012: 5). He was right, particularly in respect of critical educational research. This text offers researchers a range of conceptual tools such as the Norm, the examination, discipline and the docile body that can be applied in a critical analysis of FBVs and Prevent. Gillies describes Discipline and Punish as ‘rich in historical detail, at times minutely perceptive, at times coldly analytical’, presenting what could be seen as the ‘quintessential Foucauldian historical style’ (Gillies, 2015: 7). The book opens with a grisly description of the public execution in 1757, of a regicide, Damiens. The public spectacle of the execution is an expression of what Foucault refers to as ‘sovereign power’ because it represents the absolute power of the monarch, visibly exercised on the body of the criminal. Following his account of the extreme physical punishment of Damiens, Foucault outlines a timetable and the rules ‘for the House of young prisoners in Paris’, drawn up in 1837. Foucault comments, ‘We have, then, a public execution and a timetable…they each define a certain penal style. Less than a century separates them’, but by the end of the eighteenth century, he notes, ‘the entire economy of punishment was redistributed…it was a time of innumerable projects for reform’ (Foucault, 1991b: 7). Punishment had ceased to be a spectacle but Foucault questions whether changes in the penal system in Europe and the US were simply the outcome of a process of ‘humanization’ (Foucault, 1991b: 7). Foucault closes chapter one by offering his rationale for the book, declaring that he is writing a history of the past ‘in terms of the present’ (31). Referring to prison revolts that took place in ‘recent years’ (Foucault, 1991b: 30), Foucault makes it clear that what will follow, is a critical investigation of the emergence of modern forms of power over the body and over the ‘soul’ (Foucault, 1991b: 30). Through detailed historical accounts Foucault describes the development of these technologies. He begins with a description of eighteenthcentury military training and education, where he introduces the concept of docile bodies, leading into an account of disciplinary and dividing practices such as the ‘examination’ and the ‘Norm’. The final chapter, ‘Panopticism’, outlines his theories on continuous surveillance in modern society.

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Disciplinary Power: Docile Bodies The DfE document ‘The Prevent duty: Departmental advice for schools and childcare providers’ (DfE, 2015), states that the duty placed on specified authorities to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism (DfE, 2015: 3), should be seen, ‘as part of…wider safeguarding duties, and is similar in nature to protecting children from other harms’ (DfE, 2015: 5). The Departmental advice goes on to outline what steps a teacher should take if they observe ‘behaviour of concern’, including when it is appropriate to make a referral to Channel (DfE, 2015: 6). Channel is the government’s multi-agency programme and is part of Prevent. A Channel panel must include representatives of the local authority, the police, and other groups, including NHS and social workers, teachers and probation officers. If an individual is referred to Channel, the first stage is ‘triaged’ by specialist Police and an initial gateway assessment is undertaken by the Police. In most cases, this first assessment goes no further than a referral to the Channel Panel who produce a support plan, monitor any recommended interventions, and review progress after 6 and 12 months. According to Home Office statistics, in 2015/2017, 7, 631 individuals were referred to Channel (Home Office, 2017). The education sector made the highest number of referrals, accounting for 33%, followed by the police. 36% left the process requiring no further action, 50% were signposted to other support services and only 14% were referred to the Channel panel. 56% of the individuals referred were aged under 20 and 78% were male. 65% were referred due to concerns about Islamist extremism. 10% were referred due to concerns regarding right-wing terrorism. The statistics are an example of the power/knowledge dyad at work. Channel is an example of the soft, rehabilitative, reforming disciplinary power at work in the FBV dispositif, serving several functions; collecting quantitative data to model, predict and therefore govern those positioned as the delinquent subjects of its discourse and to profile the ‘deviants’ requiring reform, thus producing knowledge of those it targets. Foucault describes the type of power operating through agencies such as Channel as the ‘gentle way in punishment’ (Foucault, 1991b: 104). The sovereign power of the pre-classical age was exercised through the power to take life or let live, the sovereign’s right of seizure of life itself (Foucault, 1998: 136). The power at work in technologies such as Channel, is

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power to ‘control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces under it’ through reform and normalisation (Foucault, 1998: 136). The aim of this technique of power is to render bodies and minds docile and amenable. Docile bodies are disciplined bodies. ‘Discipline’ and surveillance produce, ‘subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies’ (Foucault, 1991b: 138). The aim of discipline is not to destroy, but to reform human subjects, to ‘increase the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility)’ and diminish ‘these same forces (in political terms of obedience)’ to achieve ‘an increased aptitude and an increased domination’ (Foucault, 1991b: 138). The way the FBV/Prevent ensemble is taken up and enacted exemplifies what Foucault is referring to in this passage. The compliant OfSTED regulated teacher, upholding the teachers’ standards and FBVs through her professional and personal conduct and the unquestioning politically neutral student who accepts the legitimacy of the UK government’s actions in theatres of war exhibit what Foucault means by an increased aptitude and an increased domination. Seemingly benign techniques such as safeguarding and Channel encapsulate what Foucault means by discipline, ‘It is not a triumphant power’ he states, ‘it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated but permanent economy’ (Foucault, 1991a: 188). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault provides examples of the disciplinary techniques at work in the barracks and schools of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Timetables coded physical spaces in the form of the quasi-monastic enclosures and the cells of barracks and schools, ritualistic parades and other forms of physical education all served to discipline and shape docile bodies using methods that have their echoes in the daily social rituals of the schools and colleges shaped by the Prevent discourse. Normalising Judgement and the Examination Foucault writes that the exercise of discipline ‘presupposes’ a mechanism that ‘coerces’, monitors and surveils, ‘by means of observation’ (Foucault, 1991a: 189). Disciplinary power operates through techniques that make it possible for its agents to see the effects of power and to make ‘the means of coercion’ clearly visible to those on whom these techniques are applied. He gives the example of the Ecole Militaire, which functioned as an apparatus for the minute observation of its pupils as a ‘microscope of conduct’ (Foucault, 1991a: 191). Discipline operates through hierarchised, continuous and functional surveillance. We can see evidence of this microphysics

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of power in operation in the way in which OfSTED inspect FBVs, safeguarding and the unrelenting audit, observation and monitoring culture that predominates in UK schools and colleges. The OfSTED inspections that were triggered during the Trojan horse enquiry are a case study of disciplinary surveillance in action. In an interview with the sociologist Tahir Abbas, Tahir Alam, former chairman of the Park View Educational Trust, which ran the schools at the heart of the enquiry, described the inspection as a ‘Witch hunt’, adding, ‘we were under attack by media, the Department for Education and OfSTED, this was a co-ordinated effort’ (Alam, in Abbas, 2017: 8). Alam’s account of the inspection process echoes Foucault’s description of disciplinary observation as ‘hierarchized, continuous, and functional surveillance’ (Foucault, 1991a: 192). The outcome of the Trojan horse enquiry, as detailed in Chapter 2 was the strengthening of the FBV requirement marking the shift from a soft to hard community cohesion discourse (Abbas, 2017) and a new requirement that OfSTED would inspect schools’ provision of SMSC which was to include the promotion of FBVs through SMSC, effectively embedding a securitised construction of Britishness throughout all curriculum subjects and made central to schools’ ethos. Foucault states that a ‘small penal mechanism’ operates at the heart of all disciplinary systems (Foucault, 1991a: 193). The mechanism is a reference to the power of the Norm, and it joins the other powers that discipline has at its disposal, ‘the Law, the Word (Parole), and the Text’ and ‘Tradition’ (Foucault, 1991a: 196). The Norm became an instrument of disciplinary power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a mechanism for rendering human subjects docile. It operated through the imposition of certain standards of behaviour, through drills, inspections and examinations to regulate, shape and objectify groups of people who required ‘governing’. The school, of course, is the definitive site for the enactment of these sorts of practices. Foucault illustrates how the Norm functions in his descriptions of eighteenth-century orphanages, and the ‘shameful class’ of the Ecole Militaire, and the Christian Schools where pupils who were unable to pass into the ‘higher order’ at the end of a series of examinations, were placed ‘well in evidence’ on ‘the bench of the ignorant’ (Foucault, 1991a: 195). The following extract describes how the Norm operates to divide, classify and identify those that deviate from its standard who are then marked for reform. The Norm,

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Differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected, or as an optimum towards which one must move. It introduces through this ‘value giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal. (Foucault, 1991a: 195)

Foucault argues that the Norm is the law of modern society (Foucault, 1991b: 184), adding that the Normal is ‘the principle of coercion in teaching’ (Foucault, 1991b: 184). Although he is writing genealogically about the emergence of modern power techniques, his observation that it was the introduction of standardised teacher training colleges and a standardised education system that were to operate as instruments of normalisation, applies as much today as it did in the eighteenth century. The relevance of Foucault’s conceptualisation of the Norm to the discourse of FBV is clear, as the empirical material in Chapters 8 and 9 demonstrates. Both Muslim teachers and their students expressed anxiety about the racial messages conveyed by FBVs through their experiences of its enactments in their schools. Their interviews show evidence of how teacher enactments of FBVs mobilised a binary division between those deemed loyal to British values, and those positioned as suspect. The degree to which teachers and students adhere to FBVs establishes the extent to which they align to or deviate from the racial norm, as Foucault argues, educational techniques of normalisation enable measurement of ‘a whole range of degrees of normality, indicating membership of a homogeneous social body, but also playing a part in the classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank’ (Foucault, 1991b: 184). British values as the Norm, impose racial and cultural homogeneity. Disciplinary power/knowledge techniques such as the Prevent duty and Channel collect data and profile those who deviate, making ‘it possible to measure gaps’ (Foucault, 1991b: 184). The Norm, ‘homogeneity’ Foucault states, ‘is the rule’ and its purpose is to absorb difference and reform those the discourse has marked as abnormal and the delinquent. The requirements that teachers actively promote FBVs through cross curricular SMSC, in other words through all subjects, is an example of the way in which the normalisation process enters the very capillaries of school life. Discipline, Foucault argues, operates as an expression of the micro physics of power. Students considered to be at risk of being

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drawn into terrorism and the Channel process are subject to the instruments of normalisation that Foucault calls ‘the examination’, by which he means observations, surveillance, in addition to the conventional written examination. The purpose of these techniques of examination is to enable the ‘normalizing gaze’ to make discipline visible, establishing ‘a visibility through which one differentiates …and judges…’ (Foucault, 1991b: 184). Foucault uses the image of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to characterise the all-pervasive normalising gaze. The Panopticon is a central tower, overlooking a prison, a madhouse or school (Foucault, 1991b: 200) that allows the ‘supervisor’ to surveil ‘constantly’. Foucault gives the example of a school with a Panoptic tower that allows the Head teacher to ensure that ‘there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time…to induce… a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1991b: 201). From this description, it is clear that the way schools function is panoptic, irrespective of whether a tower is included in their design. The point Foucault is making is that under constant surveillance, the hyper visible inmates of a panoptic institution, become self-regulating and selfdisciplining, the docile bodies of discourse. The ‘everyday panopticisms’ (Foucault, 1991b: 212) are all too evident in the constant high stakes audits and mock inspections that education establishments constantly impose upon teachers and students. The panoptic gaze is, of course, a feature of the Prevent duty requirement which requires teachers to report students considered to be at risk of being drawn into terrorism, effectively transforming an educational site into a pre-crime space. In this way, the disciplinary power at work in Prevent and FBV turns schools and colleges into ‘a sort of social quarantine’, operating as an ‘infra law’, extending the requirements of the law, ‘to the infinitesimal level of individual lives’ (Foucault, 1991b: 211). Biopower Foucault’s theorisation of power continued to develop after the publication of Discipline and Punish in the lecture series he gave at the College de France in the late seventies and the three volumes of ‘The History of Sexuality’. In the first volume, The Will to Knowledge, published in 1976, Foucault outlines his theory of biopower. Foucault argues that the sovereign power exercised in the execution of Damiens underwent a profound transformation in the late eighteenth century, leading him to

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claim, ‘one might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life, or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault, 1998: 138). This power to foster life is the power at work in the disciplines, power which works to control, monitor and optimise rather than destroy its subjects. However, the disciplines are primarily centred on the body of the individual social subject in order to increase its docility. The other pole of this power to foster life that Foucault refers to as biopower, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, taking the species body, the population as its target. Biopower does not replace disciplinary power, it complements and integrates it. Power in its biopolitical form is concerned with populations, particularly the urban populations that emerged in the beginning of the industrial period, phenomena ‘that are aleatory and unpredictable’ (Foucault, 2004: 246). Biopower operates through biopolitics, to deal with segments of the population that require governmental interventions and the deployment of security mechanisms, ‘installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings, so as to optimize a state of life’ (Foucault, 2004: 246). FBV and Prevent operate through both poles of modern power, targeting the individual and populations it has designated as suspect. In ‘Spooked! How not to prevent violent extremism’ Arun Kundnani points out that government claims that the Prevent strategy was community led were false and ‘that local authorities were pressured to accept Prevent funding in direct proportion to the number of Muslims in their area- in effect, constructing the Muslim population as a “suspect community”’ (Kundnani, 2009: 6). Kundnani’s assessment is echoed in a recent Institute for Race Relations (IRR) report, which states that, ‘the deprivation provisions of 2002 onwards, along with the measures making citizenship harder to acquire, such as the ‘life in Britain’ test, are just one aspect of measures targeting Muslim communities, in Britain and abroad, in the past two decades, which have helped to turn British Muslims into a ‘suspect community’ (IRR, 2022, 14). Similarly, the Peoples’ Review of Prevent (Holmwood & Aitlhadj, 2022: 72) offers further evidence of the biopolitical targeting of the Muslim population in its analysis of data on population distributions taken from the 2011 census, which shows that 73% of Muslims in England and Wales live in Prevent Priority Area (PPA) in contrast with 35.5% of the population taken as a whole. As a biopolitical strategy, this data indicates that government regards the Muslim community as a radicalisation risk requiring regulation.

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The updated 2021 Home Office official statistics report, ‘Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent programme’, England and Wales, April 2020–March 2021’ (Home Office, 2021), reflects a more generalised, diffuse referral pattern in the post-Brexit, covid lockdown context. A key finding is that there were more ‘Extreme-Right Wing’ referrals in 2021, than Islamist referrals. Right-wing extremist referrals accounted for 25% of the total number, compared with 22% referrals due to concerns with Islamist radicalisation. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation report ‘Brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities’ (Goodwin & Heath, 2016) identified a correlation between communities where incomes, education and skill levels are below the national average and strong support for the Leave campaign. The report’s authors, Goodwin and Heath, found that strongest support for Brexit was in areas where, ‘a large percentage of the population did not have any qualification and were ill-equipped to thrive amid a post-industrial and increasingly competitive economy…operating in the broader context of globalisation’ (Goodwin & Heath, 2016). The Brexit campaign was characterised by xenophobic anti- immigrant racism and a surge in aggressive defensive English nationalism. Research on social media undertaken by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) (Smith & Colliver, 2016) found that far-right groups all ‘amplified their online reach’ during the referendum, with one group, British Unity, increasing its visibility on Twitter by almost 12,000% during the campaign. ISD also found evidence that the far-right English Defence League gained more online support and were discussed in a positive way online both after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox and the EU referendum result (Smith & Colliver, 2016: 1). Similarly, interviews with supporters of the EDL and other far-right groups undertaken by Simon Winlow, during the referendum period, found a strong relationship between social class, structural and economic decline, and English nationalism. In a blog for Bristol Policy Press (Winlow, 2016), Winlow comments on the sense of betrayal by mainstream politicians expressed by his participants, ‘Many of our contacts believed that, for them, the best days were gone…their neighbourhoods were falling apart. Longestablished families were moving out and immigrants were moving in. Their jobs were insecure, and their lifestyles were declining. The older men displayed an entirely understandable nostalgic attachment to times past’ (Winlow, 2016).

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Some of the data in Chapter 9 reflects the impact of Brexit on the attitudes of students in socially and economically deprived, predominantly white communities where a high leave vote was recorded. The teacher interviews show that for some of these teachers, FBV and the Prevent duty function as the frame through which teachers are disciplining that other construction of the neoliberal ‘post racial’, the ‘white’ working class. In the interview data, the home terror threat narrative elides with white discontent, expressed through pupils’ racialisation of religion. As Rhodes states, white groups sharing white skin colour are not equal, or equally white (Rhodes, in Kapoor, Kalra & Rhodes, 2013). The respect for faiths advocated in FBV forms part of a strategic governmental reinvention of a national postimperial multicultural British imaginary, but this is multiculturalism as a form of symbolic relief. Through the implementation of FBVs these white pupils are to become unproblematic classless multicultural citizens. Inclusion in this discourse is disciplinary, normalising, code for inclusion in the dominant culture of the nation, ‘our way of life’. But this is multiculturalism without substantiation, it is a chimera, a front to maintain the appearance of hybridity and inclusivity in a competitive, individualistic environment which obfuscates the culpability of political elites in producing the structural inequalities that triggered the Brexit ‘cry of rage’ that teachers are now charged with governing. On appointment as Chief OfSTED inspector, Amanda Spielman made British values the focus of her Birmingham speech to Birmingham Education Partnership. Covering broad ground, Spielman references the Trojan horse enquiry and Islamist extremism, but extends the normalising gaze to the children of poorer communities stating, …It is especially important that a rich and deep curriculum helps to anchor British Values within schools. And by the curriculum I don’t just mean subject choices and the timetable – but the real substance of what is taught in schools…it really matters, especially for disadvantaged children, who are less likely to have any gaps filled at home (Spielman, 2017).

The biopolitics of a governmental discourse aimed at rehabilitating troublesome elements of ‘broken Britain’ are revealed in this extract. FBV is flexible, adaptable, redrawing its borders not only to discipline the Muslim subjects of the Prevent discourse, but more broadly the ‘disadvantaged’, the left behind, the white ‘discontents’ of Brexit Britain.

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Spielman’s speech and the teacher interviews reveal how FBV and Prevent operate as biopower, with one important element circulating between the disciplinary and regulatory, ‘applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The element …that circulates between the two is the Norm’ (Foucault, 2004: 252). Biopolitics and Racism Foucault argues that the identification of troublesome groups in sections of the population that the normalising biopower seeks to regulate, is a form of racism, ‘the modern state can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions’ (Foucault, 2004: 254). By racism Foucault is referring to the way biopolitical power regulates the population, ‘by strategically fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls…it is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat the population as a mixture of races…to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism; to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower’ (Foucault, 2004: 254). The strategic concentration of Prevent resources in local authorities with high Muslim populations and policy makers’ concerns with white working-class underachievement, particularly amongst boys, and their utilisation of Prevent and FBVs to govern communities where sympathies for right-wing nationalism has taken root, bear testimony to Foucault’s analysis of biopolitical racism. Foucault argues that the biopolitical power at work in modern liberal societies such as the UK, requires strategies of security. Prevent and FBV are security strategies that exemplify Foucault’s conceptualisation of the way power operates to govern the population. However, government in liberal societies is inherently contradictory. Liberal societies require freedom, but this is a freedom that must be regulated, produced and organised, it is a concession of liberal government. There is, therefore, a relationship between government, liberalism and security in Foucault’s work that can be brought together in his concept of governmentality.

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Governmentality The concept of governmentality is central to this study. Governmentality is a portmanteau word, combining ‘government’ with ‘mentality’, which, as Gillies suggests, can be translated to mean ‘rationalities of rule’ (Gillies, 2015: 15). In his lectures on the history of the art of government, Foucault refers to government as ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Foucault, 2002a: 341), by which he means the strategies and techniques that are used to control and shape peoples conduct, such as schooling. Foucault offers a definition in his lecture on the arts of government (1977–1978), By this word I mean…the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge, political economy, and as its essential technical means, apparatuses of security…resulting…in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and…in the development of a whole complex of knowledges (savoirs). (Foucault, A: 219–220)

Governmentality is a complex concept, but it serves as a valuable analytical grip for describing the mentalities of rule that govern the human subjects of the FBV/Prevent discourse. There is, however, a paradox at the heart of the liberal governmentality operating through FBVs. FBVs espouse democratic freedom and the rule of law whilst simultaneously requiring teachers to surveil and report students deemed to be at risk of radicalisation. However, this contradiction is integral to liberal society. Liberal freedoms cannot be exercised in an unlimited fashion. Liberal government operates through the establishment of limitations and controls on the ‘free play of forces’ that are the very basis of liberal society. Security is, therefore, the other side and the condition of liberal government and the rationalities of rule it brings into play. Foucault’s theorisation of power is not teleological or developmental, indeed, he talked of, the ‘overlapping’s, interactions, and echoes’ of the various power technologies (Foucault in Lemke, 2016: 90). Liberty and domination are two sides of the same coin in liberal governmentality. Sovereignty, discipline, biopower and governmentality do not supersede one another, but are mutually supportive,

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‘We should not see things as the replacement of a society of discipline by a society, of say government. In fact, we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management’ (Foucault, 2002a: 219). In the late 70s Foucault commented on the creeping authoritarianism and securitisation of the liberal state caused by the threat of left-wing terror groups. Foucault concluded that ‘strategies of security’ are both, ‘liberalism’s other face and its very condition’ (Foucault, 2010: 65). ‘The game of freedom and security’ he argued is at the heart of liberal ‘governmental reason’ (Foucault, 2010: 65). So, ‘there is no liberalism without a culture of danger’. As discussed earlier, biopolitical power operates through normalisation to regulate and govern aleatory and unpredictable elements of the population, such as the British Muslim communities targeted in Prevent funding or the flows of refugees seeking asylum in the UK from the civil wars in Iraq and Syria. Security and freedom for Foucault, are not opposing principles, they are both elements of a single technology of government (Lemke, 2016: 49). The securitisation of education as the domestic front line of the war on terror, should, perhaps be seen less in terms of a radical departure from its traditional pastoral function, but more in terms of its governmental role. After all, for Foucault, government is ultimately concerned with supervision and surveillance, ‘only to intervene when it sees that something is not happening according to the general mechanics of behaviour’ (Foucault, 2010: 67), which is when the hard machinery of the strategies of security are enlisted in by the ‘government of fear’ (Etat de peur), (Foucault in Lemke, 2016: 52). Implications In the preceding sections I have tried to show how Foucault’s work on discourse and power offers an analytical framework for interrogating the ways in which the FBV/Prevent discourse shapes the subjectivities of the teachers and students interviewed for this study. Governmentality, I argue, is the analytical grip that brings together the theoretical tools deployed in this analysis. The rationality of rule in the FBV/Prevent discourse is a liberal governmentality of fear or ‘unease’, but liberalism, as argued above, is contradictory. On the one hand, in its neoliberal form, liberalism is the producer of economic and individual freedoms, and on the other hand, in its neo conservative form, it must operate according to the principle of risk calculation, as Foucault states, ‘the freedom of economic processes

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must not be a danger…either for individuals or for society’ (Foucault, 2010: 65–66). So, there is a tension in this constant arbitration between the freedom of individuals and the security of individuals in the liberal governmentality of fear playing out in the biopolitics of FBV and Prevent. The teachers interviewed for this study are the educational subjects of a radical neoliberal policy experiment taking place in British education. Since the 1988 Education Reform Act was enacted under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration, schools have operated in an increasingly competitive and deregulated environment. School performance data, in the form of publically published league tables, and inspection reports provide parent consumers with valuable data upon which to base the choice of their child’s school on. League tables act as a dividing practice placing schools in competition with each other, ‘with the successful ones flourishing and the unsuccessful ones closing’ (Gillies, 2015: 76). Stephen Ball argues that these neoliberal education policy reforms work through three policy technologies that shape teacher conduct and subjectivity, ‘the market, managerialism and performativity’ (Ball, 2003: 215). In 2010, under the Coalition government, the radical neoliberal education experiment moved to another level with the enactment of the Academies Act, which took schools out of local authority control, placed schools and school budgets into the hands of sponsors with the power to dictate teachers’ pay and conditions. In the deregulated neoliberal Academy, individual teacher performance determines progression. Drawing from Lyotard, Ball defines performativity as ‘a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition, and change based on rewards (both material and symbolic). The performances (of individual subjects or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of ‘quality’, or ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection’ (Ball, 2003: 216). The high stakes performative neoliberal education discourse puts academy schools in competition with each other and requires enterprising, entrepreneurial education managers and teacher subjects. We have already seen how discipline produces self-regulating, self-surveilling docile subjects. Foucault’s analysis of the self-governing subject applies equally in the context of the teachers required to constantly check their practice for OfSTED compliance. Foucault characterises the neoliberal subject as homo oeconomicus, ‘an entrepreneur…of himself…being for himself, his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for

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himself the source of [his] earnings’ (Foucault, 2010: 226). The selfregulating teacher of neoliberal education discourse is both self-surveilling and entrepreneurial, only as successful as his or her last set of results or inspection grade. Of course, to suggest that the only move available to teachers working in a context shaped by the ‘terrors of performativity’ (Ball, 2003), positions them as cultural dupes, devoid of agency. Again, Foucault offers analytical tools and a frame through which to make sense of the ways in which teacher subjects navigate the contradictory education policy discourses at work in their lives. In an interview given in 1984, Foucault stated, …I have always been interested in this problem, even if I framed it somewhat differently. I have tried to find out how the human subject fits into certain games of truth, whether they were truth games that take the form of a science or refer to a scientific model, or truth games such as those one may encounter in institutions or practices of control. (Foucault, 2000: 281)

In an earlier interview given in 1982, Foucault talked about his work on the technologies of the self, by which he meant the practices of selfformation human beings perform upon themselves, but he points out that technologies of the self and the technologies of power, ‘hardly ever function separately’ (Foucault, 2000: 225). Translated into the current educational environment the technologies of power can be seen operating through policy requirements and performativity and the self-forming techniques are actions teachers might choose to perform on themselves within the discursive parameters of their highly regulated professional lives. Self-forming activities might be continuing professional development, the acquisition of qualifications, or ethical self-forming activities drawing from critical educational theory and practice that opposes the dominant truth game of performativity. For example, the self-governing activities of the activist teacher with an allegiance to social and racial justice, or to critical pedagogy, take expression through an agonistic, critical self-reflexive relationship to an educational discourse that is in competition with the neoliberal discourses of productivity and performativity and the governmentality of fear operating within the FBV/Prevent discourse. Such accommodations may produce a sense of dissonance or be the source of the resisting teachers ethical mode of subjectivation,

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their telos, as Foucault points out, ‘where there is power, there is resistance…and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault, 1998: 95).

Conclusion In the next chapter, I will outline the methods utilised to gain insights into the ways the teachers interviewed for this study navigated the ‘incitements’ of the FBV/Prevent discourse. This chapter began with an extract from ‘The Subject and Power’ where Foucault states the aim of his genealogical investigations was to address the question of how human beings are made into subjects. The next chapter addresses Foucault’s question in the context of the enactments of the FBVs/Prevent discourse to address the following critical questions, What sorts of dividing practices are at work in FBVs? How do they classify, rank and hierarchise teacher and student subjects? How do the teacher subjects of the FBV discourse interpret and interact with FBVs, do they resist, or has it given rise to new forms of subjectivity? To undertake this investigation requires researchers to engage with what Stephen Ball calls the rich empirical underlife of education, by which he means teachers in their localised, contingent settings, spaces where ‘policy as practice is created in trialectic of dominance, resistance and chaos/freedom’ (Ball, 1994: 11). The methods adopted to undertake this research are genealogical and foreground the narratives of the teachers who are the instruments of FBVs policy, its point of articulation, translation and enactment.

References Abbas, T. (2017). The ‘Trojan Horse’ Plot and the Fear of Muslim power in British State Schools. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs., 37 (4), 426–441. Ball, S. (1994). Education Reform. Open University Press. Ball, S. (2003). The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity. Journal of Education Policy., 18(2), 215–228. Ball, S. (2012). Introducing Monsieur Foucault. In S. Ball (Ed.), Foucault and Education. Disciplines and Knowledge. Routledge. Cameron, D. (2015). PM at 2015 Global Security Forum. Available at: www.gov. uk/government/speeches/pm-at-2015-global-security-forum

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Cameron, D. (2016). We Won’t Let Women Be Second Class Citizens. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-wont-let-women-be-second-classcitizens-brh07l6jttb DfE. (2015). The Prevent Duty. Departmental Advice for Schools and Childcare Providers. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439598/prevent-duty-dep artmental-advice-v6.pdf Dreyfus, H., & Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault. The University of Chicago Press. Fadyl, J., Nicholls, D., & McPherson, K. (2012). Interrogating discourse: The application of Foucault’s methodological discussion to specific inquiry. Health, 17 (5), 478–494. Foucault, M. (1980). The Confession of the Flesh. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge. Pearson Education Limited. Foucault, M. (1981). The Order of Discourse. In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Routledge Kegan Paul Foucault, M. (1991a). The Means of Correct Training. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1991b). Discipline and Punish. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1992). The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality: 2. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1998). The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality: 1. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2000). Michel Foucault. Ethics. Essential Works of Foucault 1954– 1984. Volume 1 (P. Rabinow, Ed.). Penguin. Foucault, M. (2001). Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Routledge. Foucault, M. (2002a). The Subject and Power. In J. Faubion (Ed.), Michel Foucault. Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Volume 3. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002b). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge. Foucault, M. (2003). The Birth of the Clinic. Routledge. Foucault, M. (2004). Society Must Be Defended. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2009). The Order of Things. Routledge. Foucault, M. (2010). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan. Gillies, D. (2015). Educational Leadership and Michel Foucault. Routledge. Goodwin, M., & Heath, O. (2016). Brexit Vote Explained: Poverty, Low Skills and Lack of Opportunities. Available at: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/bre xit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities Holmwood, J. & Aitlhadj, L. (2022). The Peoples’ Review of Prevent. Available at: https://peoplesreviewofprevent.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ mainreportlatest.pdf Home Office. (2017). Individuals Referred to and Supported Through the Prevent Programme, April 2015 to March 2016. Statistical Bulletin. Available

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at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/677646/individuals-referred-supported-pre vent-programme-apr2015-mar2016.pdf Home Office. (2021). Individuals Referred to and Supported Through the Prevent Programme, England and Wales, April 2020 to March 2021. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/individuals-referred-to-andsupported-through-the-prevent-programme-april-2020-to-march-2021/ind ividuals-referred-to-and-supported-through-the-prevent-programme-englandand-wales-april-2020-to-march-2021#:~:text=In%20the%20year%20ending% 20March,sector%20(1%2C221%3B%2025%25) Institute of Race Relations. (2022). Citizenship: From Right to Privilege: A Background Paper on the History of Citizenship Stripping Powers. Available at: https://irr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Deprivation-of-cit izenship-Final-LR.pdf Kundnani, A. (2009). Spooked! How Not to Prevent Violent Terrorism. Institute of Race Relations. Available at: Spooked (irr.org.uk) Lemke, T. (2016). Foucault. Routledge. Lynch, R. (2014). Discourse. In L. Lawlor, & J. Nale (Eds.), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. Cambridge University Press. Marshall, J. (2012). Foucault and Educational Research. In S. Ball (Ed.), Foucault and Education. Disciplines and Knowledge. Routledge. Miah, S. (2017). Muslims, Schooling and Security. Trojan Horse, Prevent and Racial Politics. Palgrave Pivot. Mills, S. (2004). Discourse. Routledge. Rhodes, J. (2013). Remaking Whiteness in the Postracial UK. In N. Kapoor, V. Klara, & J. Rhodes (Eds.), The State of Race. Palgrave Macmillan. Spielman, A. (2017). Amanda Spielman’s Speech at the Birmingham Education Partnership Conference. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/spe eches/amanda-spielmans-speech-at-the-birmingham-school-partnership-con ference Smith, M., & Colliver, S. (2016). The Impact of Brexit on Far Right Groups in the UK: Research Briefing. Available at: https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-con tent/uploads/2016/07/Impact-of-Brexit.pdf Winlow, S. (2016). Trump, Brexit and the EDL: The Left’s Failure to Capture the Electorate’s Trust. Available at: https://policypress.wordpress.com/2016/ 11/10/trump-brexit-and-the-edl-the-lefts-failure-to-capture-the-electoratestrust/

CHAPTER 7

Teacher Narratives: Parr¯esia and the Courage of Truth

Introduction Chapter 6 presented Foucault’s theorisation of discourse, power and knowledge to make an argument for the application of his analytical frames to the FBV/Prevent discourse. In this chapter, the argument is developed to support the choice of methods used in data collection. Genealogies, as we have seen are histories of things that are supposed to have no history, they are ‘anti-sciences’ (Foucault, 1980: 83). Foucault’s problematising project aimed to trouble hegemonic histories by offering a counter narrative of the emergence of modern social institutions such as the clinic or the school, to show that the established order is not a necessary state of state of affairs but the result of the ‘hazardous play of dominations’ (Foucault, 1991a: 83). Genealogy reveals disruptions and discontinuities to produce a counter memory to official history, it ‘is a methodology of suspicion and critique, an array of de-familiarizing procedures and re-conceptualizations that pertain not just to any object of knowledge, but to any procedure of knowledge production’ (Hook, 2005: 4–5). Genealogy as critique utilises empirical materials which privilege subjugated voices and delegitimised knowledges, against hegemonic discourses, as Foucault’s work on the ‘abnormals’ in texts such as Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 2001) and Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1991b) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_7

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demonstrates. Foucault rejected universals, and grand narratives in favour of local knowledge, reflecting anthropological attention to ‘thick description’ in works such as Discipline and Punish. Indeed, in an interview in 1966, Foucault described his research in terms of ethnography, stating, ‘I could define it (my research) as an analysis of the cultural facts which characterize our culture. In this sense, it would be something like ethnology of the culture to which we belong’ (Neto, 2018: 10). His interest in the ‘rich empirical underlife’ of discourse is shown in his view that power operates through ‘micro-mechanisms’ (Foucault, 1980: 101) in the quotidian spaces and daily rituals of institutions such as the schoolhouse. Foucault characterises the way in which power pervades the social body by describing ‘its capillary form of existence’ (Foucault, 1980: 39) by which he means, ‘the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’ (Foucault, 1980: 39). Teacher Narratives: Subjugated Knowledges The methods adopted in this study reflect Foucault’s concern with the ways normalising power permeates ‘and reproduces itself down to and including the most molecular elements of society’ (Foucault, 1980: 99). The study aims to critically consider the ways in which teachers circulate between the threads of the net like FBV/Prevent assemblage, ‘simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power’ (Foucault, 1980: 98). This is not, however, a sterile exercise undertaken by a detached observer. Indeed, such an approach would represent another objectification of teachers already positioned by FBVs policy in its grid of intelligibility. The aim of this enquiry is to foreground teacher narratives, with particular attention to those teachers and their accounts of their students, who are marginalised and targeted by FBV/Prevent for reform and correction. It takes their concerns, dilemmas and positioning seriously. Data collection through interviews in schools and classrooms located in communities stratified by discourses of class, race and culture reflects Foucault’s emphasis on local criticism in recognition of the discontinuous and fragile character of social reality that cannot be captured by totalising supra historical ‘global’ theories (Foucault, 1980: 80). Indeed, thinking in terms of a ‘totality’, Foucault argues, ‘proved a hindrance’ (Foucault, 1980: 81).

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The narratives of over regulated teachers, subject to the terrors of performativity and students reduced to value added knowledge containers correspond to what Foucault calls ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 1980: 81). Subjugated knowledges are ‘located low down on the hierarchy’ (Foucault, 1980: 82). In the hierarchy of performative education discourse the school leader is the ‘hero’ (Ball, 2003) and managerialism is privileged. Teacher esteem is linked to measurable performance, examination results and other forms of calculation. Dialogue and decision making is framed by metrics, performance data and targets set by the education regulator OfSTED. Space for open, creative pedagogical discussions might be found in staff and department meetings but in the hierarchy of educational discourse, directives and the latest curriculum framework trump and even ‘disqualify’ teacher knowledges developed in the localised context of the school. It is in this sense that I argue, teacher narratives can be characterised as ‘subjugated’ or as ‘popular’ knowledge (le savoir des gens) (Foucault, 1980: 82). Foucault defines popular knowledge, not as mere ‘common sense knowledge’, but as the ‘particular, local, regional knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980: 82) that teachers, as ‘street level bureaucrats’ develop and use in their professional lives. The value of collecting teacher narratives and their accounts of their students’ experiences, is that it is through these subjugated knowledges that we gain ‘historical knowledge of the struggles’ entailed by enacting policy (Foucault, 1980: 83) and the ‘violence of marginalization’ (Hook, 2005: 5) experienced by teachers and students positioned as suspect. The interview materials enable analysis of the ‘painstaking rediscovery of struggles’ (Foucault, 1980: 83) faced by the teachers and student subjects of the FBV/Prevent discourse. Foucault’s definition of genealogy is the ‘union of erudite knowledge and local memories’ which allow researchers to ‘establish a historical knowledge of struggles’ and to make use of this knowledge ‘tactically’ (Foucault, 1980: 83). He goes on to state that his emphasis on local knowledges is not a ‘lyrical right to ignorance’ (Foucault, 1980: 84). The value of recovering subjugated voices lies in their capacity to trace ‘discursive formations of power and control’, as Hook argues, the genealogical method enables researchers to reveal the ruses of power, ‘to enforce an awareness that things have not always been as they are’ (Hook, 2005: 7). The purpose of genealogy is critique, by deploying oppositional knowledges, to up turn the ‘self-evident’ truths of normalising truth regimes such as the FBV/Prevent discourse.

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Qualitative Method and Foucault The empirical material collected for this study consists of extensive interviews with teachers conducted over the 2015–2019 period. The data consists of teachers narrating their views, understanding and experience of FBVs and the Prevent strategy as they were implemented and enacted in their schools. The interviews are qualitative and the research style adopted in this study is in line with Denzin and Lincoln’s characterisation of qualitative research as enquiry that places emphasis ‘on the qualities of entities and on processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or measured…in terms of quantity, amount, intensity, or frequency’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005: 10). Denzin and Lincoln outline five broad characteristics of qualitative research that are shared by the methods adopted in this study, namely: Post positivism, an acceptance of postmodern sensibilities, an emphasis on capturing the individual’s point of view, examination of the constraints of everyday life and the endeavour to secure rich descriptions of the social reality or the problem being examined (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005: 11– 12). All these characteristics were present in my data collection methods, but the analytic that framed the method was inspired by my reading of Foucault. Foucault’s genealogical method has shaped the ontological, epistemological, methodological and ethical orientation of this study, the data collection process and the analysis offered in the presentation of the teacher narratives in the findings chapter. My engagement with Foucault’s thought and the application of his critical concepts to the truth game of FBV/Prevent belongs to the post-qualitative moment as described by St Pierre, in the sense that the analysis offered in this book doesn’t follow a formula for Foucauldian critique. There is no book titled ‘Ten steps for Foucauldian genealogical analysis’ (St Pierre, 2017: 2) as St Pierre notes. A post-qualitative Foucauldian analysis ‘requires reading the broad range of Foucault’s work to understand how genealogy works with his archaeology, his power/knowledge reading, his final ethical analysis, his governmentality, biopolitics and so on’ (St Pierre, 2017: 2) but also requires a willingness to experiment with these conceptual tools. St. Pierre writes, post-qualitative inquiry ‘cannot be accomplished within the methodological enclosure’ (St Pierre, 2017: 2), it ‘cannot be measured, predicted, controlled, systematized, formalized, described in a textbook or called forth by pre-existing, approved methodological processes, methods and practices’ (St Pierre, 2017: 2).

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This encounter with the problematics of the FBV/Prevent discourse has required my engagement with a variety of materials, policy texts, politicians’ speeches, newspaper reports and interviews to undertake analysis and interpretation. The research process has been ‘gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary’ (Foucault, 1991b: 76). In the following sections it is the teacher narratives that provide the material for this interrogation of the ‘play of dominations’ at work in education policy. However, interviews privilege the ‘speaking subject’. In his earlier work, Foucault makes it clear that he was not interested in the speaking subject. Resolution of this tension requires some experimentation with Foucault’s broad oeuvre and his theorisation of subjectivity. Foucault’s work is characterised by his avoidance of fixity. His books are ‘becomings’, expressions of the changing intellectual, ethical and political trajectories of his life, marked by an artistry of the self, as he states, ‘The work of modifying one’s own thought and that of others seems to me to be the intellectual’s reason for being’ (Foucault, in Ball, 2019: 1). However, this tentative and experimental character to his work could also be seen as ‘inconsistent, sometimes imprecise, always contrarian’ (Ball, 2019: 1). But, as Ball argues, to ignore the twists, reversals and discontinuities in Foucault’s work is ‘to miss a great deal of the point of Foucault’ (Ball, 2019: 1). It is in his theorisation of the subject that we find some of the most interesting and analytically generative shifts in thinking. In his later work on the technologies of the self, Foucault’s theorisation of subjectivity moved from his preoccupation with the effects of discourse and the ‘technologies of domination’ (Foucault, 2000: 225) to an interest in the resisting and agentic subject. His interest in the relationship between human beings and the games of truth that operate through institutions and the power/knowledge nexus remained, but he corrects his earlier thinking, stating, Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between one-self and others. (Foucault, 2000: 225)

In his later lecture series on later Greek ethics and philosophy at the College de France, Foucault shows an interest in the status of the speaker and ‘truth telling’ as an agonistic practice he refers to as parr¯esia (Foucault, 2011). These lectures, ‘The Government of the Self and Others’ (Foucault, 2010) and ‘The Courage of Truth’ (Foucault, 2011),

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are of significance for this study because they emphasise the possibilities for teacher and student resistance, agency and the work of freedom, ‘liberty as a practice’ (Foucault, in Ball, 2019: 10), within the discursive parameters of the education truth regime in which they are located. The choice to include interviews enables insights into the ways that discourse constrains or enables ‘writing, speaking and thinking’ (Ball, 2019: 11), but by drawing from Foucault’s later work on the hermeneutics of the self, the speaking subject is not reduced to the over determined dupe of power. Indeed, to do so would be to reduce power to domination and there would be no scope for educators or students to resist policy discourse or to engage in fearless speech or the ‘practices of the self’ (Foucault, 2000: 282). In point of fact, in an interview given in 1978, Foucault informed the journalists that, ‘I don’t construct my analyses in order to say, “This is the way things are, you are trapped”. I say these things insofar as I believe it enables us to transform them’ (Foucault in Scheurich & McKenzie, in Denzin & Lincoln, 2005: 861). The Participants As we have seen, Foucault’s theorisation of the subject and power changed in his later work. He understood power as a triangle, where different forms of power might coexist and operate in the same location or social institution. Expressions of sovereign and disciplinary power, and neoliberal governmentality might all be circulating in the same site. The schools and colleges of the FBV/Prevent discourse encapsulate this power triangle where self-governing teacher subjects surveil suspect students as required by the hard legal machinery of the counter-terror and security act. It is in the capillaries of the power network, the classrooms, corridors and staff meetings where teacher and student subjects interact with and enact the discourse. Their narratives reveal the ways in which they shape and are shaped by the requirements of FBV/Prevent and the extent to which the discourse is rendered fragile, resisted, reappropriated or accommodated. The teacher interviews and their reports of the impact of FBVs on their students, form a documentary record of the power effects of muscular liberalism in action, at the sharp end of discourse, enabling us to begin to ask, At what price can subjects speak the truth about themselves? (Foucault, 2020: 444)

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Data Collection Interview data were collected from three cohorts of pre-service student teachers following a one-year PGCE in secondary religious education 11–16 leading to the award of qualified teacher status (QTS) based at the teacher training institution where I am employed. I was the Course Leader and tutor for two of the groups featured in this study. The third PGCE group were led by a colleague after I had stepped down from the role and was no longer involved in the PGCE. In addition to the pre-service teachers, interview data was also collected from in-service teachers of religious education and humanities subjects at various stages of their careers. The in-service teachers were members of my institution’s professional teacher training school partnership and had responsibility for mentoring trainee teachers in their school settings. All the teachers were volunteers and provided informed consent for their participation with the right to withdraw at any point and to have their data destroyed. Participants’ identities were protected with the use of culturally appropriate pseudonyms. The sample was, therefore, a purposive sample in which participants were recruited on the basis, of ‘judgement of their typicality’ and ‘possession of the particular characteristics being sought’ (Cohen et al., 2008: 114–115). The pre- and in-service teachers are ‘knowledgeable people’ with the required in-depth knowledge of the FBV requirements. As beginning teachers, the pre-service teachers’ possess in-depth knowledge of the professional requirements of the DfE Teachers standards through continuous assessment of this knowledge throughout the course of their training. To pass their assessment and to demonstrate compliance with the requirements of both OfSTED and the DfE, they were required to produce portfolios of detailed evidence demonstrating how they have met the professional standards, and this, of course, includes Part 2 of the Teachers’ Standards, the requirement not to undermine fundamental British values (DfE, 2011). Similarly, the in-service teachers’ knowledge of FBVs and of Prevent is a legal duty required by the counter-terror and security act, subject to inspection scrutiny and audit. In Foucauldian terms, the pre- and in-service teachers are the subjects of discourse and the power knowledge truth regime of FBVs/Prevent, might play several roles as ‘adversary, target, support or handle’ (Foucault, 1998: 98). In these ways the purposive sampling employed here enables access to those at the sharp end of this policy, with the professional roles, power in the

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case of the senior in-service teachers, access to networks, expertise and experience to offer insights into the ways the FBV discourse was playing out in their schools and practice. Free Spokenness The interviews and the data collection process are as much a part of my narrative and experience as the teachers I interviewed. At the time I was an ITE tutor, subject to and constrained by the requirements of FBV policy, charged with ensuring that the teachers I was training were conversant and compliant with the FBVs. Both I and the teachers are the post-human subjects of discourse, ‘continually fashioned in practices’, (Britzman, 2020: 36), but not without freedom and agency as Foucault argues in his later work on the technologies of the self. The discursive subject can engage in ethical self-constituting practices as ‘the practice of freedom’. In a late interview with Rux Martin Foucault stated, ‘Man is a thinking being…My role- and that is too emphatic a word- is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truths, as evidence, themes which have been built up at a certain moment in history, and so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. … All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence’ (Foucault, in Martin, 1988: 10–11). The group interviews functioned as a site of agonistic deconstruction, problematisation, and resignification. They are a negotiated accomplishment, ‘inter-views’, co-constructions where the teachers as ‘thinking beings’ were able to talk frankly about their experiences and where structurally vulnerable young people were able to contest the way they were being positioned by the games of truth playing out in the FBV discourse. In this sense the group interviews functioned as liminal ‘spaces of freedom’ where educational ‘freedoms’ can still be enjoyed (Foucault, in Martin, 1988: 11) and the exchange of views revealed ‘the arbitrariness of institutions’ and ‘how many changes can still be made’ (Foucault, in Martin, 1988: 11). There is risk entailed in this practice because it is potentially subversive. The interviews became the space of freedom where I, the teachers and the students were able to engage in the problematisation outlined by Foucault in his discussion of the ‘games of truth’ operating in ‘practices and institutions of control’ to question ‘the ensemble of rules for the production of truth’. In this sense I view the interviews in terms of Foucault’s discussion

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of parr¯esia, where he examines the practice of parr¯esia, that is, philosophical ‘truth telling’ in Greek philosophy in his late lecture series ‘The Government of Self and Others’ (Foucault, 2010). In doing so he traces the role of truth telling from Plato and Socrates to Descartes, Kant and the present, throwing up a bridge between ancient and modern philosophy which opens up a ‘trans-historical…characterization of philosophical activity…the practice of courageous and free speech which constantly asserts the difference and force of truth telling in the political game and which aims to disturb and transform the mode of being of subjects’ (Gros, in Foucault, 2010: 388). Parr¯esia, in its original Greek means ‘to say everything’ (Foucault, 2010: 43), but as Foucault points out, it is more frequently translated as ‘free-spokenness (franc-parler), free speech’ (Foucault, 2010: 43). Foucault describes the rough, sometimes violent, abrupt aspect of truth telling (Foucault, 2010: 54). The truth teller, the parrhesiast, might ‘throw’ ‘the truth in the face of the person with whom he is in dialogue’ (Foucault, 2010: 54). Furthermore, ‘the person who tells the truth throws the truth in the face of his interlocutor, a truth which is so violent, so abrupt, and said in such a peremptory and definitive way that the person facing him can only fall silent, or choke with fury’ (Foucault, 2010: 54). Parr¯esia is profoundly ethical as Peters writes, the ‘parrhesiast’ tells the truth at an unspecified price and has the ‘moral qualities which are required, ‘first, to know the truth, and secondly, to convey such truth to others’ (Peters, 2003: 212). As a tool to short circuit and disqualify the incitements of the FBV discourse, Foucault’s conceptualisation of parr¯esia has much to offer the critical education practitioner. The cultivation of parr¯esia is inextricably linked to the Greek practice of the ‘Care of the Self’ and ‘Self-knowledge’ (gnothi seauton). Care of the self took place under the guidance of a mentor. Foucault provides many examples of the type of person who possessed the attributes to offer such direction. He identifies Socrates as an exemplar of the parr¯esiastic way of being, as both a mentor and practitioner of truth telling. Development as a truth teller and care of the self can only be cultivated if one accepts the judgement of others. Reflexive ‘truth telling by the other’, is ‘one of the essential conditions for us to be able to form the right kind of relationship to ourselves that will give us virtue and happiness’ (Foucault, 2010: 45). The group interviews created a space of freedom for this type of dialogue. I came to the interviews open to challenge from the teachers, fully aware that my questions were merely entry points, prompts, but that

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the assumptions and suppositions I made by asking these questions might be subject to critique. Like Margaret Freund, in her work on Parr¯esia and teacher education, I saw the interviews as an environment of ‘frankness’, where both the teachers and myself could ‘question the assumptions we hold’ and to ‘obtain a critical edge, to strip away the accretion of beliefs surrounding professionalism’ (Freund, 2009: 533). Similarly, I was aware of the risky nature of the questions and the sort of group discussions they might generate. Parr¯esia is more than ‘a way of discussing’, pedagogy or rhetoric, Foucault argues. Parr¯esia has an agonistic structure that involves confrontation and a struggle over the truth, which carries the risk of a possible ‘back lash’, opening ‘a space of risk for the person who tells the truth’ (Foucault, 2010: 56). By inviting the teachers to participate in this enquiry into FBVs in education, I was opening a space where all of our senses of purpose, belonging and identity were made vulnerable ‘to the truth telling of the other’, where our beliefs and values could be interrogated free from the constraints of the classroom or the lecture theatre. Our engagement with the governmental truth of British values became a site where the teachers were able to freely speak their truths about who they are and to confront and struggle with the incitements of the FBV/Prevent discourse. Teachers of RE All the teachers were secondary RE practitioners. Their pedagogical and professional subjectivity was to a greater or lesser extent shaped by their engagements with the pluralistic discourse of RE, providing them with a resource and a perspective on religious, cultural and ontological difference they could draw from that acted as an alternative, competing discourse to the civic nationalism of FBVs. Three of the group interviews included in this study are with preservice teachers. Notwithstanding the prescriptive nature of their training curriculum, these teachers were still fashioning their fluid professional identities. They were encouraged to think critically and reflexively by their RE ITE programme, and perhaps more so than their peers training to teach national curriculum subjects, they were aware of the freedoms that RE offered them as a ‘basic curriculum’ subject. In these ways the pre-service teachers were similar to the ITE cohort interviewed by Lawson and Harrison who ‘saw their pedagogic identity as much more than the dossier of Standards built up through IAP (individual action planning)’ (Lawson et al., 2010: 102).

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The in-service teachers were all experienced RE mentors, responsible for training pre-service teachers. They included a Head of Faculty, two Heads of Department, and four well established classroom teachers. I knew the teachers from my work as the University lead for RE PGCE and had established a relationship of trust and openness with them through our sometimes challenging work and commitment to initial teacher training where frank conversations and free speech (franc parler) are a prerequisite of achieving a successful outcome. Ball, Braun and Maguire’s work on policy actors (Ball et al., 2012) provides a useful analytical device for theorising the positions from which the in-service teachers enacted their roles. As Ball et al. remind us, we should be wary of neat typologies and teachers often combine more than one of the eight types they outline, reflecting what post structuralists would characterise as the multiple, fluid and unfixed nature of professional identity as it seeks to respond to the many conflicting challenges of the settings in which they worked. Depending on their ethnic and religious positioning, the classroom teachers demonstrated a greater tendency towards the transactor role as facilitators and supporters of policy. The middle managers demonstrated a more critical positioning, occupying contradictory subject positions, required to both narrate policy, interpret, select and enforce its meanings but also able to exhibit a parr¯esiastic commitment to truth telling as its critics. For these teachers, at the sharp end of policy, maintaining counter discourse, their own truth about policy enactments of FBVs functioned almost like an exercise in the ‘Care of the Self’, and I became the interlocutor in the dialogue.

Conclusion This chapter has aimed to demonstrate how Foucault’s critical theory can be used to shape both the theoretical framework and the way that empirical data was collected for this study. The chapter has focussed on the concepts of genealogy and parr¯esia and addressed how these concepts can be applied in empirical data collection methods such as interviews. Using Foucault’s discussion of genealogy in Power/Knowledge (Foucault, in Gordon, 1980), I have characterised the teacher and student narratives collected through group and individual interviews, as forms of subjugated knowledge and following Foucault, I argue that these narratives are oppositional forms of knowledge that call into question and disrupt the official governmental discourse on FBVs. I have also sought to make

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the case for using the teacher and student narratives on the basis that they align with Foucault’s later interest in technologies of the self and his theorisations of resisting and agentic subjects, constrained but not over determined by discursive structures. Drawing from Foucault’s later lecture series on the governmentality of the self and the courage of truth I have conceptualised the interviews as a method of data collection in a space of freedom, a space for free spokenness, (franc parler) and truth telling (parr¯esia). Just as the conceptualisation of the narratives as subjugated knowledge places them in opposition to the power/knowledge nexus of the FBV/Prevent discourse, my framing of the interviews as Parr¯esia similarly places the truths of the teachers and their students in opposition to the official governmental discourse and seeks to fulfil the critical purpose of parr¯esia, ‘to tell all’, without ‘concealment’ or reserve (Foucault, 2011: 10). The following chapters ‘tell all’, tracing and documenting the views and experiences of pre- and in-service teachers as they first encounter the requirements of FBV and enact the discourse in their practice, right through to the reflections of a group of experienced educators who gathered to offer their views on FBVs in the aftermath of the EU referendum.

References Ball, S. (2003). The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. Ball, S., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How Schools Do Policy. Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools. Routledge. Ball, S. (Ed.). (2019). Foucault and Education. Putting Theory to Work. Routledge. Britzman, D. (2020). ‘The Question of Belief’: Writing Poststructural Ethnography. In E. St. Pierre & S. Pillow (Eds.), Working the Ruins. Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education. Routledge. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2008). Research Methods in Education. Routledge. Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.). (2005). The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Sage. DfE. (2011). Teachers’ Standards. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1040274/Tea chers__Standards_Dec_2021.pdf

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Foucault, M. (1980). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge. Pearson Education. Foucault, M. (1991a). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1991b). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1998). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality: 1. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2000) In P. Rabinow (Ed.) Ethics. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (Vol. 1). Penguin. Foucault, M. (2001). Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Routledge. Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the College de France 1982–1983. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2011). The Courage of Truth. The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the College de France. 1983–1984. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2020). Structuralism and Post-structuralism. In J. Faubion (Ed.), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works 1954–1988. Penguin. Freund, M. (2009). ‘Me at University Doing Teacher Training—What a Big Laugh’: Narrative and Parrhesia. Educational Action Research., 17 (4), 523– 536. Gordon, C. (Ed.). (1980). Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge. Pearson Education. Hook, D. (2005). Genealogy, Discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the Work of Critique. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2(1), 3–31. Lawson, T., Harrison, J., & Cavendish, S. (2010). Individual Action Planning: A Case of Self-Surveillance? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(1), 81–94. Martin, R. (1988). Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault. In L. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault. The University of Massachusetts Press. Neto, J. (2018). Michel Foucault and Qualitative Research in Human and Social Sciences. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 19(3). https://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/3070 Peters, M. (2003). Truth Telling as an Educational Practice of the Self: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Ethics of Subjectivity. Oxford Review of Education, 29(20), 207–223 Scheurich, J., & McKenzie, K. (2005). Foucault’s Methodologies. Archaeology and Genealogy. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Sage. St. Pierre, E. (2017). Writing Post Qualitative Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9). https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417734567

CHAPTER 8

Dividing Practices: RE Teachers’ Views of Fundamental British Values

Introduction In this chapter I present findings obtained from a detailed analysis of interviews with pre and in teachers of religious education who participated in the research on secondary teachers’ views of the requirement to promote fundamental British values in 2015. The interviews provide rich insights into the ways in which the teachers interpreted, accommodated, resisted, and disrupted the FBV discourse. As discussed in chapter seven, the choice to conduct an interview project aligns with the Foucauldian orientation of this study. Riley, Robson and Evans argue that the interview is a social situation providing ‘access to discourses that a participant uses when making sense of an issue’ (Riley et al., in Bamberg et al. (eds.), 2022: 294) concluding that if policy discourses such as FBVs are circulating in the social spaces of the school and the college, then they will structure and shape teachers’ thoughts and will be articulated in the interview. In 2015 the Prevent duty and the counter-terror and security act were enacted. The Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terror attacks took place in Paris. This was a period of unprecedented education policy making in the ‘fog’ of the war on terror. The interviews reveal how these crisis events had a significant impact on the daily lives of the teachers as they worked hard to find answers to their pupils’ questions and to work out their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_8

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Table 8.1 Data collection schedule February 2015 Group interviews December 2015 Group interviews February 2015 Individual interviews March 2015 Individual interview

2014–2015 cohort: Pre-service secondary RE teacher groups 1&2 2015–2016 cohort: Pre-service secondary RE teacher groups 1&2 In-service secondary teachers of RE In-service teacher of RE

own responses and positioning as teachers of religious education. This is a period in which Foucault’s insights and theories about surveillance and governmentality offer the sharpest and most revealing critique. The teachers’ narratives provide stark examples of a governmentality of fear operating through dividing practices that threaten the precarious sense of belonging of minority students the teachers care for, and in several instances the teachers themselves (Table 8.1). Participation in data collection was, of course, voluntary. The participants were highly engaged throughout the various stages of the project. This commitment was demonstrated by the willingness to participate in more than one interview and to take part in other related activities including the making of a film about young peoples’ views of the Brexit referendum and the roundtable group discussion which concluded the project. Many of the pre-service teachers have remained in my professional network and continue to contribute to RE ITE as school-based mentors. Developing this community of practice is a shared endeavour, enabled by a mutual understanding of RE as a space of reflexivity and critique. The pre-service teachers were given assurances that their participation or non-participation would have no bearing on their assessment or eligibility for the award of QTS. At every stage of the project I made detailed applications for approval by the ethics research committee of the Faculty of Education before any data was collected. The RE PGCE programme I led over the 2015 period of data collection developed as a reflexive space where critical dialogue was privileged over performative standards-driven policy discourse. My conceptualisation of RE as an alternative discourse was made explicit in my practice and interactions with the participants and I assured them that criticality was integral to data collection and analysis. As an RE professional, FBVs constituted a threat to the pluralism of the phenomenological RE that had shaped my subjectivity but this shared concern connected me to

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the struggles of my pre and in-service colleagues for whom FBVs and PVE are a site of conflict and contestation. In this way, reflexivity is practised through the sharing of our narratives, whilst privileging and foregrounding the dilemmas experienced by my participants. The focus on teacher narratives allowed for the critical genealogical investigation at the micro level of cultural analysis by engaging with ‘local…disqualified… knowledges’ (Foucault, 1980: 81) in opposition to the sovereignty of the ‘half-blind Leviathan’ that created FBVs (Brenkman, 2007). In line with my institution’s research ethics guidelines and the British Education Research Association’s (BERA) guidance on ethical research (BERA, 2018), participants were provided with a detailed information sheet outlining the aims of the research, interview questions, the advantages and disadvantages of taking part, data storage and management, commitment to transparency and their right to withdrawal. Participants received a separate consent form to ensure that offered opportunity for clarification on any aspect of the study. Participants were also provided with details of an independent third party based in the University Research Office to whom they could refer any complaints or concerns about the research. Participants were encouraged to discuss taking part in the study with their friends or/and family prior to making the decision to participate. Four group interviews were conducted in 2015. The first two ran in February 2015 and the third and fourth took place in late December 2015. The focus of these interviews was FBV. The group interview that took place in 2017 followed a similar method and explored the impact of Brexit and the implications for educators working in a space shaped by the civic nationalism of FBVs. The interviews lasted for 90 minutes. The rationale for using dialogical group interviews has been outlined in the previous chapter with reference to parr¯esia, but this method also drew from the tradition of reflexive, interpretive RE associated with the work of Robert Jackson where participants interpret and reinterpret their understandings in the light of each other’s contributions (Jackson, 2004). The group interviews fostered an intersubjective environment where themes emerged, inductively through the teachers’ discussions to shed light on how they were making sense of FBV. Their narratives are, ‘in depth, intimate stories of problematic life lived up close…telling moving accounts that join private troubles with public issues’ (Denzin, in Denzin & Lincoln, 2003: 464).

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Both the group and individual interviews used the same questions and lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. The dynamics of the individual interview required me to be an empathic listener, whereas I took the role of facilitator in the group interviews where the teachers constructed and debated meanings with minimal input from me. The teachers’ narratives collected in both the group and individual interviews, revealed many similarities with recurrent themes and concerns which will be explored in this chapter. The questions were as follows: 1. What does it mean to you to be British? 2. In your opinion, what are fundamental British values? 3. As an RE teacher do you think it is your role to promote fundamental British values? 4. Do you think fundamental British values should be a requirement of SMSC provision? 5. Taking into account the possible responses of pupils, parents/guardians and communities, what are the possibilities and constraints of fundamental British values? Protecting Identities Participants’ identities and the identities of their schools and settings have been protected by pseudonyms. Potentially identifying details have been omitted or changed. Interviews were recorded on a digital device and immediately uploaded onto a password protected cloud-based storage provided by my institution. Interviews were transcribed immediately after upload. Data Analysis After each interview I listened to the recordings and noted down key themes and my initial reflections on what I had heard. In-depth qualitative interview data analysis is a recursive, iterative process involving listening and re-listening to recordings. The next stage was the transcription of the interviews using Microsoft Word. Transcription was central to the analysis process, enabling me to listen in depth to the subtle nuances involved in the teachers’ interpretations of FBV, the tone of their talk, the points they

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emphasised, the silences, stuttering, laughter, confusion and the anger and frustration that the requirement elicited. Transcription enabled me to break into the data. As I became familiar with the recordings, listening to them whilst re-reading the transcriptions to check for accuracy, I highlighted phrases, words, and points of emphasis as the first stage of a process of thematic analysis and open coding. For example, there are sequences where teachers describe the role of OfSTED, inspection and the auditing of the requirement, often describing it in terms of a ‘tick box’ approach. As I identified key themes, I was able to colour code principal themes such as British identity as a first stage leading to a more refined and focussed analysis, bringing in Foucauldian concepts, and by adding notes and interpretation of themes in the margins of the transcript. For example, the discussion of ‘tick box’ inspections can be analysed in terms of Foucault’s discussion of the examination, surveillance, and governmentality. Similarly, as I listened to the teachers’ debate aspects of the policy, particularly where there was disagreement or conflict in their talk, I was able to use Foucault’s concept of discourse to analyse the ways in which competing discourses were rubbing up against each other, for instance, in the ways the teachers tried to reconcile their understanding of pluralistic RE and their role under the requirements of the Prevent duty. As I went through the data, I was able to develop my analysis, drawing on Foucault’s work on normalising power and governmentality, by asking how the teachers’ accounts of the divisive effects of FBVs had marked out certain student groups as in need of ‘reform’ or correction. The data also shed light on the subject positions the teachers were taking up in relation to FBV, for example, as translators, enactors, or critics of the requirement. Consideration of the subject positions the teachers were adopting also involved analysis of the identity work they were performing on themselves and the ways in which they articulated a reflexive, ethical self-understanding of their roles as a form of educational parr¯esia, often expressed in terms of a counter cultural discourse of RE presented as an educational alternative to civic nationalism. February and December 2015: Pre-service Teacher Group Interviews In this section I present extracts from the February and December 2015 interviews with four groups of pre-service secondary RE teachers. The interviews reveal clear differentiation between white majority subjects and

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south Asian heritage British Muslim teachers, although the discourse is questioned and problematised by all. The group interviews acted as a site of free spokenness, of parr¯esia, where the teachers were able to learn from each other’s experiences and interpretations of what British identity meant. Listening to and discussing the sometimes painful and alienating experiences of the Muslim teachers enabled all the participants to reflect upon their role as teachers of pluralistic RE and to consider how they might enact FBVs. The findings are presented thematically, addressing questions about British identity, British values and their interpretation and enactments in the teachers’ educational experiences. The data from each group is too rich to be combined. It is set out so it can be read separately to maintain the integrity and flow of the interviews. It is also worth noting the wider national and geopolitical context of each group interview, for instance, the terror attacks at the Paris Bataclan had taken place the month before the December interviews. As Brenkman (2007) suggests, the fog of war permeates the discussions as the teachers’ references to terror attacks demonstrate (Table 8.2). Table 8.2 Pre-service teacher participants February 2015 Group 1

Group 2

Liz, female, age 23, White Irish traveller, Roman Catholic Sadia, female, age 22, British, Indian heritage Muslim Zahra, female, age 27, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim Shazia, female, age 35, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim Marie, female, age 25, White British, Roman Catholic Jen, female, age 22, White British, Roman Catholic Naz, female, age 26, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim

David, male, age 30, White British, born in Scotland, no religion Connor, male, age 24, White Irish, Roman Catholic Nicola, female, age 30, White British, Roman Catholic Jo, female, age 22, White British, Roman Catholic Ruth, female, age 22, White British, born in Northern Ireland, Protestant Anne, female, age 25, White British, Protestant Helena, female, age 22, White British, no religion

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Group 1 February 2015 British Identity and British Values The first set of interviews I present were undertaken in February 2015. In this sequence, the trainees discussed their understandings of British identity. Their interpretations are a reflection of their locations as the racial and religious subjects of the FBV discourse. Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault’s peers and collaborators, refer to the naiveté and the cruelty of modern biopolitical racism which operates through assimilation and integration of subjects it has classed as deviant or abnormal. The trainees’ discourse reveals a progressively critical deconstruction of the incitements of FBVs as they question their positioning within the discourse and the symbolic violence of FBVs as a racial signifier. The narrative opens with a discussion of what it means to be British, Jen: You don’t necessarily have to be born in Britain but if you live in Britain Zahra: That’s what you are…then you are British. Nasira: Yes. Does that really mean that you are British? Because I would have said if I mean I was born British, but I don’t think a random person would class me as British. They would class me as Asian. SoZlekha: But that’s your heritage Sadia: Yes, but they never say you are British. Jen: But would you say you were British? Sadia: To an extent. I wouldn’t class myself as British. Shazia: Because of? Sadia: Because other people wouldn’t class me as British. Shazia: Right. Sadia: But that would make me to have an ideology of what British is…which would be, I think a white person. Yes. I think a white person, yes.

Sadia, a young British born, Lancastrian female of Indian heritage knows through her experiences of everyday racial micro aggressions, exacerbated by the ‘them- and- us’ rhetoric of the war on terror, how she is perceived by white majority subjects. Sadia shared an account of her sister’s experience at Manchester airport where she was subjected to additional checks, which Sadia attributed to her sister’s visibility as a hijab wearing Muslim woman. Sadia is painfully aware of the White gaze and the biopolitics of belonging where race and religion are markers of difference.

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Sadia’s colleagues, Shazia and Zahra initially demonstrated a closer association with British identity. Shazia pointed out that her family was very British, and that British people shouldn’t be afraid to ‘fly the flag’, however as the discussion develops, both Shazia and Zahra’s identification becomes progressively more fragile as they describe their experiences of everyday racism. Shazia and Zahra know that their ontological security as teachers, a status they have worked hard to achieve, is threatened by noncompliance with the powerful disciplinary and racial Norms mobilised by FBVs. They are aware that there is a constitutive inside and outside to BVs, and their initial response is to identify with it. Interviewer: Are you, when you said earlier that you wouldn’t necessarily see yourself as British, how would you see yourself? Sadia: I would say my culture would come up, my ‘ethnic’ would be the priority, which would be Asian. … Well on a form I will always put “Asian Indian”. Zahra: But do you ever write “British Asian Indian”? That’s theSadia: Yes. Zahra: Because if you’re born and bred in this country, the main concept is that you were born in this country then you are British… I would class myself as British, just because your culture is there. Sadia: You would always say you’re British but you’d always get asked “Oh, what country are you from?” Zahra: England! I’m from here!

Sadia challenges her colleague’s identification with Britishness by reminding Zahra of the constant micro aggressions implied in questions such as where are you from. Sadia knows she’s excluded so she rejects the British norm. Sadia: But it’s the first thing that you get asked is that, what country are you come from? And I’m like, I’m born here… And I say well I was born here!

Shazia and Zahra express concern about young Muslims becoming radicalised, but their support for BVs becomes progressively weaker as they describe their own experiences of racism. Shazia adds that society has to work harder at making people feel more accepted before BVs can be promoted.

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Shazia: And they want people not to turn against their own country because they feel as though they don’t belong in that country, so they’re doing this now aren’t they? Trying to say to them you’re British as well, so that you don’t grow to feel not accepted and then turn it against your country later… No, that has to be other people accepting, doesn’t it? And I don’t know how that will ever come, apart from great RE!

Shazia pauses and then adds, Shazia: I don’t feel tolerance. Zahra: Yeah, we tolerate it! Sadia: I think you do need tolerance. Shazia: Yeah, definitely. Liz: You need it but you need it more on top of it, you can’t just tolerate it. Zahra: Accepting it, it’s about accepting it. Sadia: So that would mean people questioning you? Do you understand? So if we take it further so that’s somebody questioning you? It’s like somebody questioning you why are you Muslim listening? Do you understand?

For Sadia, the BVs discourse amounts to the questioning of identity. Her narrative is a counter discourse, and an expression of what Foucault would characterise as the courage of truth and free spokenness, parr¯esia. Shazia introduces an agonistic dimension to the exchange with her Muslim peers and resists the reification of Muslims as acceptable targets for questioning, suspect and different. In doing so, she influences her peers’ thinking, as this sequence demonstrates, Sadia: So we need to be tolerant towards each other, like give me respect. Shazia: Yeah, yeah, and then to be accepting of the differences. Sadia: Yes, but not questioning me why you must, why you must be wearing this? (Points to her hijab) Shazia: And before you do promote the British values, work at it, work at making people feel British and making people feel accepted and then that’s your second step isn’t it? Valuing Britishness. But first of all define, what is Britishness? And make people feel a bit more accepted. Liz: That’s a whole school issue isn’t it?

Shazia’s commitment to making people feel accepted contrasts with her own experience of every day racism. In the next sequence the racist

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discourse of Shazia’s antagonist highlights the painful experience of being positioned as un-British and unaccepted. Her response highlights the ways in which she is compelled to adopt various subject positions in order to maintain an admissible existence both as teacher, compliant with FBVs, advocating national pride whilst defending her Muslim faith and her daughter from racist comments. Shazia and Sadia articulate a form of double othering which reflects their positioning within the incorrigible binary of FBVs. As Muslim teachers of RE, they are both its targets and the instruments of its articulation, Shazia: Even like the other day this Staffordshire terrier was sniffing …my daughter, and we’re not scared of dogs or anything but she didn’t want quite a vicious Staffordshire terrier next to her, and I said could you move your dog because she’s a bit scared of it, oh and he goes “Oh you lot, you come here, and we like dogs here and you don’t like them so you expect us to take them away.” And I’m like “Where have I come from?” I goes “I was born here. I’ve left this country 3 times, that’s it, how many times have you left it? I bet you go on holiday every year don’t you but I don’t, I’ve left this country 3 times, it’s my home as much as it is yours.” And he like shut up a little bit, but I thought yeah, you never are going to be accepted as soon as someone, as soon as you say something that someone else disagrees with, yeah, you’re not British, yeah, but then that’s just too big a, it’s such a big issue to tackle, isn’t it?…And you can only do your own little bit like you said, through RE.

Group 2 February 2015 British Identity and British Values The trainees who made up Group 2 identified as British, with the exception of Connor who identified as Irish. Ruth identified as British, although she was born in Northern Ireland, to Northern Irish protestant parents. Similarly, Jo identified as British, although her parents were from the republic of Ireland and Roman Catholic. The composition of the group highlighted the diverse allegiances and identities within the British union and led to the group questioning monolithic concepts of Britishness, particularly in the light of the Scottish independence referendum. Initially the group focussed on cultural tropes, joking about the stiff upper lip, the Royal wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton and

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even waiting in queues. Nicola opened the discussion by equating Britishness with democracy, freedom of speech and a ‘really wide education’, adding, I’m proud to be British and whether that’s because of the history, I’m proud

The discussion became more critical when Joe used the example of gerrymandering in Northern Ireland to question whether democracy could be considered a British value. David questioned Nicola’s framing of democracy, a reflection of her racial and ontological security, by commenting that he agreed with the promotion of democracy, but asked, Why all of a sudden do we need to teach fundamental British values?

David continued by commenting on the potentially alienating influences of media discourses, stating, I think that young people are easily influenced. If they go to school and…if it’s in the news …now that all Muslims are terrorists and they go to school and all these school kids are seeing it in the news and on the TV…then they’re there passing on these comments to Muslim students and getting prejudice and discrimination…and for me that’s what is pushing people away

David’s reflexive comments led to Jo asking whether FBVs were a contradictory response to radicalisation, describing them as a fundamentalist political response to fundamentalism, in her words, ‘being fundamental about being fundamental!’. David questioned whether FBVs as an educational response to terror was ‘responsible’ for highlighting the divisive potentials of media discourse and FBVs on Muslim students who might feel, They are being pushed away…and they’re saying oh, actually, do I want to go to school every day and be called names because…or can I get away from it?

The group’s reflexive dialogue is perhaps a reflection of their own commitments to pluralistic RE and sense that FBVs were in tension

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with multi-faith RE. Jo characterised media and political war on terror discourses as Islamophobic, stating, it’s not a million miles away from anti-Semitism …And then our response to oh well you’re fundamental about being Moslem, well we’re going to be fundamental about being British, and we’re going to kind of ply all the children with “This is how British is”, “This is how to be British”, “Why don’t we all be British together, that would be fantastic”.

As the interview progressed the group had become more critical of FBVs expressing a concern with who was defining Britishness and the capacity of the discourse to become ethno nationalist, leading David to comment, Because if you were to ask someone who is affiliated to the BNP or something like that, if you were to ask someone with certain values they would think that they were being very British

Group 1 February 2015 Enactments It was in their discussion of the constraints and possibilities of FBVs in practice that both groups identified challenges rather than pedagogical and educational potential in FBV. Both groups expressed concerns with FBVs becoming an additional item for OfSTED inspection, reflecting the terror in the teacher’s soul of constant governmental ‘examination’, and the capacity of FBVs to polarise and stigmatise students emerged as a concern. In group 1 Shazia highlighted the capacity of FBVs to alienate parents and students in her placement setting, an inner city community school serving a predominantly south Asian Muslim community, commenting, I think if you start …we’re promoting British values in the school because this hasn’t been worded like this before or anything they’d question it.… And they’d say what are you teaching our kids? And some might likely say, they might think well our kids aren’t British, what are you teaching them? Yes, just, yeah, I know in (name of school) it was a challenge to get people to feel British so they had the (name of school) Bacc-, I can never say the word?

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Interviewer: Baccalaureate? Shazia: Yeah, where they promoted British values that way. But when I sat in one of those classes they weren’t absorbing it, the pupils weren’t absorbing it. They didn’t identify with it, they tried to show Mr Bean and they were like oh, you know, he represents Britishness and look at how funny he is and the world celebrates him, and it was just like they couldn’t identify with it. Interviewer: Yes. They didn’t get it? Shazia: They didn’t leave that lesson thinking we are British.

Shazia’s comments reveal the confusion experienced by schools charged with implementing FBVs in structurally vulnerable communities where Britishness operated as a racial code for whiteness. Implicit in Shazia’s account is the suggestion that communities would feel targeted by the policy, as suspect and deficient, in need of reform and government. In the same group, Jen points out how some of her students’ allegiances to ethno nationalism and far right ideologies shaped their constructs of Britishness, Jen: You see at my school it was the other way round, it was “We’re not including other people, we’re White British and that’s how it is,” and I had a massive problem with kids not accepting that there are different religions and different cultures and it was just like wouldn’t, like they’re not British because they look like that and that’s the issue that I have to tackle with them and then you’re trying to teach inclusivity and then their parents come in and they could be from the Far Right and the EDL to one side and they’re not going to have any of that, are they, they’re going to be like no, why are you teaching that? It’s inclusive if you’re British you’re Christian and you’re white and that’s how it is and it’s like, mm….

Jen’s description prompts Liz to caution against the reduction of BVs in some students’ minds to a British, un-British binary that would empower white majority students to exclude anyone who didn’t conform to the British Norm, Liz: if we teach the pupils “this is what it means to be British, this is British values”, as soon as they see something that doesn’t conform to this list that we have given them they’re immediately going to start picking and bullying because it was seen as, I mean in my school, as very limited white other, I mean it was a very small school so everyone was from

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this one area, if you got any people who even look different that would be it, they would be all over them, so as soon as I would go in and say “Right we’re doing British values, British values means we do this, this and this,” they’d immediately turn to that person and just go, well they’re not British.

Group 2 February 2015 Enactments The discussion became progressively more critical in group 2, reflected in their dialogue about possibilities and constraints of enactment and implementation. For Jo, like her colleagues, Jen and Liz in group 1, FBVs carried the risk of legitimising parental prejudice, with implications for pupil withdrawals from RE, Jo: But I’m worried about parents, the type of parents who will say “oh I don’t want my son learning about Islam” “what are you going to do, you’ll turn him into a Moslem”

Jo’s anxieties are echoed by Connor, whose mentor had. Received notes from the school from the parents saying that they don’t want their kids doing homework on Islam

David asked whether FBVs would create a new category or label for certain student groups, I think a lot of the issues, I think a lot of them come from that labelling, I think and I would, is that what we’re doing, are we creating another label for people too, do you understand what I mean?

The tensions between open, pluralistic and critical RE and the incitements of FBVs were emerging in the February 2015 group interviews, a theme that was to become the refrain of this investigation. Shazia’s comments capture the contradictions as the discourses rub up against each other in a way that was to resonate throughout the project (Table 8.3), Shazia, ‘But we’re not doing British studies, we’re doing RE studies so we can study religions that are prevalent in other parts of the world. That’s our subject, we’re not British values teachers are we? We’re RE teachers’.

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Table 8.3 Pre-service teacher participants December 2015 Group 1

Group 2

Alex, female, age 27, White British, no religion

Nick, male, age 30, White British, no religion Georgia, female, age 26, White British, no religion Amy, female, age 22, White British, no religion Ella, female, age 23, White British, Protestant Amin, male, age 30, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim

Bridget, female, age 22, White Irish, Roman Catholic Maryam, female, age 23, British, Pakistani heritage Muslim Aleeza, female, age 29, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim Lottie, female, age 35, White British, Protestant Alison, 30, female, White British, Protestant Carl, 30, male, White British, no religion

The December 2015 interviews with the 2015–2016 cohort took place against the backdrop of the enactment of the 2015 Counter-terror and security act, which included the introduction of the Prevent duty requirements that required specified authorities to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and on November 13th 2015, the Bataclan terror attacks, perpetrated by Islamic state sympathisers. The teachers found themselves addressing pupils’ questions about Islam and terrorism and dealing with mounting anti-refugee sentiments in their schools. Fear, backlash and a growing sense of polarisation amongst their pupils characterise the teachers’ narratives. In common with the narratives of the February group, the Muslim teachers’ insights highlight the divisiveness of the FBVs requirement. Fear emerges as another key theme, underlining the need for open, agonistic, classrooms and high levels of political and religious literacy. The teachers problematise and critique FBVs, but identify ways in which their RE practice can respond to the challenges of their students perceptions of terror and its relationship to Islam. In the first section the teachers’ views of British identity and British values are presented, followed with their discussions about enacting and interpreting FBVs in RE. Group 1 December 2015 British Identity and British Values There is little consensus about how to define British identity in group 1. Bridget, a northern Irish trainee points out that Britishness is a politically

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contested identity and Aleeza characterises Britishness as multiculturalism but qualifies her view by highlighting the racialization of Muslim identity and her experiences of racial micro aggressions as a hyper visible Muslim woman, Bridget: I’m from Northern Ireland so growing up I’ve had friends who would identify themselves as Irish friends or who identified themselves as British, Aleeza: I think like actually being British, living in a multicultural society, in an inclusive society, is what makes you patriotic British Maryam: I think going to back to it as well so what does it mean being British, I don’t think ’Being British’ can be defined… the fundamental British values are universal values, it’s not something that that’s just been you know designed and implemented within Britain Aleeza: Well I still get asked before and when I never used to wear my scarf I used to have blonde hair and you know, and I used to dress a certain way and nobody asked me where I’m from, it was only up until I wore my scarf all day that they asked where I’m from and I said what do you mean where I’m from? Exactly what would you mean by that “where I’m from”? Do I need to justify? Do you know what I mean? It’s just, it’s astonishing, the questions that I get asked now compared to what it was before.

As the group continued their discussion, the group highlight the potentials of FBVs to create a segregated ‘us and them’ mentality amongst their students. Maryam: Sorry, I probably worded it wrong. I meant like British, having fundamental British values just adding the British into it just changes the whole meaning of the word ’values’…It doesn’t, it’s a universal set of values that are applied in every single country that you go into, it’s more to do with, it’s just morality in general and it’s how you would act and it’s the way you would behave towards others, but I meant if, sorry I probably misunderstood the question but as in putting British into the fundamental British values just changes the whole meaning of ’values’ in general. Values are values no matter what country you’re born in. Alex: I think the only purpose that this serves by putting the word British in is actually to alienate people…thinking OK let’s look at these values and dropping the British bit because it does alienate people. Aleeza: Absolutely. It segregatesMaryam: I feel as if-

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Alex: It creates that us / them mentality thatMaryam: I was just going to say that, us and them.

As their discussion developed, the trainees pointed out the ways in which the discourse of BVs constituted the subjects of its discourse, leading Erin to suggest that by positioning certain groups as suspect and at risk it was a form of radicalisation, but ‘in the other direction’, Alex: It’s almost as good as creating that divide. Aleeza: It’s that good at categorising. And it’s like the Orientalists, that approach literally is the ’us’ and ’them’ and there’s a massive danger of categorising people who shouldn’t even be categorised in that, in a way that oh these are these guys and oh, we have this particular image and when we walk on the street, oh, are they British? Are they part of that set of beliefs? Bridget: It’s almost like radicalisation in the other direction. Aleeza: Exactly. Bridget: It’s like almost instead of saying, they’re so obsessed with trying to prevent radicalisation like within Moslem communities like they’re almost preventing radicalisation within like other communities and it’s like they’re turning them against like people who shouldn’t be prejudiced against them. Alex: By supporting the idea that there is an issue that we need to guard against, they are creating the issue….You know there’s lots of children in that school, say in my school for example, would never be radicalised until we introduce the idea of radicalisation to them and they say what do you mean? And it’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophesy with it. Bridget: It’s like in my school it’s like a predominantly white British school, most of them have never even met a Moslem in their life but all they know is the stuff that they’re hearing on the TV and they’re just like “Miss, Miss, what does this mean? Can you explain this? What happened? Can you tell us? Can you explain it?” Maryam: I think it’s qualifying, I think its qualifying racism as well, I think it’s like positive racism, and it’s literally qualifying it like oh, this is them, that’s us, this is them, pigeonholing everybody almost.

There is consensus amongst the group that the ways in which BVs play out in their schools and communities corresponds to Foucault’s description of dividing practices through the formulation of what Jen calls ‘a common enemy’.

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Alex: It’s the formulation of a common enemy that we can all get behind. Carl: Yes. Alex: So it strengthens our communities by forcing us to work together against this. Carl: Yes, it’s a divide and conquer isn’t it, it’s never like a society for me.

Alex highlights the cost to the communities the policy has targeted, But the problem is that the enemy is within our, the ’enemy’ that they have created and that they have named is within our community, so surely that’s going to do more damage to the community? They will unite a certain amount of the population against this enemy that they have named, but then that will create divisions, it’s like apartheid where someone’s family is on either side of the wall, do you know what I mean? That will break down

December 2015 Group 2 The dialogue in Group 2 followed a similar pattern, where the trainees express concern with the potentially divisive effects of FBVs and its biopolitical targeting of Muslims. Nick argues that there is a supposition underpinning FBV policy that certain sectors of the community are not British enough. Amin comments on what he calls a paradigm shift in policy, identifying the shifts in governmentality from multiculturalism to securitisation, aptly describing FBVs as British bulldog citizenship, Nick: Well, I think it’s contradictory. I think that for years we’ve been told to celebrate the fact that Britain is multicultural, and that we’re all a different kind of peoples that live together in tolerance and harmony, and yet this strategy appears to be moving away from that and they’re trying to stick everything in a shoe box ….I think this directly contradicts what Britain is, Britain is multicultural and tolerant and diverse and acceptance of so many different views. And why try and put them back in a box? It just makes it divisive and making it worse? Amy: Because we’ve been drilled into us that we’re a multi-faith society, we’ve got all these different religions, we can’t really go back to how tradition was. Nick: It’s the underlying implication that some people don’t respect those institutions which I reject. I don’t think it is any way fair, I think everything about the Prevent Strategy is divisive. I don’t know whether it’s, I mean it’s an accusation to say it’s deliberate but subconsciously I would

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say that I think it’s extremely divisive. You are immediately bracketing people into being different rather than embracing the fact that we’re all British. Amin: I think contemporary youngsters are finding it difficult because the previous Labour government they were embracing difference, embracing pluralism and multiculturalism whereas obviously the new government they’ve basically shut the door… There’s been like a paradigm shift, so it’s like the direct opposite where you have to abide by our social morals or ethos or values, so I think a lot of people are confused because within that the paradigm the different governments will be trying to promote, so maybe what we are saying is there may be a hidden agenda or subliminal message to abide by our rules by the current Conservative government.….she was saying the previous government had an emphasis on multiculturalism, pluralism, whereas now this like citizenship and this British Bulldog citizenship.

Enactments Group 1 December 2015 The group interviews revealed the extent to which the discourse constituted the objects of which it speaks particularly in Maryam’s account of an assembly on FBVs in her placement school. Alex describes fear amongst her students and their families, describing them as ‘scared’, with direct consequences for how they respond to RE in the classroom. In both groups pluralistic RE is presented as the site of counter discourse with the potential to reverse some of the alienating effects of war on terror and security discourse. In this sequence, Maryam first asks whether Prevent and FBVs, despite being a national policy requirement, Really provide relevance to nationals or is it targeted?

From her religious and cultural positioning as a Muslim teacher of south Asian heritage, she recognises the biopolitical strategies at work and provides an example of how the policy was enacted in her school setting which provides evidence of the stratifying dividing practices at work in the discourse. The school was expecting an OfSTED inspection. In order to prepare students the principal led an assembly on FBVs. Students filed into the assembly and were presented with a powerpoint slide with an

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image of the twin towers on fire after the 9/11 terror attack juxtaposed against a list of the 5 FBVs, I mean we did assemblies on Prevent …Now, the Asian children they walked in and they were like right, from what we’ve heard about this assembly this is targeted at us….

Maryam, refers to the principal as she addressed the students, She was saying “they”, “them”, “them Moslems”, “they did this”, “they do this”, “they do that”. ….these divisions are created because of people like Theresa May, the younger generations are going to grow up, they’re going to have hatred ….that’s where the misunderstandings will start, that’s where the judgements will start, so then it goes back to the question who has radicalised who? Everyone else is going to say oh yes, but fundamental British values, oh yes but it’s good for us, it’s tolerance, it’s this, it’s that, no, no, these kids are feeling targeted, they will hear them very words “they” and “them”. They’re already going to be sitting there with their arms folded like this, listening to her and do you know something, when she speaks it comes through. You can’t hide it, what she really wants, what she is really saying it is the “us” and “them” theory and it comes right through’

Maryam’s account is a striking empirical example of what Foucault characterises as biopolitical racism in his society must be defended lectures. Foucault argues that racism targets and divides by introducing a caesura, a divide into the social body and in Maryam’s example, the discourse physically and stratifies the student body. The discourse, as Foucault argues, is inscribed on bodies. The body is the surface upon which the discourse emerges. Maryam continues referring to the panoptic ever-present disciplinary threat of inspection, but queries the educational value of FBVs, when none of the teachers, in her words, are prepared to get to the ‘bottom of these values’. What she describes is an example of over regulated selfgoverning teachers preparing for the ‘examination’ that is an OfSTED inspection. This sequence reflects the structural cynicism of a biopolitical governmentality that empties the educational out of education, ….because they had the fundamental British values because Ofsted is targeting schools after Christmas and my school is expecting Ofsted, and

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they are trying to, you know, they’ve got posters up saying “These are the fundamental British values”, it’s only for Ofsted, I have to, I’ll openly say that, it is only for Ofsted because no teacher is actually taking their time out to get to the bottom of these values and trying to you know talk to the kids in the language that they speak and trying to explain to them what these values are. So you know they don’t care about it, deep down none of the teachers actually care about it in my school particularly, but just to please Ofsted they have put these posters up.

The group also questioned the contradictions entailed by a policy presented as part of SMSC, designed to enhance students’ spiritual and moral development that appeared to be undermining their pupils’ development in the way it was being translated in their schools. A striking feature of these narratives were the references to fear valorised by media and governmental discourses that positioned Muslims as suspect as Carl comments, FBVs have done ‘nothing to help it’, Carl: I think it’s the media and I think the government have done nothing to help it, by bringing this in, that’s all, because I think they’ve just created that division even more.

Alex and Carl referred to instances where parents had requested that their children were withdrawn from RE lessons on Islam. Alex remarked, You’re also got others who, like Christians, who won’t want, don’t want to be taught about, their kids to be taught about Islam because they’re scared they’ll get converted.

In both groups the Paris Bataclan attacks were mentioned in the context of how RE could be used to mitigate the racialisation of Muslims and the confusion of their students in response. In group 2, Amy, Nick and Carl described lessons they had taught which were designed to challenge negative media stereotypes of Islam and the myths their students held about Muslims. FBVs were singled out for criticism because they made the nuanced critical work of these beginning RE teachers even more challenging. Nick and Carl argued for high levels of specialist theological knowledge as a necessity for teachers of RE to correctly represent faith groups and address misconceptions. In group 1, Aleeza offered an example of how her RE mentor offered an alternative response to the Bataclan attacks to counter the fearful media narrative, reappropriating the discourse and resisting mediatization through RE,

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Aleeza: In our RE class my teacher said why are we observing this minute’s silence, and all of the kids were like, “Because of the Paris attacks.” And my teacher said, “No, for all of them who have died and suffered around the world.” She made that categorically clear because for her that is what fundamental British values was, to show that respect to every life, whether you’re a police, whether you’re a Palestinian, whether you’re a Syrian, whether you’re a Parisian, whatever you are you show that minute’s silence for every life.

Group 2 December 2015 Similarly, in group 2, the trainees wanted to reframe and reclaim FBVs in alignment with their commitment to inclusive RE, reflecting the ways in which teachers make adjustments but, their reservations outweighed the perceived benefits, Nick: Don’t have to be jingoistic but…. I think the dangers hugely outweigh the positive outcomes. Amy: Yeah, we are built in a country that is built on values that we didn’t really need to put a label on Fundamental British Values, because it opens up the whole thing for those who aren’t white British to be scapegoated in society.

In-Service Teachers of RE Interviews with the in-service teachers of RE took place in late February 2015 and March 2015. The teachers were asked the same questions as the student pre-service trainee teachers. Interviews took place in their schools in classrooms set aside for the purpose. Main findings are presented in the same format as the trainee teacher interview data, with the teachers’ views of British identity and British values presented first and followed with their discussion of the possibilities and constraints of implementation. There are many consistencies and parallels between the trainee teachers’ responses and their in-service colleagues’ reflections and accounts (Table 8.4). The Participants Ikram was head of RE in a large 11–16 secondary co-educational academy school in a former industrial mill town, to the north of a major urban

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Table 8.4 In-service teacher participants February 2015 Ikram, age 35, male, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim Mazneen, age 26, female, British, Indian heritage, Muslim Adam, age 37, male, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim Joanne, age 29, female, white British, no religion Suzanne, age 29, female, white British, Protestant Dawne, age 29, female, white British, no religion March 2015 Alison, age 34, female, white British, Protestant (Anglican)

Individual interview Paired interview Individual interview Individual interviews

Individual interview

conurbation in Northwest England. The town is home to a large south Asian heritage, predominantly Muslim population and was one of the locations of the 2001 riots that led to the introduction of the government’s community cohesion policy. Mazneen, a teacher of RE and Adam, head of humanities and an RE teacher, were based in an urban local authority 11–16 co-educational secondary school in a large city located in Northwest England. The school served a diverse mixed community, including students of south Asian heritage, predominantly Muslim, but also of Sikh and Hindu backgrounds. As British Muslim teachers of south Asian heritage, Ikram, Mazneen and Adam were positioned like Sadia, Shazia and Zahra, doubly othered by a discourse that both targeted them and required them to become the instruments of its articulation. Joanne was a teacher of RE based in an 11–18 local authority coeducational secondary school serving a predominantly white community. The school was located in a relatively affluent semi-rural commuter town located in the northwest of England. Suzanne and Dawne were teachers of RE in a large 11–18 secondary academy school located in a former industrial town with links to mining in the northwest of England. Alison was head of humanities and an RE teacher based in an 11–16 coeducational Church of England secondary academy school, located in a former industrial town with links to mining and the cotton industries. Interviews with Joanne, Dawne and Suzanne reveal a less critical interpretation of FBVs than their colleagues Ikram, Mazneen and Adam, reflecting their ontologically secure location as white British subjects. Dawne interpreted FBVs as a tool to discipline problem students with right-wing nationalist affiliations. Her understanding of the purpose of FBVs reveals biopolitical power operating through the requirement in

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the way that it is applied to discipline ‘troublesome’ structurally vulnerable populations, whether they are the suspect Muslim communities or the pro Leave white communities of former industrial towns. In contrast, Joanne and Alison responded critically to FBVs. Alison’s school serves a similar community to Dawne’s, but she is deeply suspicious of the politics of BVs and articulates a counter discourse drawing from RE and her school’s Anglican ethos. Chronologically, the first interview took place with Ikram, followed by Mazneen and Adam, Suzanne and Dawne, Joanne and finally Alison. Ikram British Identity and British Values Ikram expressed concern that Britishness was being mobilised as a racial signifier that would divide the community he served because of their experiences of racism, which he refers to as painful experiences. He argued for the removal of the adjective British and an alternative to FBVs based on universal human rights. He is also unambiguous about the divisive nature of FBVs and their impact on his students and their families who, he argues, will feel that their loyalties are being questioned, I think what happens a lot of the time the word Britishness gets hijacked by many of the people, some people obviously use it as a link to a particular skin colour, some people link it to a particular language. Some people link it to a particular culture that might be associated with Britishness…rather than just pinning it down to as a British individual what should you value? But I think it’s about leaving the word ’British’ out and saying as a human or as a neighbour or as a citizen of the world what you should value, rather than just saying British and I think a lot of the time when you say fundamental British values that would I think have a negative impact on people that come from ethnic minorities because they would feel that their loyalties are being questioned because that would mean that they’ve got heritage whether it’s in other parts of the world you’ve got your heritage and you would be thinking that if I kind of cave in to the fundamental British values does that mean I’m giving my own values up?

Ikram talked about the experiences of the south Asian community in his town, whose parents and ‘forefathers’ had come to ‘work in this country’, but had suffered ‘painful experiences’, let down by the justice system,

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Now, if someone has been let down how would they feel when you were to talk about British values? Because they would obviously have that idea that “I was let down” by the system, which was underpinned by those values, now what do those values have in common or for me as an individual?

Ikram was also concerned that the promotion of FBVs had overtones of white supremacy, hesitantly pointing out that it had connotations of Nazi ideals of the perfect race, And I think this idea of what is a perfect Britishness… is Britishness being put as a race that we’re looking for?

Ikram’s interview took place during a busy day of full-time teaching and lasted 45 minutes, reducing the time to talk about implementation, but his comments are revealing, again reflecting concern with the capacity of FBVs to divide and alienate students, They [pupils] might feel that their religious or cultural values might have to be pushed aside to make space for British values … there are students that I’ve taught which are from ethnic minorities, and now they might feel intimidated if I kept on using the words “British values”, because they might feel as though what message are you trying to get across? Are we not British? Or why is it that the word “British” has to be mentioned all the time?

Mazneen and Adam British Identity and British Values Mazneen and Adam, as members of the same department were interviewed together. Their comments reflect Ikram’s fears about the divisive effects of FBVs, and their sense that they and their Muslim students were being positioned as the suspect Other by a racialising discourse. In their discussion of enactments and implementation they describe situations where quiet teenagers are transformed into suspects by discourse, highlighting the pernicious racialising effects of overzealous interpretations of the Prevent duty. Adam described himself as a liberal and a global citizen. His hybrid, hyphenated fluid sense of self enables him to accommodate various subject positions without any sense of dissonance,

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I see “British” as part of my identity but not my sole identity so it’s my, my ethnicity is Pakistani, my religion is Islam, my place of where I live I’m a Mancunian and I do like to consider myself that, I do take pride in that.

Mazneen interjected stating that she ‘disagreed’ with Adam’s characterisation of Britishness. Like Ikram, she perceives Britishness as a racial signifier of the dominant culture which rejected her and her family. Mazneen was born and educated in Lancashire, but her experiences of anti-Muslim discrimination led to her dis-identification with Britishness, such as her example of people questioning her mother, ‘why aren’t you speaking English?’ She also singles out British foreign policy as a factor contributing to her sense of alienation from Britishness, Because of what has been done in Britain’s name, or in using foreign policy as its reason and I have almost adopted part of that to become less British and more in tune with culture, tradition, religion, society as a whole rather than society as what you see on TV

Mazneen refers to anti-Muslim racism in the 9/11 environment as another critical factor that shaped her relationship to Britishness, leading to a greater identification with her family’s Indian heritage. But now it feels that everything has become repressed almost and you have to go back into your communities because you don’t fit in. And so I felt that over the years especially during the time of September 11 and it is a big thing for me …and I used to get the conversations in the streets …why are you dressed and what is that on your head and you know the undertones of prejudice, and having gone through that it influenced me to become…sadly to become less British. I don’t know if it is a sad thing but to become less British and to become more inclined towards again the aspect of culture, of what does, of who am I? And I don’t particularly class myself as… British.

For Mazneen, Britishness and British values are not what she would construe as ‘positive values’. Her daily experiences of racist micro aggressions, often directed at her hyper visibility as a hijab wearing Muslim woman led her to associate British values with assimilationism. BVs are a ‘box’ for Mazneen, a normalising category as this extract shows,

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But you don’t have to fit in to this box of Britishness because actually again you know I would I don’t think there used to be a box, but the box is there and the box needs to disappear for people to feel truly involved.

Mazneen’s comments prompted Adam to situate the BVs discourse in the context of racial binaries. He referred to Norman Tebbit’s cricket test question, a test he argues ‘is still here’. Adam agrees with Mazneen that the turning point was 9/11, asking, Maybe it goes back to George Bush’s original question …“Are you for us or against us?”

Enactments and Implementation Adam and Mazneen were highly critical of the potentially chilling effects of the Prevent duty and its link to FBVs. Adam rejects the definition of FBVs because of their origin in the Prevent duty, stating, That is not what I consider British values, that’s a different, that is a political agenda.

He continues by expressing his anxieties that the policy will target and stigmatise particular groups, It feels like it’s being aimed at one particular group of people and I think therein lies the danger which could be that we will stigmatise, even through this, a whole group of Moslem children…when it was raised in a leadership meeting as the Prevent Agenda it was looked up and there was a synopsis given of it and the first thing I said was please be conscious of the fact that do not stigmatise the Moslem children in this class, in this school, or in any school in the UK which is where I think that that is dangerous.

Similarly, Mazneen expressed anxiety about the chilling effects of these requirements, pointing out that the most important aspect of her work was to have ‘conversations’ with her students in the safe space of her classroom. She asked rhetorically, how a teacher would ‘manipulate’, that is soften and disguise the language of security so that the class was ‘ still being in a safe space for students to speak?’. Mazneen points out that prior to the introduction of FBVs, there was greater scope for teachers to soften potentially polarising topics,

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Because SMSC was something that you could ’fluff’ and make happy and make pretty, but fundamental British values is not something that you can make a positive, you can be positive about it but there’s lots of ins and outs and there are lots of students in particular at Stretford who will turn around and say ’There’s something wrong with that’, ’There’s something wrong with this’, ’We don’t agree with this’. But are we going to say to all of them, sorry we’re going to have to report you?

Adam related an incident in which a teacher shared images of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that led to the Charlie Hebdo shooting to highlight the sensitivities of enacting FBVs requirements in his religiously diverse school with its high proportion of Muslim families, Earlier this year we had the horrific shooting of the cartoonist in Paris, the Charlie Hebdo affair. In our school a teacher showed those cartoons to some students. And all Hell broke loose as you can imagine. Parents were outraged, and multiple phone calls and letters demanding that an investigation be carried out. But one of the fundamental British values is freedom of expression so I am stuck there. Because as an RE teacher and as a liberal myself I will not show those cartoons at Stretford High School so am I then not as an individual meeting that freedom of expression value which is fundamental to British life?

Adam disassociated himself from the cartoonists, and his support for freedom of expression adding, ‘cartoonists, draw away’, but he is keenly aware of the polarising effects and negative consequences of overzealous interpretations of the FBVs by teachers who might seek justification for intentionally offending religious minorities through an appeal to the illiberal liberalism of FBVs. In the final example from this interview, Mazneen and Adam provided an account of implementation of the Prevent safeguarding requirements. Adam points out that the Prevent agenda positions teachers as ‘informants’ who could ‘push’ children in the wrong direction by subjecting them to surveillance, That you know what, let’s watch that child, and it could be that they just, you know they have got the average problems that every school children has.

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Mazneen and Adam’s example is a case study in the chilling effects of Prevent. They describe how a 15-year-old female pupil was referred to Mazneen, I’ve also had a conversation with somebody looking at, and it was an odd situation, being given a student to mentor through Year 11 and being told that that student really needs help…the conversation went like this: “We are really worried about this girl because I’m not sure but she seems a little bit different to how she was when she first started. She seemed eager at the beginning. I’m not sure if she’s switched off from all her lessons.” And it was directly after the news had just reported that 2 girls from Manchester had just travelled to Syria. And the teacher said explicitly, “She’s one to watch. You need to be careful because I can imagine her on TV after trying to get to Syria.”

Mazneen’s account shows how the truth regime operating through the FBVs discourse transformed a withdrawn student from troubled adolescent to an ISIS run away. The normalising biopolitics of FBVs and Prevent are in operation here through the surveillance of the ‘menace within’ (Foucault, 2004). As RE practitioners, both Mazneen and Adam expressed their concerns that RE was being singled out in their school as the safe space where students could be referred. For Mazneen, this represented a threat to the freedom of the RE classroom as the place where students could express a range of opinions, especially if the student is not engaged in school so suddenly she’s on her way to Syria then that’s an assumption that is… political, that shouldn’t be landed upon on an RE doorstep. It shouldn’t be that you now fix that problem because you are supposed to be teaching fundamental values so we think she’s at risk but now you fix it.

Dawne and Suzanne British Identity and British Values Dawne and Suzanne were colleagues in the same RE department. They were interviewed separately. Suzanne’s interview was cut short but enabled her to offer her perspective on the role of RE as a subject where challenging issues could be addressed. RE as a safe space for controversial debate was a recurrent theme throughout the interviews. Both Dawne

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and Suzanne felt that their students needed lessons where they could express their views, even if they were anti-social. Suzanne comments, You’ve got to allow for them to say them things in RE. They’ve got to be able to say the things that they can’t say anywhere else. Because they’d get in trouble if they say it anywhere else perhaps…That way you can, you can talk about the issue.

Suzanne discussed her students’ fears about terror and their conflation of religion with race, adding that not allowing freedom of discussion ‘can almost breed an issue’. I was able to spend more time with Dawne who offered her understanding of British identity, British values and her translations of BVs into classroom practice. Dawne rejected simplistic tropes and cultural stereotypes of British values, such as the union jack or ‘eating a rich tea biscuit’. For Dawne, FBVs were ‘just values’. She relates how her school’s senior leadership team introduced FBVs, she ‘took the lead’ and ‘developed lessons for all year groups’, but she chose to interpret the requirement as a way to address right-wing nationalism amongst her white working-class students, We looked at tolerance and also what British values are, and we had a look specifically at people who would say they are fundamentally British… So we looked at political groups…You know, such as the EDL group, the Britain First groups and all the rest of it and we asked whether or not, we asked the kids do you think that that lines up with what the British values are?

Enactments and Implementation Dawne’s decision to focus on tackling racism through FBVs, is a reflection of the biopolitical discourse of the policy, as Rhodes argues, neoliberal policy making, masquerades as raceless and classless, but its purpose is disciplinary. Just as citizenship national curriculum was introduced as a way to tackle political indifference, which was equated with moral apathy, FBVs target marginalised white communities constructed as the, ‘obstinate barrier in the remaking of a non-racial, benign form of whiteness’ (Rhodes, in Kapoor et al., 2013: 60). Through FBVs the resentments of Dawne’s peripheral working-class students can be governed, through integration into a non-racial classless ‘multi-cultural imagining of nation and community’ (Rhodes, in Kapoor et al., 2013: 59).

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Dawne: So they did accept it in one way and liked it and then in the other way they said yes, but there’s also the fact that British people born and bred can’t get a house, can’t get a job, because of these people. Yes. What I have done, this is actually in practice when I have faced that is gone to the grassroots of it and said, well and basically shown them what is an economic migrant, what is a refugee, what is an asylum seeker. Interviewer: Right. Dawne: What do these terms mean? Because they don’t know that. Those are just words to them. Interviewer: Right, OK? Dawne: All, it all comes under the same blanket, it all means the same thing to them. You know and an asylum seeker is just somebody who is here for the benefits. Well that’s not the case, and it’s sort of showing them what the difference is between these different terms and then saying to them, you know, do you want to shut the door on that? Is that something that you wouldn’t allow? Because I’ve got 13- or 14-yearolds saying you know, I don’t agree with immigration, well what does that mean? I mean we’re not just talking about, you know, in Islamic issues. It’s what, well what are the EDL doing? It’s that question as well, because this is, it’s in Britain, so what’s going on? You know, what are, it’s not just them, it’s us.

Dawne is conscious that FBVs and Prevent are an OfSTED inspection focus and implies that RE and her team have been responsibilised and will therefore be accountable for the inspection outcomes. Her description of the inspection in terms of ‘being in the firing line’ reflects a governmentality of fear that requires Dawne and her team to take responsibility for surveilling her students in a disadvantaged community, which simultaneously surveils her, as Rose argues, FBVs become a governmental technique of co-ordination, ‘where programmes for the administration of others intersect with techniques for the administration of ourselves’ (Rose, 1999: 5). Dawne: I may have put myself in the firing line for when Ofsted turn up with this one. …I suspect that, I mean RE teams are going to be…Well it has been me that has done all the British values ’stuff’.

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Joanne British Identity and British Values Joanne and Alison adopted a more critical interpretation of FBVs. Joanne’s interview highlights the dissonance between her pluralistic conception of RE and the governmental definition of FBVs derived from the Prevent strategy. Joanne questioned whether FBVs aligned with the actions of the British historically, Joanne: Well I don’t, I don’t think, if we are thinking about history then I don’t think that Britain in the past has necessarily promoted those values…Well I think if that’s the case the government’s definition of ’British values’ might be different to mine…I think maybe the government think that we shouldn’t necessarily be quite as tolerant or quite as inclusive or embrace the differences and that we maybe should have one sort of set mindset of how we deal with it.

Joanne’s interpretation shows that she thinks of FBVs in terms of a racial hierarchy which positions certain groups as deficit, less British than others, who are ‘fundamentally British’, Joanne: Well I think fundamental British kind of insinuates to me that people then have to be a certain way and if they don’t like it then they’re not fundamentally British.

Enactments and Implementation From her school’s sociocultural location in a predominantly white, affluent commuter town, Joanne identified her students’ attitudes as a challenge to her implementation of FBVs. Like Dawne and Suzanne, Joanne sees FBVs as a vehicle for the promotion of multicultural RE and tolerance. Joanne identified student attitudes acquired through their families and exposure to social media are the main barriers to religious and racial understanding. Joanne: The challenges are the media…Social media. Upbringing. Interviewer: Yeah? Joanne: And children come into school with a certain set of ideas that you’re trying to challenge but then maybe parents or family or peers

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or the media then basically undo all the hard work because of the prejudices that are put forward and the views that are put forward and they mislead people and I think that young people at high school don’t necessarily come in with an open mind, they come in already with a set of, you know, they already know what they think about immigration.

Joanne demonstrates a reflexive and critical concern that FBVs may act against the values of intercultural understanding and critical RE she wishes to promote. Anti-immigrant attitudes combine with anti-Muslim tropes, acting as a challenge to Joanne’s educational project, but she also problematizes the potential of FBVs to valorise and reinforce the very attitudes she seeks to tackle, Joanne: Well I think that people generally don’t accept sort of immigration, and they don’t accept that not all Muslims are terrorists, and things like that, and they are very, very set in that mindset so I think when one little thing happens from a minority group and that’s put across in the media then you get those attitudes again of, “Well go back to your own country”, “All Muslims are this”, “Immigrants are taking all our jobs and doing this.” And I do think that it’s the media’s fault for that, and unless that’s challenged I don’t think that will change. I think we can do everything we can do to instil British values but in some ways it might reinforce people that to be British you’ve got to be born in this country. In some ways I think it might make it worse.

Alison British Identity and British Values Alison’s was the most in depth and the longest of the interviews. As head of humanities in a Church of England, 11–16 high school, Alison was the most experienced of the in-service teachers. She is deeply sceptical about the FBVs requirement articulating a counter discourse based on her school’s religious values and her own educational positioning. Alison’s response is reflexive, critical and demonstrates parr¯esia in the way, that as a responsibilised middle manager, she engages in a risky dialogue with OfSTED, as the interlocutor who has power over her (Foucault, 2011), she tells her educational truth. Alison describes FBVs as reactionary and she is also deeply familiar with inspection regimes, as her reference to auditing shows,

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So I really didn’t want us to go down the route, in my view the reactionary route that many schools have done which have gone: “Oh British values let’s audit them, let’s put these in here!” That’s, I thought that was quite dangerous and I think as academics we have to question what these policies are telling us and you know we have to use them accordingly. So we went for ’Values We Share’ in our school, which is hopefully a reflection of modern Britain.

Alison’s alternative framing of FBVs as values we share, could be seen as the co-option of her practice by flexible, governmental policy discourse, a subtle technique of power that is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, deterritorialize her Anglican ethos, reframe and reterritorialize it as FBVs. However, as Alison’s interview developed it became clear that her reading of Anglican Christian values was in opposition to David Cameron’s nationalistic equivocation of FBVs with Christianity. In this extract Alison points out the often uneasy relationships between religion and government, referring to the example of feminist activists who had graffitied sexist adverts on the underground, Alison: And we looked at, and as a church school as well I felt we had a little bit more to play on that so I preferred to go down the Christian values of the schools route…We talk a lot about democracy …I’m quite happy with having as many conversations as possible about that. Rule of law is an interesting one for RE teachers because of course we teach public defiance and questioning the law when appropriate, you know? …Did you see the underground pictures and the women who wrote on the underground?

Alison used the incident of the activists in her teaching on the rule of law and questioned whether her stance would be deemed to fit with FBVs. She pointed out that her students loved her lessons on civil rights and religious leaders who she classed as ‘rebels’, What’s acceptable promotion? What’s indoctrination? ….Miss… did an advert on the ladies who tore up the graffitied image, she’s not promoting? Real love! Because you are not supposed to graffiti on anything. Yes, and that’s what kids are interested in, they like the rebels, they like the, you know, one of my favourite lessons is Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X…

Alison rejects imposed governmental constructs of British identity and values, emphasising her commitment to being part of an ‘eclectic family’, adding,

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I like Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem on “We are the British”. I always read that to the children at school you know, it’s about being very, very diverse, we are the British, we’re a tribe of hundreds of cultures, we know 400 ways to cook a potato and it’s really beautiful in expressing that being British is very broad, it’s about choosing to belong and it’s about moving forward in that spirit. And the children always embrace that poem quite well.

For Alison, national identity should be chosen. She emphasises agency and freedom to choose an identity, Yes… yes, it’s pluralistic, there isn’t a, this is a…I think it it’s an identity that you will choose to take on I think yes.

Alison rejects and questions binary constructs of Britishness, expressing concern that the discourse could descend into a divisive ‘us’ and ‘them’ duality where Britishness is synonymous with whiteness, Yes, it’s not an ’us’ and ’them’, it’s not an ’us’ and ’them’, very much it’s not. We are British you are not British. And I think that is something that we have to work really hard with the children when you, when you’re teaching children they can very, very easily just perceive British as white.

Alison, in her managerial role, appropriated Britishness discourse, resignifying FBVs as ‘Values We Share’, removing the adjective British, adding that the policy had totalitarian nationalistic connotations, Alison: I don’t like the phrase, personally, we’ll pull against it. We changed it to ’Values We Share’. Interviewer: Right? Alison: And we removed when we looked at the policy, I don’t know why it did make me feel very uncomfortable. It’s dramatic but a little bit Hitler youth-ish!…You know, the… I just didn’t like it, I didn’t like the idea that we streamline our education into a particular way and a bit of indoctrination, and I didn’t like that.

Alison added that she thought FBVs were ‘imperialistic’ and ‘xenophobic’ and exclusionary, Yes, we don’t have universal values in how we treat our neighbour, we have British values about how we treat British people. That’s not very nice though is it?

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Implementation and Enactments Alison’s school served a similar demographic to Dawne and Suzanne’s school, located in the area of post-industrial decline with high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and deprivation. The school served a predominantly white community where structural disadvantage was expressed through anxieties projected on migrants, religious and racial minorities. Alison refers to the challenge of countering prejudices from parents, which she says always make her cry, describing a form of passive resistance to her attempts to promote critical RE, Alison: So yes, passive resistance to what we’re trying to do. So you know your teacher might tell you that it’s wrong to be racist but you know I’m telling you.

FBVs, she argues, run the risk of alienating and dividing communities further. She recognises the security agenda driving the discourse and the potential for greater marginalisation amongst students who don’t feel that they belong, Alison: Yes, let’s stop people you know being terrorists? And you know, the best way is to make people feel included, to make people feel they belong, to give people scope to debate openly and freely and not put labels on it like, “Today we are teaching you these British values”, because if you had a cohort of the students who did feel a little bit isolated, actually the last thing you want to do is make them feel more marginalised. Interviewer: Right, and you think it runs the risk of doing that? Alison: Runs the risk, oh yeah, yeah, I think it runs the risk. When we talk to children about how people feel and how they can feel marginalised and different, because if you make people feel like this is the way, this is what we do here and you’re different then it’s very easy for them to then identify with another group and become quite angry. Because everyone wants that sense of belonging, don’t they?

Discussion The question this research seeks to address is what types of teacher subjectivities does the FBV discourse produce? The teachers and their students are the micro bodies of the educational policy power nexus, and the interviews offer in-depth insights into the rich empirical underlife of

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FBV policy and the ways in which it inscribes itself on the teacher and student bodies of its discourse. The interviews are a study of the function of modern power in the capillaries of the education system where teachers unmask the insidious racializing and normalising operations of this governmentality. The interviews reveal the diverse ways in which the teachers interpret and enact FBVs, but two significant factors emerge as the influences on how the teachers choose to interpret and enact the requirement. Firstly, the teachers’ own religious, ethnic and cultural background and secondly the social, economic and cultural location of their schools and the communities they serve. To return to Foucault’s enquiry into the modes of objectivation we can see there is a clear demarcation between the everyday experiences of hyper visible Muslim teachers such as Shazia in group 1, February 2015, and her white majority colleagues for whom FBVs do not constitute an existential threat although they are a source of conflict and dissonance. The themes that emerge are highly contingent on the teachers’ own ethnic and religious positioning and the socioeconomic and cultural demographics of their schools. For the Muslim teachers, Maryam, Ikram, Adam and Maz and the Muslim children they teach, FBVs function as a normalising, dividing, reforming and surveiling form of disciplinary power that targets the bodies of their students. The power effects of the discourse are revealed in Maryam’s stark description of her school’s divisive assembly on FBV and Ikram’s remarks about his students’ concerns that their loyalties were being questioned. Shazia and Sadia show how the discourse mobilises a racial norm that ranks and divides into racial hierarchies, forcing them to occupy multiple subject positions that require them to be endlessly adaptable as they live with the tension of being a hyper visible member of a suspect community and the instrument of the biopolitical policy that simultaneously contributes to their marginalisation and insecurity. As an expression of biopolitical governmentality, the teachers’ narratives reveal how they are both governed and required to govern, to conduct the conduct of their students through their enactments of FBV. This is a discourse that requires them to play ‘a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank’ (Foucault, 1991a: 196). The interviews reveal how the exclusionary effects of the wider political and media discourses of the war on terror are exacerbated through FBVs which act as normalising racial standard. The FBV discourse as the articulation of governmental power is onto formative as Foucault argues, ‘power produces; it produces reality’ (Foucault, 1991a: 194).

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The dialogue between Shazia, Zahra and Sadia reveals the symbolic violence at work in the British values discourse that requires them to position themselves in relation to its racial standard. As a form of power, Britishness as the racial Norm, objectifies the teachers, and the choice is clear, where do your loyalties lie, are you a criminal or are you one of the good boys? (Foucault, 2000: 326). Britishness as the Norm mobilises a racial truth regime and the teachers know they must navigate, ‘a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body’ (Foucault, 1991a: 196). Britishness as the Norm operates as a governmentality of unease and fear producing ontological insecurity, fragmenting Shazia and Zahra’s sense of belonging as their poignant dialogue reveals where Shazia’s over identification with Britishness, ‘I feel totally British’ is challenged by Sadia. By the end of the interview Shazia reframes her view stating that when ‘colour’ is involved, ‘that’s a different dimension’. This and other sequences where the Muslim teachers share their views adds weight to Foucault’s argument that fear plays a regulatory and moral function in neoliberal societies (Foucault, 2010). Fear induces compliance with the Norm because the cost of questioning Britishness is social death (Foucault, 2004), as Foucault argues, not actual death but social exclusion. Zahra and Shazia understand the power of the Norm and the consequences of noncompliance, which could have implications for the careers they have worked so hard to achieve. They know they stand to lose by not fitting in. They want to be ‘intelligible’, whereas Sadia, Ikram and Maz recognise that Britishness has a constitutive inside and outside, but question and resist its incorrigible binary. They are the resisting subjects of the FBVs discourse, expressing free spokenness through their critique of FBVs (Foucault, 2011). Where Sadia highlights the everyday racial micro aggressions, she endures through banal questions asking where she comes from and Maz rejects Britishness as the signifier of the racial pain and insults her family has endured, the discourse is rendered fragile because these teachers are invested in mitigating its alienating effects on their students. Ikram’s argument for a human rights approach to values education as the alternative to FBVs, which he sees as a fearful imposition on a community that experiences the pain of racial marginalisation, signals hope that these educators will adapt and appropriate FBVs in a way that might enable critical pedagogical practice. The ‘modes of objectification’ (Foucault, 2002: 326) that ‘transform human beings into subjects’ (Foucault, 2002: 326), are demonstrated

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with force in the teachers’ descriptions of the objectifying and divisive effects of enactments of FBVs on their students. As the teachers related examples of the ways in which FBVs and Prevent were being implemented in their settings, their dialogue became more critical and resistant. For example, when I informed Adam and Maz about the origins of the definition of FBVs in counter-terror policy, Adam stated bluntly that he saw FBVs as a ‘political agenda’. In Maryam’s account of the assembly on FBVs, she recalls her Muslim students’ comments that, ‘this is directed at us’. Her account is a visceral description of that ‘great instrument of power’, the ‘Normal’, operating as the ‘principle of coercion’ through FBVs. Maryam’s portrayal of the school Principal reciting the 5 FBVs as the students filed into assembly reflects Foucault’s characterisation of the power of the examination in modern education. The ‘normalizing gaze’ of the Principal and her staff, the ‘observing hierarchy’ (Foucault, 1991a: 197) target the suspect community within the school, no longer local young people, but ‘abnormals’ (Foucault, 2000: 51) and the FBVs are enacted as a form of ‘ surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish’ (Foucault, 1991b: 184). The Principal, herself, a subject of a performative and fearful governmentality, enacts FBVs in this way because of a looming OfSTED inspection, but in the process, she objectifies her students and ‘establishes over individuals a visibility’ through which she ‘differentiates them and judges them’ (Foucault, 1991a: 204). Similarly, in Maz and Adam’s account of the student referred to them as ‘one to watch’ because she was on ‘her way to Syria’ there is evidence of normalising, correcting and reforming disciplinary power at work, targeting the body and the mind of a young woman under ‘examination’. As Foucault states techniques of power such as Prevent function as a form of ‘examination’ because, like the young woman in Maz’s account, she is given her ‘status’ as a problem (Foucault, 1991a: 204) and her ‘status’ is linked to the degrees to which she deviates from the Norm, ‘the marks that characterise’ her and make her, ‘a case’ (Foucault, 1991a: 204). Documented, referred and monitored, transformed into a ‘case’, with her profile saved on the school’s pupil database as ‘one to watch’, Maz’s student’s real life is ‘turned into writing’ and the ‘carefully collated life’ has a ‘certain political function’ as a procedure of objectification and subjection (Foucault, 1991a: 204). In contrast to their Muslim colleagues, the white ‘majority’ teachers embody the racial Norm. They are majoritarian invisible raced subjects

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whose experiences have not been shaped by the racial disadvantage experienced by their Muslim South Asian heritage colleagues. Interviews with individual white teachers and the all-white group 2 (February 2015) reflect their racial and ethnic positioning, however, within group 2’s discussion Connor, Ruth and David point out a lack of cohesion within the British union. Their narratives reveal little consensus about what might constitute British identity or a British value and bewilderment with the requirement. Where their Muslim colleagues are present in the groups, their stories serve to edify their colleague’s understanding of the racialising effects of the discourse, prompting them to reflexively reinterpret and problematise FBV. This finding strengthens the arguments of researchers such as Iqbal (ref), that teachers who come from the minority communities are best placed to interpret policy pedagogically in ways that limit potential damage to learners in schools which serve those minoritised communities. A theme of both the group and the individual interviews is a concern with the additional performative demands and burden placed on teachers by FBVs and Prevent, in a context where teachers are heavily regulated, continuously surveiled and managed. The data confirms Foucault’s argument (Foucault, 2002: 219) that power in modern social institutions operates in a triangle formation of, ‘sovereignty-discipline-government’. The ever-present fear of inspection acts to discipline teacher bodies, as exemplified in Maryam’s description of the FBVs assembly ‘put on’ for OfSTED and the teachers’ fears that FBVs are yet another auditable tick box exercise necessary for compliance, irrespective of the effects on their students. In this way the teachers become ‘measurable’ and ‘calculable’, like their students, subject to the disciplinary power of the ‘anonymous’ and ‘functional’ regulator, OfSTED, exercised through inspection (Foucault, 1991b: 193). The danger inherent in this high stakes inspection regime is that it produces teacher subjects who become disassociated from their pedagogical and educational values in order to remain compliant. Policy enactment requires teacher subjects who are governable, adaptable, self-regulating and self-monitoring, in other words, teacher subjects who are homo oeconomicus, ‘The person who accepts reality…someone manageable… someone who is eminently governable’ (Foucault, 2010: 270). However, there is little evidence in any of the groups that the teachers had become passive or willingly governable subjects, rather, the teachers presented themselves as ethical subjects, through free spokenness

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(parr¯esia) which in turn was an expression of their ethical self-forming activity and their ethical telos (Foucault, 1992). This aspect of the interviews is both striking and significant from a Foucauldian point of view. Power, as stated above, produces reality and power relations can only operate where there is resistance and counter discourse. Without freedom, the teachers would not be able to constitute themselves as the questioning, critical and in some cases fundamentally oppositional educational subjectivities of the FBV discourse, as Foucault argues, Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics…ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection. (Foucault, 2000: 284)

From the perspective of Foucault’s ethics, education policy requirements such as FBV, curricular frameworks and pedagogical discourses, such as the pedagogies of RE, operate as ‘modes of subjection’ (Foucault, 1992: 27) which prompt the ethical subject to consider their moral relationship to these discursive resources. The interviews reveal where they ‘recognise their moral obligations’ (Foucault, 1992: 27), but the modes of subjection are a site of tension expressed through discussions about the conflicting demands of pluralistic RE and the homogenising shared values discourse of FBV. Shazia’s observation that she and her colleagues were teachers of RE, not teachers of British values and David’s concern that FBVs would alienate and push aside marginalised students demonstrate the ways in which they were reflexively refusing the incitements of FBVs. Such education ethical work is not easy, ‘it can be practised in the form of a relentless combat…’ but, ‘whose momentary setbacks—can have meaning and value in themselves’ (Foucault, 1992: 27). We see examples of this self-constituting ethical work in the ways the teachers choose to enact and interpret FBVs such as Alison’s refusal to fully embrace British values through her reframing of the requirement as ‘values we share’, or Nick’s utilisation of the RE classroom as the space where the morality of western invasions in the middle east and Afghanistan became a critical investigation of disaster capitalism. The interviews also reveal the ways the teachers articulate and enact what Foucault refers to as the ethical telos, the personal ethical imaginary which, ‘commits the individual towards a certain mode of being’ (Foucault, 1992: 28). There is a consistent theme of wishing to tell the truth about religions, to counter misrepresentations that might feed

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resentment or embolden racism and to protect their students from harmful influences stemming from a commitment to pluralistic RE, for example, Ikram’s interview demonstrates his desire to minimise the divisive effects of the Britishness discourse on his students and their families who distrust the educational interventions of the state. Similarly, there are numerous examples of truth telling and free spokenness in the interviews. The interviews show the teachers to be the resisting subjects of FBVs. Their commitment to provide a truthful account of religious, cultural and ethnic diversity reflects Foucault’s discussion of parr¯esia as, ‘a stance, a way of being which is akin to a virtue’, which involves, ‘ways of acting’ (Foucault, 2011: 14). The interviews demonstrate how the teachers practice their parr¯esia as an ‘obligation’ and ‘responsibility’ to speak the truth to their students. Alison’s lessons on the rule of law or Amin’s theological lessons on jihad provide two examples of this practice. By drawing from his knowledge of Islamic theology Amin was able to offer his students an alternative perspective to the reductive media discourse that was shaping their perception of Islam and Muslims. Similarly the teachers’ accounts of their experiences of FBV and Prevent in practice reflects Foucault’s characterisation of the parr¯esiast’s truth telling, that is ‘always applied…and is directed to individuals and situations in order to say what they are in reality’ and ‘to tell individuals the truth of themselves hidden from their own eyes’ (Foucault, 2011: 19). Parr¯esia requires courage. It is a risky endeavour in an environment characterised by fear and in some instances anti-Muslim backlash and xenophobia as Jen in group 1 February 2015 reported. For Jen, FBVs had the potential to reinforce a sense of racial superiority amongst her students, some of whom came from families with affiliations to far-right extremist nationalist groups. Similarly, in the December 2015 interview, Alex described the fear amongst her students, who she described as ‘scared’ by the terror attacks. Dawne and Suzanne interpret the requirement as a strategy to respond to the xenophobia of some of their students who see religious and cultural difference as a threat, conflated with asylum seekers who are in competition for housing and jobs. Jo and Alison reported similar concerns with xenophobic attitudes, but scepticism towards the capacity of FBVs, described by Alison as ‘a bit Hitler youth’ish’, to address such racism. Alison’s account of FBVs describes a governmentality of security and fear that requires her interventions to soften its nationalistic.

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Dawne’s utilisation of FBVs as a way to discipline the discontent of her white working-class students reveals the operations of a flexible biopolitical governmentality that targets the troublesome and the aleatory sectors of the population (Foucault, 2004). FBVs normalising function operates through the imposition of homogeneity, seeking to transform both Ikram and Maryam’s suspect Muslim students and Dawne’s working-class students into liberal multicultural classless citizens. As a governmental strategy, FBVs disavow structural disadvantage, seeking to reform and correct the suspect or deviant child, deficient in Britishness. Irrespective of their ethnicity, FBVs act as a normalising apparatus of capture, where allegiance to Britishness as the Norm indicates, ‘membership of a homogeneous social body’ and enables teachers to classify, hierarchize and distribute rank according to the degree to which their students align to its racial standard (Foucault, 1991b: 184).

Conclusion The interviews presented in this chapter provide insights into the ways that the discourse of FBV and Prevent in education acted on the subjectivities of the teachers. These interviews are a document of a politically febrile period where the effects of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terror attacks were shaping public opinion and the UKIP Leave campaign was building momentum. However, the teacher interviews point to the structural cynicism at work in FBVs demonstrated by their alienating effects on the Muslim teachers and their students. All of the teachers testify to the conflict between FBV and the tradition of pluralistic RE they draw from as ethical subjects concerned with fair representation of faiths and open classroom debates. However, the key finding is that the interviews reveal that the teachers are not the passive dupes of policy. On the contrary, they are the resisting subjects of FBV, drawing from the alternative discourse of their open, pluralistic RE. Like their students, these teachers and, as Chapter 8 also shows, have an ethical commitment to the truth and an educational telos in contrast to and in opposition to the chilling effects of the governmental security discourse of FBVs. As a genealogy the interviews are an expression of the teachers’ subjugated knowledges, but it is these accounts that allow us to write a counter history and document the insidious effects of this racialising discourse that threatens to empty education practice of any viable meaning. In the next chapter I consider teacher interviews collected in the aftermath of

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the Brexit referendum and at a roundtable discussion held in December 2019.

References Brenkman, J. (2007). The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy. Political Thought Since September 11. Princeton University Press. British Educational Research Association (BERA). (2018). Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research. https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidel ines-for-educational-research-2018 Jackson, R. (2004). Rethinking Religious Education and Plurality. Issues in Diversity and Pedagogy. Routledge. Denzin, N. (2003). The Practices and Politics of Interpretation. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Sage. Foucault, M. (1980). Two Lectures. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge. Pearson Education. Foucault, M. (1991a). The Foucault Reader (P. Rabinow, Ed.). Penguin. Foucault, M. (1991b). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1992). The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality: 2. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2000). Michel Foucault. Ethics. Essential Works of Foucault 1954– 1984 (P. Rabinow, Ed., Vol. 1). Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002). Michel Foucault. Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954– 1984 (J. Faubion, Ed., Vol. 3). Penguin. Foucault, M. (2004). Society Must Be Defended. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2010). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2011). The Courage of Truth. The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the College de France 1983–1984. Palgrave Macmillan. Kapoor, N., Kalra, V., & Rhodes, J. (Eds.). (2013). The State of Race. Palgrave Macmillan. Riley, S., Robson, M., & Evans, A. (2022). Foucauldian Informed Discourse Analysis. In M. Bamberg, C. Demuth, & M. Watzlawik (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Identity. Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Brexit, Religious Education and Fundamental British Values

Introduction Chapter 8 examined the teachers’ experiences and interpretations of FBV and Prevent in 2015. The findings show that the Muslim teachers felt the divisive and exclusionary effects of FBV most keenly, whilst it was largely received with bewilderment by their white majority colleagues. A key finding, however, is the way that most of the teachers resisted the requirement, choosing to reinterpret it in line with their own ethical and pedagogical commitments. The teachers’ interviews reflect agency and a deeply ethical preoccupation with RE as free spokenness, parr¯esia. In relation to Foucault’s enquiry into the ways that human beings are transformed into subjects through the objectifying effects of power, the teachers’ interviews reveal them as the resisting ethical subjects of the FBV discourse and educational truth tellers, parrhesiasts. In this chapter I present findings obtained from analysis of interviews undertaken with 2 groups of pre-service teachers in 2017 which focussed on the impact of the Brexit referendum on their students’ views of religion and a roundtable group interview undertaken in 2019 with inservice teachers, initial teacher educators, youth leaders and faith group representatives. The roundtable event was held to conclude a collaborative project exploring young peoples’ sense of belonging and identity in post-referendum Britain. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_9

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Many of the concerns that were shared in the 2015 interviews are expressed by the participants in the 2017 and 2019 interviews but in the febrile racialised context of the Brexit referendum there is evidence that they are heightened and exacerbated. We also find the same ethical sensibilities, concern with truth telling and tension between pluralistic RE and the requirements of FBV. Crisis Racism: Brexit Brexit is a ‘crisis racism’ event (Balibar, in Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991: 204). The war on terror and political backlash against multiculturalism created the foundation for Brexit to confer ‘legitimacy’ to racial and religious discrimination (OHCHR, 2018). Balibar describes crisis racism as the ‘crossing of certain thresholds of intolerance which are generally turned on the victims themselves’ and significantly, in relation to Brexit, this plays out in the way in which the divisions ‘between classes…yield…a social consensus based on exclusion and tacit hostility towards’ the figure of the ‘foreigner’ (Balibar, in Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991: 219). The vote took place on 24 June 2016 with a referendum turnout of 71.8% of eligible UK voters. The result was a slim majority (51.9%) in favour of leaving the EU. In the weeks that followed the referendum there was a spike in hate crimes directed at migrants, racial minorities, and the LGBT community. Figures released by the National Police Chiefs Council in July 2016, showed that in comparison with 2015, there was a 58% increase in reports of hate crime in the last week of July, five weeks after the referendum vote (Travis, 2016). ‘Taking back control of our borders’ was a constant refrain of the pro-Brexit Leave campaign. In rhetoric ‘largely framed by appeals to emotion’ (Sayer, 2017: 92) the Leave campaign presented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers as an existential threat to the economy and the culture of the UK. The UKIP poster Breaking Point exemplified this discourse most strikingly. The slogan ‘take back control of our borders’ was set against the image of a long line of dark-skinned immigrants, queuing to cross the border of the UK. The Leave discourse was, therefore, racializing. It imposed difference, the ‘foundational act through which racialization is produced’ (Fassin, in Mascia-Lees, 2011: 422), by mobilising biological racism, which takes skin colour as a primary marker, and cultural and religious difference to designate threat. The timing of the Breaking Point poster coincided with the Syrian refugee crisis and can be seen as a specific

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reaction to refugees from Muslim countries, ‘bearers of alien customs’ who lie ‘beyond the boundary of what it means to be British’ (Virdee & McGeever, 2017: 7). The study that led to the 2017 group interviews was prompted by a conversation I had with a Head of RE in a secular 11–18 local authority secondary school belonging to our ITE partnership, situated in a suburb of a city in the Northwest of England in late 2016. For the first time in her career the teacher had to deal with parents and guardians exercising their right to withdraw their children from RE lessons. The teacher noted that in the weeks after the Brexit vote there had been an increase in withdrawals, a trend that had become national as reported by Richard Griffiths of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. Griffiths noted that ‘parents with certain prejudices including Islamophobia and antisemitism who wish to remove their children from certain lessons would significantly hinder the ability of the school to prepare a child for life in modern Britain’ (Turner, 2018). Troubled by the teacher’s account I decided to undertake a small scale exploratory online survey to investigate whether secondary RE teachers in our ITE partnership thought that the racial politics of the referendum had affected the way their students engaged with RE and perceived religion. In total, 68 teachers responded including the nine pre-service student teachers. The dominant themes that emerged from the analysis were teachers’ concerns about the racialisation of religion, conflation of religion, especially Islam, with anti-migrant attitudes, recognition of the value of RE as an educational space to discuss students’ fears but criticism of the ‘chilling effects’ of government frameworks such as Prevent and FBV (Thomas, 2016). Respondents were invited to participate in follow up qualitative interviews to discuss these findings in the light of their own experiences. The group interviews formed part of this second phase of the study and investigated the extent to which the themes reported in the online survey were evident in the student teachers’ schools, as they perceived them. The interview aimed to examine the extent to which the student teachers discerned evidence of, . Racialization of religion in their placement schools . The effects of the racial politics of the post-referendum period on students’ views of religion.

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And to explore: . The student teachers’ views of FBV and the Prevent duty to gain insights into whether policy requirements were enabling or constraining factors on their practice. Some of the teacher narratives indicate evidence of un-reflexive antiMuslim sentiments amongst white pupils. However, whilst anti-Muslim sentiment is a dominant theme, there is also evidence from two schools, one serving a predominantly white, middle-class community and the other, a new Christian free school, that issues of race are either invisible, or are managed within tightly regulated policy frameworks. The most striking narratives though, testify to a visceral atmosphere of unease expressed by the teachers working in challenging urban environments, who report evidence of students’ fears of being deported after the referendum vote and panicked application of the Prevent duty. These accounts confirm Virdee and McGeever’s view that the aftermath of the referendum ‘has been overdetermined by racism’ expressed through insular English nationalism (Virdee & McGeever, 2017: 1), but equally they suggest a racism with a longer structuration merging with the unease created by the referendum (Table 9.1). The 2017 group interviews adopted a focus group method. The teachers were provided with statements taken from the online survey of secondary RE teachers’ views of the effects of Brexit on the way their students received RE. Participants were recruited from the Secondary Table 9.1 Group interview pre-service teachers January 2017 Group 1

Group 2

Tim, age 22, male, White British, Roman Catholic Paul, age 27, male, White British, Roman Catholic Kate, age 22, female, White Irish, Roman Catholic Rachel, 25, female, White Irish, Roman Catholic Clare, age 22, female, White British, Protestant, Anglican

Emma, age 30, female, Course Leader, White British, Jewish Jade, age 22, female, White British, Roman Catholic Abby, age 22, female, Sabrina, age 22, female, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim Helen, age 22, female, White British, no religion

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PGCE RE programme I had previously led with the agreement of their Course Leader. The following section presents extracts from the interviews revealing key themes. Group 1 The Impact of Brexit Group 1 agreed that Brexit had legitimised pre-existing racist views that were influenced by anti-immigration sentiments, as Kate argued, Kate: I think that Brexit was basically for a lot of people …an opportunity for people to basically say no to immigrants, like they never really understood the purpose of Brexit and they just took the opportunity to say now we’ll get rid of them, just ignorance really

Islam and Terror Kate: I don’t know if it’s affected me in my life but whenever we’re doing Islam in school, even if you’re not talking about terror that’s all you get asked, not matter what topic you’re doing on Islam you get asked questions about terrorism, so they obviously associate it with terrorism Clare: Today I was doing about John the Baptist and terrorism came up, it was like… Kate: Yeah, feel like they’re obsessed with it, straight off what their Mum and Dad think and the media and stuff, that has an effect Clare: As soon as you get onto the topic about anything, it’s about like… Kate: Isis Clare: Yeah, terrorists

The group agreed that mediatization played a significant role in shaping their students’ attitudes. They discussed a report that had gone viral on FaceBook referring to Muslims ‘cancelling Christmas lights in Sweden’. Rachel added that in her predominantly white mono cultural placement school, her students and their families ‘were angry’, and Paul commented that in the wake of terror attacks, his students were scared. Both groups reported on the pernicious racialising effects of this fearful imaginary in the RE classroom, with Rachel noting that the fear was directed at religion in general as a signifier of difference, the irrational other to the unthreatening neutrality of secular liberalism,

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Rachel: Yeah, and their families are angry, but you can see that in their opinion of RE, like, do you know what I mean? From them saying well I don’t want my children learning this that and the other… Yeh and it’s not just about Muslims it’s about Christianity as well, its religion in general

Conversely, Tim related how this discourse of fear was affecting his Muslim students in his urban placement school, Tim: I did one lesson er living as a Muslim in British society …and …I had some interesting responses, and one of them which I found a bit strange was one them she literally wrote, it’s hard to be a Muslim because all white people are racist…

RE as a Safe Space Group 1 unanimously agreed that RE had a major role to play in challenging their students’ misconceptions and fears. They singled out the government’s Progress 8 accountability and performance measures, which had led to school management teams allocating more resource and curriculum time for maths, science and English as opposed to RE, as a contributory factor in the low status of RE in their placement settings. They agreed that lack of time and resource undermined the capacity of RE to tackle the social problems and misconceptions their pupils held about religion and terror, leading Rachel, Tim and Paul to comment, Rachel: I think we need backing of what its (RE) actually bringing to the table and I think, like society needs to realise that the stuff that we’re teaching the students is actually going on around them whether they want to believe it or not but we’re tackling things that the kids are going to experience… Paul: It’s more important for them to learn about Brexit, terrorist attacks than it is to learn Pythagoras’ theorem Tim: when you hear about people taking their kids out of RE, to us it’s ridiculous, because you think, that’s not going to help them, that’s not really going to help them at all, even if they have a really negative opinion of Islam, surely learning more about it, is still more beneficial, erm but that’s not their attitude, I think that the problem is that some people have the attitude that somehow learning…that some religions are so bad that just learning about them will make you somehow a worse person

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Rachel: they don’t have the right to withdraw their child from maths so, why should they have the right to withdraw them from any other subject, or PE?

The group expressed bemusement towards FBVs, which they agreed were universal values and ‘common sense’. There was consensus that the inclusion of the adjective British added nothing to the values. Tim described them as a ‘social tactic’ to bring people together. Kate, like Shazia in the 2015 February interviews questioned the relevance of FBVs in RE, stating, Like we’re learning about religion not being British, do you know what I mean? That’s a completely different thing isn’t it?

Group 2 The themes that emerged in group 2 s interview reflected the views and experiences of their colleagues in group 1, but this group’s accounts of disciplinary, surveilling and divisive practices were starker. Impact of Brexit In agreement with their group 1 colleagues, group 2 also saw Brexit as a proxy for anti-Muslim racism, as Helen comments in this extract, Helen: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any excuse for ignorance and people, like what we were saying earlier, people voted to leave the EU as a way of saying we don’t want Muslims we don’t want refugees, they weren’t aware of the implications of everything else…they’re just ignorant

The group also identified fear as a factor shaping Brexit racism, a fear driven by terror attacks, which combined with anti-Muslim and antirefugee sentiment to create a ‘crisis racism’ and a retreat into populism, Helen: I think it’s a lot to do with, like the terror attacks and things that have happened… I think it’s a lot like, er it might seems a bit extreme, like Hitler wanting to blame the Jews, I think it’s a lot to do with that, looking for a small group to blame for what’s going on in the world a small group of Muslims, who are not even real Muslims, they’re causing this harm, so I know we’ll blame them , all of them, all of them must be bad people, all Muslims must love terror, that why, that why we’re in the situation we’re in

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Anti-Muslim racism was evident in the RE classroom. Helen related the example of a boy whose anti-Muslim views combined with a general dislike of religion, where he conflated Jesus with Islam because of portrayals of Jesus as a bearded middle eastern man, Yeah, in year 7 one of the boys I teach he’s very anti-Muslim and any chance that he can bring up a way to disrespect Muslims he does even if it’s not on topic, we were doing about Jesus the other day and he was like, Jesus was a Muslim, I hate Muslims, it just didn’t really link at all and we’ve had assemblies on racism and on the impact that Brexit

The racial biopolitics of the governmentality of fear were demonstrated most starkly in this account of the impact of the referendum in Emma’s former school. Foucault’s argument that biopolitical racism targets certain groups within society and creates divisions, ‘caesuras’, is clearly evidenced in Emma’s narrative. The minoritized students Emma refers to exist in a racialised state of exception within their urban community, fearing deportation after Brexit. Emma describes how she and her colleagues responded with pastoral and educational strategies to help their fearful students make sense of Brexit, Emma: I’ve worked here for just under 2 years, so I was here when it (Brexit) happened, my colleagues in my previous school which is in south Manchester and is very, very mixed erm they said that they had, not just in RE but in all subjects, the day after, when the result, they had a lot of students coming to school fearful, just fearful, very, very fearful, am I going to be sent home? What is going to happen, and there was an awful lot of almost academic pastoral support work of allowing them in these safe spaces to unpick the reasons why people might have voted this way and the realities of what this meant for them because they had a significant proportion who said, ‘well my Dad, my Dad’s not in this country, I’m never going to see him’, erm and we’re kind of talking year 7, year 8, 9 very, very fearful but the school was very much encouraging this dialogue, you know this was the policy (the vote) but this is the reality of what’s going to happen to you and recognising then, this is the implications of it, teenagers worried they’re going to be sent back to countries, that for some of them, they’ve never even been to

FBVs and Prevent The sociocultural locations of the teachers’ schools played a significant role in shaping the ways FBVs and Prevent were implemented and

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received. Helen described a ‘huge flag’ displaying the FBVs that hung in the main entrance of her school. She related a lesson in which her year 10 students saw FBVs as a valorisation of their national identities as opposed non-British subjects. Helen’s example reflects the ways in which FBVs are open to banal ethno nationalist interpretations and reinforce an ‘us and them’ binary, Helen: Yeah, I think it…with that year 10 class, we did the whole put what it mean to be British on a British flag and they sort of saw themselves on a pedestal, like, this is what it means to be British, I’m British I’m great, it was, like even doing that it felt like it was a sort of them and us situation and that was in PSE with an RE teacher but she had to do it because its fundamental British values and it was …you know what I mean…and it just didn’t sit quite right with me…wouldn’t like to do that again

The group emphasised the importance of good RE subject knowledge so teachers could handle and diffuse their students’ misconceptions and manage debates that would allow them to discuss sensitive issues relating to race, religion and politics in a pedagogically safe environment. Emma provided an example of an incident in her school which was escalated due to the class teachers’ lack of subject knowledge. The incident involved a group of year 10 Muslims students who expressed opposition to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons because of the way they portrayed the Prophet Muhammad. For Emma, the incident was a missed opportunity for a valuable educational discussion about the limits of free speech, Emma: After the Charlie Hebdo incident and the students in form time, when their form tutor was a history teacher said yeah, well they shouldn’t have done it, they got what they deserved, they shouldn’t have drawn pictures of the prophet, its rude isn’t it, and they were given detention and they were given internal exclusion, like in the exclusion room, and they were asked to stay at home for 3 days as their punishment and I thought…I know that if that had been in my RE classroom I’d have gone hang on, tell me again what you’ve just said, unpick what you’ve just said there… but I was very alarmed that…what the kids been sent home, that just reinforces all the… Helen: And they just panic don’t they Emma: it was a panic, this was a complete panic…I mean I loved her, but this was a history teacher who’s just gone ‘Prevent’! And who’s filled in a form and my God we’ve got 15-year-olds speaking their mind…what could be worse…

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Emma’s account reveals the tensions between the disciplinary requirements of Prevent and the educational values of politically and religiously literate RE. The panic and fear that Emma described was mirrored in accounts of the implementation of the Prevent duty in Jade’s school where she described the teachers walking ‘constantly on eggshells’ in an environment where, It’s constantly ‘Prevent’…we go through Prevent all the time…oh, yeah all the time…I don’t think it’s good, it creates fears…it does… ‘cos them teachers it scares them and then they look for any little thing

Jade described how whole school staff training had taken place to raise teachers’ awareness of the symbols used by far-right nationalist extremists. She related an incident in which a boy had drawn a swastika on his hand and how teachers were constantly looking for signs of extremism amongst their students. Jade commented, ‘It puts you on edge’ and that as a trainee, she was ‘terrified’. Her comments reveal the governmentality of fear operating through Prevent and FBVs, requiring her colleagues to surveil, discipline and report (Table 9.2), Jade: if a teacher saw that they’d just report it, cos they so scared…it’s so drummed into them to report, report

The roundtable discussion was held as a plenary event to conclude a collaborative investigation of the views of young people on Britishness, identity and belonging in the post-Brexit context. This group discussion marked the end of the phase of data collection on teachers’ views of FBVs Table 9.2 December 2019 roundtable discussion participants Sameer, age 39, male, Teacher, British, Pakistani heritage, Muslim, Joanne, age 33, female, White British, no religion Alison, age 38, female, White British, Protestant (Anglican) Noor, female, age 29, British, Teacher Pakistani heritage, Muslim Fatima, female, age 35, Tutor, Egyptian, Muslim

Peter, age 50, Youth Leader, Anglican Priest, White British, Christian Ajinder, age 55, Tutor, British, Punjabi heritage, Sikh Kate, age 55, Youth Leader, White British, Christian Daniel, male, age 47, Tutor, White British, Protestant, Anglican

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that commenced in 2015 and concluded a few months before the first covid lockdown in 2020 and the summer of Black Lives Matter protests in response to the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by US police on May 25th 2020. Data collection for this project concluded in December 2019. By 2019, FBVs had been a part of the teachers’ regulatory framework for 7 years and the Prevent Duty had been a requirement for four years. By 2019, civic nationalism in the form of FBVs was an established and familiar part of teachers’ lives and practice, however, the roundtable discussion showed that for these practitioners, FBV remained a stumbling block to the open, questioning and critical pedagogy they wished to practice in their RE classrooms. Participants included teachers, youth leaders and ITE tutors. The group was provided with statements made by the young people who participated in the project. They were then invited to discuss the statements with their colleagues before sharing their reflections with the group. The main themes that emerged reflected and supported the critique made by the pre and in service teachers. BVs were critiqued as divisive and intersecting with pre-existing racisms. The delegates emphasised the benefits of experiential and intercultural learning as an educational response and as a pedagogical alternative to the civic nationalism of FBVs. Sameer, a curriculum lead in an all-boys’ Muslim faith school expressed his reservations, stating the BVs were ‘quite divisive’ and led to ‘suspicion’ and a ‘hidden agenda’. In support, Daniel, an RE ITE tutor, commented on the imposition of FBVs and Alison commented on her experience with an OfSTED inspector, who she felt just wanted to ‘tick a box’ rather than engage with her schools’ Christian ethos and reinterpretation of FBVs as ‘values we share’. Ajinder, an ITE tutor noted how a statement from one of Sameer’s students reflected his religious identity and values, Ajinder: Here is someone who has already got their religious conceptual framework and they’re very secure in it and they’re able to then not just see through British values but actually see beyond British values to say "Actually, what we need to do is this," and that they’re so secure in their own faith values that they are able to then project those further and I really found that quite enlightening really, heartening as well.

In Sameer’s response he notes the dissonance produced by BVs which divide and conflict his students who felt as if their loyalties were being questioned,

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Sameer: It’s quite emotional to me because my boys are very, somewhat incensed by this idea that you know we have to subscribe to these British values …and for them to then grow up with this sense of dissonance …you know there’s that conflict there, your identity as being British, it needs to marry with the kind of faith which they hold quite dearly, and that’s what I kind of felt within the boys when speaking to them

Noor, an RE teacher in a multiethnic inner city high school added that for her students BVs signified whiteness and racial superiority. In agreement with Sameer, she added that for her students FBVs were building on the foundations of pre-existing racisms, stating that her students, Noor: Feel a bit intimidated because they do associate British values, Britishness to whiteness, …talking posh is white, so I’m not going to talk posh because I’m not going to talk in that way because it’s white and I don’t want to be white. So I think it’s a little bit aggressive to have the British flag and then British values, it’s kind of like putting it in my face and are you trying to say that I’m not British if I don’t abide by these rules?

Sameer agreed, sharing that his British Muslim students’ sense of precarious belonging had been exacerbated by BVs, Sameer: I think that sense of precariousness is accentuated for many British Muslims… it develops an anxiety when you also have from the top down level this kind of British values agenda being kind of forced downwards then at home they are struggling with that identity as well, it must be a really confusing and difficult for them as well in a way, where they sit, they identify themselves as Muslims OK I am a Pakistani but I also am British and then if they experience any kind of xenophobia or hate then again that’s kind of concerning for myself.

Peter, an Anglican Youth leader who ran an ecumenical interfaith youth group stressed the importance of reclaiming Britishness from the far right, Peter: Because the danger is that, with what you are saying, is if you don’t reclaim that British, that just is the agenda of the Far Right and that’s it, and the Union Jack will forever be seen as something that is exclusive and colonialist and Far Right and it’s very difficult to pull it away from that isn’t it?

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Sameer, Ajinder and Fatima agreed with Peter, arguing that more opportunity was required for students to engage in intercultural learning, so restrictive nationalistic constructs of British identity could be resisted. Fatima summarised this view, Fatima: “I’m a Muslim but I’m also British,” “I’m at home,” “I am not the outsider.”

Fatima undermines the deficit discourse of FBVs by emphasising that racialised young people are not deficient in Britishness, rather, they have developed notions of who they are and a strong hybrid identity. Alison suggested that the government’s cultural capital agenda could be appropriated for the purpose of reconstructing Britishness as plural and multi religious, multiethnic and multicultural, adding, Alison: This is Cultural Capital that we’re talking about, really inspiring stories that you’ve talked about, this is our culture and this is valuable… This is the culture of Britain today and we own it.

Discussion The interviews reveal much about the ways in which the racialising discourses of Brexit interacted with FBVs and Prevent to shape both teacher and student subjectivity. Bewilderment about the rationale for the requirement and a sense of its misalignment to the values of pluralistic RE are apparent in comments such as Kate’s remark that we’re learning about religion, not being British. The racialisation of religion as a signifier of difference emerges sharply in the teachers’ accounts which portray a milieu of fear and suspicion towards religion amongst their students. Clare’s remarks about her student’s questions about ISIS terrorism in a lesson on John the Baptist and Helen’s comments about her student who declared that Jesus was a Muslim and that he hated Muslims bear witness to this fearful environment. Helen’s description of the flags used to display FBVs and her year 10 students’ response to her lesson on FBVs as an endorsement of white British identity paints a picture of banal ethno nationalism reproducing divisive racial hierarchies. The display of racial superiority incited by the FBVs lesson led Helen to express concern for refugee children who were due to start at her school the following term.

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There are two accounts which stand out as powerful illustrations of the governmentality of fear operating through the Prevent requirement. Emma’s description of her ethnic minority students’ response to the Brexit result, expressed as fear of deportation and her colleague’s reaction to the year 10 Muslim boys’ criticism of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad offer a visceral case study of the enactments of racially divisive disciplinary power of Prevent and its security discourse. The other example is Jade’s description of the tense staff training on rightwing extremist symbolism that led to constant surveillance of students for signs of radicalisation in her school. In these examples we can see how the Prevent discourse was producing fearful teacher and student subjectivities. The divisive effects of FBVs on students were also reported by Sameer, who described in it terms of dissonance between their religious and British identity. Foucault’s analysis of internal state racism, the consequence of biopolitical governmentality, offers insights into the teachers’ accounts. Internal ‘state’ racism Foucault states, introduces ‘a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control’ (Foucault, 2004: 254). By dividing the population into legal or illegal immigrant, British or un-British citizen, innocent or suspect, the state designates certain segments of the population as a danger, thus warranting reform, discipline or incarceration, ‘in the name of the protection and management of life’ (Taylor, 2011: 753). In the context of fundamental British values Foucault’s argument that state racism targets groups for correction is reflected in the teachers’ accounts. Rasmussen (2011) argues that the forms state racism takes are hetero-referential and auto-referential racism. Examples of heteroreferential racism include xenophobia. Auto referential racism is directed at groups within society, for example, through discourses of the white working-class chav or the suspect Muslim. The disciplinary enactments of British values and Prevent, the domestic war on terror, that the teachers’ interviews bear testimony to, reflect Foucault’s characterisation of internal racism which is expanded into, ‘an internal war that defends society against threats born of and its own body’ (Foucault, 2004: 216). Emma’s account of her students’ panicked response to Brexit is empirical evidence of Foucault’s argument that biopolitical racism creates caesuras, a break in the species body, in this case, targeting urban minority ethnic Muslim students marked as suspect or deviant. Similarly in her description of her colleague’s reaction to Year 10 Muslim boys’ condemnation of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, the biopolitics of Prevent can be

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seen at work as an internal racism that seeks to defend society against its own deviant members. Emma’s students are positioned by Prevent and FBVs on the outside of society, not an outside beyond the borders of the state, but an outside that co-exists within the state that must be defended against the deviant members of its own population as part of the internal war the state wages against the ‘abnormals’ (Foucault, 2000: 51). These two incidents exemplify autoreferential biopolitical governmentality, but it can also be seen at work in Jade’s description of terrified teachers surveilling and disciplining their students for signs of rightwing extremism. Jade’s account reflects Foucault’s argument that internal racism operates at the intersections of class and race to racialise groups considered deviant, in this case the structurally vulnerable white workingclass students of a racially polarised community. Jade’s school served the community that experienced some of the worst of the 2001 Northern riots and had been targeted for Prevent funding. As an enquiry into the ways in which the racialising discourse of Brexit traverse the FBVs and Prevent discourses to shape teacher subjectivity, these accounts reveal teacher subjects of a policy rationality operating through fear and a culture of danger (Foucault, 2010). The interviews also reveal teachers’ counter discourse, ethical self-formation, reflexivity and refusal of the governmentality of fear. In Emma’s interview she inverts and problematises her colleagues’ reaction to the Muslim boys’ disapproval of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, by reframing the incident as an opportunity for an educational debate about the limits of free expression and concepts of blasphemy in Islamic theology. Her ethical telos as a reflexive, critical teacher of RE is communicated by her commitment to parr¯esia in the classroom and free spokenness about an issue she was pedagogically equipped to explore. This incident exemplifies the tensions between pluralistic RE and the chilling effects of the Prevent discourse. Similarly, Alison’s ethical work, is shown in her reappropriation of governmental cultural capital discourse as a pluralistic celebration of cultural diversity in opposition to the civic nationalism of British values.

Conclusion This chapter documents teachers’ views of impact of the post-Brexit context on them and their students’ sense of belonging and national identity. The challenges both they and their students faced in this period were significant, as Emma and Jade’s accounts of the fearful and alienating

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enactments of the Prevent duty demonstrate. However, throughout these narratives there is a commitment to question the policy discourse, to challenge the emboldened racial and religious prejudice of some students, to offer educational alternatives and to mitigate the symbolic violence of the FBVs discourse. However, despite the constraints that the teachers face, a consistent theme is agency, resistance and refusal. The teacher subjects of this research are agentic ethical subjects committed to pluralistic RE that offers them an alternative discursive resource to draw from in their self-constituting ethical practice.

References Balibar, E., & Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, nation, class. Ambiguous identities. Verso. Fassin, D. in Mascia-Lees, F. (Ed.). (2011). A companion to the anthropology of the body and embodiment. Blackwell. Foucault, M. (2000). Michel Foucault. Ethics. Essential works of Foucault 1954– 1984 (P. Rabinow, Ed., Vol. 1). Penguin. Foucault, M. (2004). Society must be defended. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2010). The Birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan. OHCHR. (2018). End of mission statement of the special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance at the conclusion of her mission to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2018/05/ end-mission-statement-special-rapporteur-contemporary-forms-racism-racial Rasmussen, K. (2011). Foucault’s genealogy of racism. Theory, Culture & Society., 28(5), 34–51. Taylor, C. (2011). Race and racism in Foucault’s College de France Lectures. Philosophy Compass, 6(11), 746–756. Sayer, D. (2017). White riot-Brexit, Trump and post-factual politics. Journal of Historical Sociology, 30(1), 92–106. Travis, A. (2016, September 7). Lasting rise in hate crime after EU referendum, figures show. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/ sep/07/hate-surged-after-eu-referendum-police-figures-show Thomas, P. (2016). Youth, terrorism and education: Britain’s prevent programme. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 35(2), 171–187. Turner, C. (2018, April 11). Teachers: ‘Racist’ parents pull children from RE classes because they don’t want them learning about Islam. The Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/11/teachers-racistparents-pull-children-re-classes-dont-want-learning/ Virdee, S., & McGeever, B. (2017). Racism, crisis, Brexit. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(10), 1802–1819.

CHAPTER 10

Concluding Thoughts: Working the Cracks

Introduction In a debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argues that ‘the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them’ (Foucault, in Chomsky & Foucault, 2006: 41). This book was written in the spirit of Foucault’s ‘real’ political task. It has sought to reveal and analyse the ruses of power operating though FBV and Prevent. The teachers’ accounts of the ways these policies have been translated and enacted bear testimony to the obscure workings of symbolic violence manifested through dividing practices and fear. So the book is also a way of fighting against an objectifying governmental power that excludes and classifies the student and teacher subjects of its discourse. I have drawn from Foucault’s concept of genealogy to undertake this task. Genealogy is a methodology of suspicion and critique. The account I have presented adopts this critical methodology, but not for the pleasure of polemic. In a statement published in June 1984 entitled, ‘Confronting governments: human rights’, Foucault declared, ‘We are all members of the governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity’ (Foucault, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_10

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2002: 212). As a former schoolteacher and a member of the ITE community, a constituency targeted for reform and correction by successive conservative governments, I shared much in common with the teachers whose narratives I have shared in this book. Like them, I am one of the governed, subject to the same disciplinary scrutiny and regulation. This book is written in solidarity with the governed teacher and student subjects of the FBV and Prevent policy discourse. Genealogy is interested in examining ‘the organizing practices’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983: 103) of seemingly benign social institutions such as education to offer a critical counter history that confounds the official policy narrative. By drawing on the ‘regional and differential knowledges’ of the teachers, their ‘dismissed’ and ‘subjugated’ knowledges, I have endeavoured to use them, to make out, ‘the dividing lines and struggles those functional arrangements and…systematic organizations of knowledge are designed to mask’ (Foucault, 2004: 7). By documenting Maryam’s and Maz’s accounts of the objectifying effects of FBV and Prevent on their Muslim students, ‘the dividing lines’ between the British and the un-British subjects of this exclusionary discourse are unmasked. By drawing on Foucault’s ‘epistemology of critique’ (Hook, 2005: 8) I have aimed to make the claims to attention of teachers heard, to use this oppositional knowledge to contest the incitements of the FBVs/Prevent discourse. Governmentality My genealogical foregrounding of the teachers’ experiences has enabled critical analysis of the governmentality operating through FBVs. The teachers’ narratives support Foucault’s triangle of power, pointing to disciplinary and biopolitical forms of government which range from the surveillance of individual students to the targeting of a diffuse population of potential right-wing extremists in Jade’s example. There is a profound tension operating in this governmentality which requires teachers to occupy conflicting subject positions as the instrument of a policy that excludes and objectifies their students whilst retaining their ‘telos’ as practitioners of pluralistic RE, a subject that presupposes openness, dialogue and criticality. It is in the light of the teachers’ accounts that I characterise the policy rationality of FBV and Prevent as a governmentality of fear. This fear is integral to the governmentality of security (Foucault, 2010) that Foucault argues as a tool of modern liberal states, allowing

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their governments to targeting ‘deviant flows’ that threaten liberal freedoms and the biological field. In other words, ‘society must be defended’ (Foucault, 2004). The teachers’ narratives testify to the ways in which this governmentality is enacted by targeting student bodies that exhibit racial and religious difference and those students who are racialised through class. This is a normalising governmentality that espouses a weak form of tolerant multiculturalism by paying lip service to religious plurality (DfE, 2011) as long as it is apolitical, but adopts a security discourse to mask its culpability in the structural decline of the disadvantaged communities it seeks to discipline and control. Rasmussen argues that this internal biopolitical state racism is governmentality ‘avant la lettre’ (Rasmussen, 2011: 40). The enactments of FBV and Prevent documented in the teachers’ narratives point to this type of racial governmentality and to the contradictions that characterise the policy making of the new Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments of the UK in this period. FBVs and Prevent exemplify the illiberal liberalism of governments that espouse liberal freedoms, but simultaneously wield sovereign power through wars prosecuted in the global south in defence of ‘our way of life’ (Cameron, 2011). This paradox leads Foucault to ask, If it is true that the power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and that disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how will the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective?…How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centred on biopower? (Foucault, 2004: 254)

Foucault’s answer to his question, is that it is through racism, because the biopolitical state ‘can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions’ (Foucault, 2004: 254). The biopolitical racism that Foucault outlines, and the teachers’ narratives describe, operates through normalisation, introduced to purify the population (Rasmussen, 2011: 41) by designating ‘the nation as the home front’ (Tyler, 2010: 64) making education one of the front lines of the War on Terror. Tyler describes this biopolitical racism as the framing of security in relation to defending the state from, ‘the hidden threats of dangerous classes within the nation home’ (Tyler, 2010: 64). Jade’s

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account of teachers surveilling students for the esoteric symbols of rightwing sects and David’s concern that minority ethnic students would feel pushed away by the racial Norm mobilised by FBVs support Tyler’s argument. Tyler illustrates Foucault’s theory with reference to the biopolitics of the War on Terror, if Britain, as Cameron’s speeches confirm, is a, ‘nation at war’ it is able to, ‘implement endless security measures, including the use of terror laws to suspend indefinitely the liberties and rights promised by citizenship’ (Tyler, 2010: 65). The autoreferential state racism of FBVs and Prevent operate in this paradoxical space. What these requirements propose is that in order to live, those designated abnormal and in need of reform ‘must become like us’, and this is a kind of social death, a type of killing (Foucault, 2004: 256). Zhara and Shazia understand what is at stake when they affirm their British credentials, as Shazia stated when she claimed, ‘We were very British, very British’ when talking about her family. Their interviews attest to the ontological power of the Norm as the guarantor of an admissible existence as a British citizen reflecting the way normalising power functions through state racism, If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist…When I say ‘killing’, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on. (Foucault, 2004: 256)

Emma’s account of the terror experienced by her students after the Brexit result, their fear of ‘expulsion’ (Foucault, 2004: 256) and Ikram’s framing of his community’s painful experiences of system failure, by being ‘let down’, speak of this political death and marginalisation. Normalisation and assimilation, expressed through policy and political speeches, are the driving forces of the internal state racism that plays out in the teachers’ accounts, reflecting Foucault’s definition of racism as, A way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. (Foucault, 2004: 254)

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When the OfSTED graded outstanding Park View academy schools were downgraded to inadequate during the Trojan horse enquiry, the judgement introduced the break between ‘what must live and what must die’. In other words, the schools and their management teams experienced political and reputational death through ‘expulsion’. The break is also evident in the social sorting Maryam described in her account of the school assembly on FBV. When the Principal showed images of the attack on the twin towers she was explicitly questioning the allegiances of the student population, making a distinction, ‘among the hierarchy of races’, attesting to, ‘the fact that certain races are described as good and others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain’ (Foucault, 2004: 255). Maz and Sadia’s references to racial micro aggressions and Ikram’s comments about the alienating effects of racism on his community reveal a painful awareness of the effects of this governmentality that treats the population, ‘as a mixture of races…to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races…to fragment’ (Foucault, 2004: 255). Similarly, the caesura introduced through Prevent operates along class lines, as Jade, Dawne and Suzanne’s accounts reveal. From a Foucauldian perspective, the normalising gaze of Prevent is a racism that is imposed on the white working-class discontents of the Brexit milieu that it seeks to reform and discipline. Prospects Considering that the interviews undertaken for this study were collected in a period when the War on Terror and the toxic xenophobia of the Brexit debate were at their most intense, consideration must be given to the current direction of Prevent/FBV policy making and the implications for education. As highlighted in Chapter 2, policy making is as polarising as it was in 2012 and 2015 when FBVs and the Prevent duty were introduced. Interviews collected from the roundtable event took place in 2019, a few months before the first covid lockdowns in the UK in March 2020. In the period 2020 to 2022, the covid pandemic exposed the profound structural inequalities of British society with Black and minority

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ethnic communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic (ONS, 2020). The Black Lives Matter movement put racial inequality and discrimination into the media and political spotlight, however, the UK government’s political response has been a downplaying of structural racism and the claims made in the Sewell report assert that Britain is no longer an institutionally racist country (Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021: 70). Government guidance on managing impartiality in schools published in February 2022 (DfE, 2022) advises teachers that teaching about ‘specific campaigning organisations, such as those associated with the Black Lives Matter movement’ they should be aware that this may cover ‘partisan political views’. For anti-racist critical teacher educators such as Cushing, these developments are an expression of a racist discourse in policy that amounts to a distortion of decolonial critique, designed to stoke fear and spread disinformation (Cushing, 2022: 2). FBVs remain the bedrock of the government’s civic education policy and there are no signs of a softening or nuancing of the requirement or a revision of the heavily criticised Prevent strategy. These governmental technologies remain central to the conservative government’s educational strategy and discourse as this extract from the guidance on political impartiality shows, Under the teachers’ standards, teachers must ensure that personal beliefs are not expressed in ways which exploit pupils’ vulnerability or might lead them to break the law. Teachers can also be subject to a prohibition order if their actions or behaviours undermine fundamental British values. (DfE, 2022)

This extract reiterates the governmental narrative of mistrust of teachers as a potentially suspect group that requires regulation. The same unrelenting governmentality of fear is evident in recent developments of the Prevent Strategy. Despite evidence from the government’s official statistics report on individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent programme over the period 2020–2021 (Home Office, 2021) showing that the number of referrals had dropped by 22% since 2019 and figures showing that the highest number of referrals to Channel was due to concerns regarding extreme right-wing radicalisation (46%), the government’s focus in Prevent remains firmly directed at Muslims. Islam, it would

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appear, continues to function as the toxic biopolitical gift that keeps on giving. In 2019, Lord Carlile was appointed by the Conservative government as the independent reviewer of the Prevent programme (Home Office, 2019). Carlile’s appointment was subject to legal challenge by Rights Watch UK on the basis that he had expressed a lack of objectivity through his ‘long standing objection to any kind of criticism or overhaul of Prevent’ according to Yasmine Ahmed, executive director of Rights Watch (Bowcott, 2019). However, Carlile’s replacement has generated even more criticism. The Prevent review was handed over to William Shawcross in 2021 by the Home Office. Shawcross, a former head of the Charity Commission, is widely regarded as an Islamophobic commentator, wholly unsuited for the role of Chair of the review. Shawcross is a member of the Henry Jackson society, a Think Tank with neoliberal and neo conservative views and is on record as stating that, ‘Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations’ (Amnesty International, 2021). The appointment of Shawcross led to a coalition of 17 human rights, including Amnesty International and community groups declaring that they will boycott the Prevent review. In a joint letter to the government, these civil society organisations state, The appointments of both Shawcross and Lord Carlile have made clear, beyond doubt, that the UK government has no interest in conducting an objective and impartial review of the strategy…it is apparent that the government intends to use this review to whitewash the strategy and give it a clean bill of health, without interrogating, in good faith, its impacts on human rights and fundamental freedoms. Without these perspectives, it is impossible to impartially assess the Prevent policy. (Amnesty International, 2021)

The concerns expressed in the joint letter, published in February 2021, appear to have been justified as revealed by the leaked Prevent review published in the Guardian newspaper in May 2022. Despite the increase in referrals of far-right extremists, the Shawcross review asks for a refocussing on Islamist extremist groups and the causes of Islamist radicalisation (Elgot & Dodd, 2022). Writing in the New Statesman, teacher, and commentator, Nadeine Asbali, accuses the leaked review of hypocrisy and

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double standards. The review claims that the increase in right-wing referrals was too broad, whereas referrals of Muslims have been too narrow, failing to include those who, ‘create an environment conducive to terrorism’ while not actually supporting violent extremism’ (Asbali, 2022) For Asbali, the review shows that Prevent is Islamophobic by design through its implication that ‘right wing extremists need to become card –holding Nazis before they are referred’, whereas Muslims ‘need only emit a mere whiff of Muslimness’ to get referred (Asbali, 2022). Asbali refers to the recent case of child Q, the 15-year-old girl strip searched on school premises by the police, without any teachers present. Prevent, she points out, allows authorities to question a child without the presence of teachers. Prevent, she argues, makes ‘Muslim children unsafe’, rendering schools into sites of criminalisation, turning teachers into, ‘informants in our classrooms’. She concludes that the proposed review shows that’ Islamophobia is no accidental by product: it is by design. And the problem is only getting worse’ (Asbali, 2022). Asbali’s comments are prescient when considered in the light of the firebomb attack on a migrant centre in Dover on October 30, 2022, in which a 66-year-old man, Andrew Leak, threw two petrol bombs at the centre. Leak was an anti-Muslim racist, who had tweeted an hour before the attack that he planned to obliterate Muslim children. Subsequent investigations found that he was a supporter of the Islamophobic former EDL leader Tommy Robinson and that he was in contact with farright Islamophobic organisations in the USA. Writing for the Guardian, Miqdaad Versi notes the remarkably muted response of the media and politicians to this home-grown terror attack. The counter-terror police did not acknowledge the attack as an act of terror until a week after the event, it didn’t make front page coverage in national newspapers and the Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s failed to acknowledge the attack as terrorism (Versi, 2022). The biopolitics of the post-Brexit era show no sign of abatement. These incidents, government condemnation of progressive anti-racist thinking, and the recently introduced policy, legitimised by High Court Judges, to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda (Dearden, 2022), signifies an environment where the political logic of civic nationalism continues to be mobilised as a tool of surveillance and exclusion. Political appeals to notions of besieged Britain continue to provide justification for divisive government strategies. Only a week after the attack on the migrant

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centre, Braverman claimed that asylum seekers were mounting an ‘invasion’ of the south coast and the Spectator published an article with the image of a tidal wave of Muslim-looking people assailing the white cliffs of Dover (Versi, 2022). These examples, and the respectability given to the racist views of journalists such as Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray demonstrate how xenophobic and anti-Muslim discourse have become normalised and mainstream. Versi concludes his commentary by stating that we are at a ‘crucial moment’ where the racialising politics of immigration are set to worsen, particularly with the UK on the brink of economic recession. At the time of writing the Prevent review is ongoing, but there is another development which threatens critical educational practice, the Core Content Framework (CCF), introduced to set out the ‘minimum entitlement of all trainee teachers’ (DfE, 2019: 3). The CCF draws on research that the DfE maintain represent the best evidence for what a teacher training programme should contain. It is a government-mandated curriculum for initial teacher education (Brooks, 2021) subject to high stakes OfSTED inspection which requires strong alignment with the CFF and its evidence base. From a Foucauldian perspective, the CCF reflects the workings of a governmental power knowledge nexus which seeks to impose its truths upon teacher educators and pre-service teachers. For example, Cushing notes the CCF’s allegiance to a positivistic ‘what works’ approach and is particularly critical of its raciolinguistic ideology that frames marginalised children’s’ languages as deficit and in need of correction (Cushing, 2022). Similarly, Smith and Lander note a ‘wilful inattention’ to racism in the CCF (Smith & Lander, 2022: 4), an absence they seek to address through the development of a research informed anti-racism framework for ITE, ‘to find pockets of hope and possibility’ which may lie amid the divergence between existing and needed activism in the real world and the current restrictive and de-racialised ITE/T policy and regulation landscape’ (Smith & Lander, 2022: 18). Similarly, Cushing refers to the cracks in the system that teacher educators can use to yield resistant power by seeing themselves as anti-racist educators using their expert knowledge to challenge the racialising education assemblage from within (Cushing, 2022: 15). There is considerable merit in these arguments, although, as this discussion has attempted to show, scope for resistance is threatened by a government that is openly hostile towards anti-racist critique and the CCF is non-negotiable. The stakes are high, as the cost of noncompliance for ITE providers is loss of accreditation.

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Religious Education Initial teacher education is an important site in this study, as is religious education. Cushing’s argument that teacher educators and teachers can resist from within the education assemblage is mirrored in the responses of many of the teachers I interviewed for this study. The teachers’ narratives demonstrate how they were able to draw from their RE as a discursive resource to work on the cracks in the system, opposing their pluralistic RE to the incitements of FBVs and the Prevent discourse. Here we return to one of the central questions of this investigation, how are the RE teachers’ subjectivities shaped by the FBVs and Prevent discourse? RE, I argue, is a particularly important and potent counter discourse to the racialising narratives of the new racism of the FBVs/Prevent assemblage. Firstly, I turn to Foucault’s work on ethics, which I argue offers rich insights into the ways RE functioned as a ‘mode of subjection’ for these teachers. Ethics Foucault described ethics as self-constituting practices, ‘the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport a soi, which I call ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions’ (Foucault, Rabinow, 2000: 263). There are various examples throughout the data of the teachers’ ethical self-forming activities often expressed through conscientious commitment to risky pedagogy that shows how they drew from their pluralistic RE as their mode of ethical subjection. For instance, in the 2015 interviews Nick described how he used the Christian and Islamic principles of the Just War to examine the morality of Western invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He examined the history of British involvement in Afghanistan since the nineteenth century, offering his students a historical and theological perspective. In the interview, referring to the wars, he stated that ‘the overwhelming majority’ of his pupils ‘came to the conclusion that they weren’t just…and I told them that I agreed with them. I just openly told them that I agreed with them’. Similarly, Amin’s characterisation of FBVs as British Bulldog citizenship and Alison’s refusal to enact FBVs as British values by reframing it as ‘Values we Share’ exemplify their ethical telos, their moral, educational, and pedagogical purpose. Alison outlined how she used her RE lessons

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on religious figures such as Martin Luther King to problematise the FBV of the rule of law. She gave the example of a lesson she taught on gender equity that focussed on the actions of feminist activists who had used paint to spray over degrading adverts directed at women asking whether they were ‘beach ready?’ Alison explored the right to protest, free speech and the limits of the law through this lesson, drawing in religious teachings to problematise FBVs and to develop her students’ criticality. Aleeza’s account of her mentor’s insistence on remembrance of the victims of all terror attacks, those belonging to all faiths and nationalities, in her school’s one minute silence for the victims of the Bataclan terror attacks is another example of a teacher drawing from pluralistic and critical RE in her daily practice. She risked a fearful backlash from both her students and the parent/guardian community, but as an ethical subjectivity, her pedagogical courage prompted her to challenge what could have become a painfully polarising experience for her pupils. In another example Maryam related how she drew on Hindu teachings on non-violence, exemplifying from case studies of non-violent civil disobedience in her lessons on religion, fundamentalism, and terrorism. She emphasised the existence of sectarianism and extremism in all religions to her students to undermine simplistic perceptions that reified Muslims as terrorists. These examples of the teachers’ ethical subjectivity demonstrate that they drew from RE as the discursive site of their self-constituting practices enabled their pedagogical parr¯esia, their free spokenness. But these practices are not without risk. It is clear from the wider social and political context that the consequences of political and religious illiteracy are profoundly dangerous. Lockley Scott’s research, carried out 2019 in a multicultural secondary school in London found evidence that whilst students were more likely to engage in open dialogue in RE lessons the Prevent duty and FBVs had created a generalised anxiety about identifying radicalised pupils and on the pupils’ side, ‘a fear of being labelled as extremist’, resulting in self-censorship (Lockley-Scott, 2019: 56). O’Grady and Jackson’s (2020) empirical research into how RE contributes to classrooms for safe dialogue mirrors much of the findings presented in this study. The teachers they interviewed reported, ‘that children grow up in a generalised climate of fear’ and that Brexit had caused ‘numerous discussions in school’ (O’Grady & Jackson, 2020: 91). Interestingly, and again, in line with my argument for RE as a mode of ethical subjection, one of their participants reported that her MA studies in RE

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had enriched her practice and enabled her to think about her teaching in a ‘different way’ (O’Grady & Jackson, 2020: 91). Lockley Scott and O’Grady and Jackson’s studies highlight the capacity of religious education as a vehicle for ‘public debate and dialogue’ about ‘controversial issues such as terrorism and world politics’ (O’Grady & Jackson, 2020: 96), but they also recognise that a ‘conducive national political context’ (O’Grady & Jackson, 2020: 96) is required if religion related dialogue is to flourish. Findings presented in the Religious Education Policy Unit’s Roundtable 2021 report titled ‘underfunded and undervalued’ highlighted the financial and political obstacles that stand in the way of a conducive political context. The report points to wide public support for the inclusion of RE, citing figures of 64% of the UK adult population in support of education in religion and worldviews and 65% in support of RE as vehicle as a means to creating greater social and cultural understanding in a plural society. However, despite public endorsement for RE, the report authors note that, 1. No government money has been spent on projects specifically designed to support RE in the last five years 2. The Department of Education has missed its recruitment target for secondary RE teachers in 9 of the last 10 years 3. In 2020–2021 the Department of Education has failed to include RE in the list of subjects attracting Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Bursaries, giving trainee teachers for RE no financial support (Religious Education Policy Unit, 2022). The Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) final report, ‘Religion and Worldviews, the way forward: a national plan for RE’ (2018) identifies another substantive obstacle to the provision of effective, pedagogically and academically rigorous RE-academisation. The report states that increasing numbers of schools, particularly all, fail to meet their statutory requirement to provide RE at Key Stages 3 and 4. The report recommends a national entitlement to the study of Religion and worldviews and argues for the replacement of locally determined RE by a national body which would develop national programmes of study along the lines of the national curriculum programmes of study in history and geography (CoRE, 2018: 8). The report argues for a change to the title of the subject from religious education to religion and worldviews. The

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term worldview is used in two ways, firstly to refer to ‘institutional worldviews’ which include religious and non-religious worldviews, and secondly as, ‘personal worldview’, to refer to an ‘individual’s own way of understanding and living in the world, which may or may not draw from one or many institutional worldviews’ (CoRE, 2018: 4). The CoRE report generated considerable discussion within the RE community, particularly in respect of the concept of worldviews, but it was dismissed by the secretary of state for education, Damian Hinds, and Trevor Cooling, Chair of the Religious Education Council notes that, given the external pressures that faced the UK government in 2020 ‘statutory change…seems unlikely in the near future’ (Cooling, in Tharani, 2020: 3). Notwithstanding the DfE’s lack of engagement with the CoRE report, RE continues to provide ‘pockets of hope and possibility’ (Smith & Lander, 2022: 3) and functions as an educational alternative ‘from within’ (Cushing, 2022: 15) the education assemblage that provides students and teachers with the discursive resources to address misconceptions about religion and contest reductive stereotypes. In his introduction to ‘The Worldview Project: Discussion Papers’ (Cooling, in Tharani, 2020) a set of papers published by the Religious Education Council to inform teachers about developments in the subject, Cooling states that the introduction of worldviews has the capacity to be a ‘game changer’ for RE in the same way Ninian Smart’s Schools Council Working Paper 36 was in 1971 (Cooling, in Tharani, 2020: 3). Cooling’s assertions are interesting in the light of the reconceptualization of RE as a more expansive field of enquiry that requires consideration of a range of competing discourses through its engagement with religious and non-religious worldviews. In discussion paper 1, the authors argue that the concept worldview can function, ‘like a ‘can opener’ concept’ by ‘reopening the study of religious and non-religious worldviews and their interplay’ (Tharani, 2020: 5). This approach to the study of worldviews will lead to, ‘wiser and more rigorous engagement with our own and others’ worldviews’ (Tharani, 2020: 5). The implication of this argument is that all worldviews are open to debate and interrogation as the truth claims that shape social and cultural reality. If all worldviews are up for debate, then there is scope for reflexive and agonistic debate- and debate presumably of the truth claims underpinning the worldviews of FBVs and civic nationalism in education policy. Perhaps a teacher trained in world views pedagogy would have handled the boys who questioned the Charlie Hebdo cartoons more skilfully

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than Emma’s colleague. Indeed, discussion paper three centres reflexivity, informed empathy and epistemological humility as attributes that can be developed through a religion and worldviews methodology. The contrast between the progressive and scholarly tenor of these papers and the hardening of the government’s civic nationalist narrative is striking. For example, discussion paper four directly addresses the complexities of power relations in worldviews and ‘the extent to which the concept of ‘worldview’ can create space’ for the ‘decolonisation’ of the curriculum’ (Tharani, 2020: 19). Ironically, OfSTED, the government regulator, has often played a supportive role in the development of effective RE in contrast to its other functions as enforcer of DfE policy and compliance. This is largely a reflection on the individuals who have occupied the role of OfSTED national subject lead in RE, such as Barbara Wintersgill, Alan Brine and the current incumbent, Richard Kueh, who have brought scholarship, criticality and a deep knowledge and understanding of research in RE to their role. In the latest OfSTED subject review (OfSTED, 2021) the report makes the case for a nuanced approach to RE as plural, non-confessional and multi-faith that enables students to engage in academic conversations as ways of knowing about religion, drawing from a range of scholarly and interpretive frames including social science, theology and philosophy. The report also cautions against simplistic essentialist representations of religious traditions, stating, ‘if pupils only learn about Jewish traditions within a topic of the Shoah or about Islamic traditions only within a sequence of lessons on ‘religion and terror’, then their knowledge of those traditions will be eclipsed by those topics’ (OfSTED, 2021). The developments outlined above point to the considerable contribution a religion and worldviews approach can make to both student and teacher ethical subjectivity, as a vehicle for parr¯esia, and as a ‘safe space’ for dialogue and debate, as opposed to the disciplinary educational sites of the Prevent discourse. The RE classroom, as some of the interview data shows, is a space where students feel safety from the chilling effects of Prevent and can engage in the risky, fearless speech that is necessary if education is to tackle the realities of religious and racial discrimination in society. The progressive RE of the worldviews project and the CoRE report is gaining traction in practice, taken up in newly agreed syllabi for RE and generating new models of classroom pedagogy, but these are classrooms with a difference. The reflexive RE classroom functions as a heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), a ‘smooth’ educational space

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in another wise ‘striated’ curriculum and it does so through its emphasis on plurality, alterity, social, cultural and ontological difference (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: 409). Foucault defines heterotopias as counter sites, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia, in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality’ (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986: 24). Critical RE can function in this way, as a potentially subversive and questioning ‘other’ space, a counter site where students can explore difference and other worldviews that might contest the truth claims of liberal Western consumer society. RE has the potential to function as a ‘heterotopia of deviation’ (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986: 25) for these reasons, as the ‘other place’ where non normative perspectives, worldviews and practices can be explored and debated. Heterotopic religion and worldviews classrooms are also the sites that shape the ethical subjectivities of the teachers featured in this study. In her recent paper ‘Teachers personal worldviews and RE in England: a way forward?’ (Flanagan, 2021), Ruth Flanagan reveals the potential of a worldviews approach for the development of RE teachers’ ethical subjectivities and reflexive practice. Using hermeneutical approaches in her teacher education sessions, Flanagan adopted the worldview approach to aid teachers to, ‘know who they are’, to ‘know self’ and become ‘worldview conscious’ (Flanagan, 2021: 321). Significantly, she argues that enabling teachers to become more reflexive through increased understanding of the formation of their own worldviews, ‘may lead to greater understanding of why others with differing life experiences may hold very different worldviews’, concluding that, ‘becoming worldview conscious equips teachers to move away from the superficial to focus instead on the underpinning values and beliefs expressed by different religion(s) and worldviews’ (Flanagan, 2021: 322). Concluding Thoughts The essential political problem, Foucault argued, was to constitute ‘a new politics of truth’ by changing ‘the political, economic’ and ‘institutional regime of the production of truth’ by, ‘detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time’ (Foucault, 2002: 133).

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This study is a gesture towards Foucault’s call to detach truth from hegemony to reveal the ruses of a governmental power, operating through the FBVs/Prevent assemblage to objectify, classify and exclude student and teacher subjects that do not align to its normalising discourse. I’ve attempted to document the impact of a period of intense reactionary policy making and the ways it has played out at the meso level through the lives of the pre and in-service teachers who contributed to this project and their accounts of classroom practice and the daily social dramas of school life. The teachers’ narratives and my genealogical account of the ways in which Britishness has been mobilised by successive British governments reveal what at first sight seems like a rift, a rupture in education policy, a radical shift away from the multiculturalism of the Swann report to the defensive British bulldog citizenship of FBVs and the disciplinary surveillance of Prevent. What is presented as truth in the official governmental rationale for the introduction of these policies is couched in the language of shared values, community cohesion and safeguarding. Through my critical Foucauldian analysis of the teachers’ accounts, I have sort to demonstrate that the truth of these hegemonic discourses is control and discipline operating through a governmentality of fear and security, designed to target ungovernable non normative groups within the population. The truth of FBVs and Prevent is that they are forms of biopolitical governmentality that work at the intersections of race and class as I have endeavoured to show through the accounts of teachers such as Maz and Adam, Ikram, Maryam, Emma and Jade. Foucault’s analysis of biopolitical power as internal state racism that targets the ‘abnormals’ is viscerally demonstrated in Maryam’s description of her Muslim students’ reaction to the Principal’s assembly on FBVs and Jade’s account of fearful teachers disciplining students for signs of right-wing radicalisation. FBVs and Prevent in these reports, present as the governmentality of fear, designed to govern the ungovernable (Hage). The central focus of this study has been to investigate the ways in which these governmental discourses have shaped teacher subjectivity, and it is this aspect of the enquiry that has uncovered ‘pockets of hope’ (Smith & Lander, 2022: 3). The teachers’ free spokenness and the courage of their truth reveal them as ethical subjects, drawing from their critical pluralistic RE as a discursive resource, the mode of subjection that enables them to engage in their ethical work of promoting racial and social justice, and as Alison and Nick’s interviews reveal, to problematise FBVs and the War on Terror. This truth telling parr¯esia, requires courage as their

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critical positioning puts them at variance with the regulatory frameworks of the teachers’ standards (DfE, 2011). There are points of resistance throughout the power network, Foucault argues, and the truth telling of the teachers confirms his claim. The teachers’ narratives and recent developments in religions and worldviews education offer an alternative discourse that creates educational and pedagogical possibilities with the capacity to soften and problematise the civic nationalist ‘worldview’ in education. The pedagogical and critical potentials of worldviews provide scope for teachers to create ‘heterotopias of deviance’ that can disrupt the biopolitical messaging of FBVs and Prevent. So, developments in Religion and worldviews education are a pocket of hope in an otherwise striated and overregulated curriculum, but caution is necessary, and I wish to avoid the temptation to conclude with a good news story. This study has revealed pockets of resistance and teacher agency in the face of a powerful racialising civic nationalist assemblage. However, as the Sewell report and the appointment of an Islamophobe as Chair of the Prevent review reveal, ministerial anti-refugee rhetoric shows no sign of abating. Despite a reduction in the number of Muslims referred to Channel, Michael Gove is reported to be pressing for the publication of ‘the details of Islamist extremist organisations and individuals’ as part of the Prevent review (Mason & Syal, 2022). There is no room for complacency. Critical education researchers and activists can work within the cracks (Cushing, 2022) by collecting the counter stories of teachers and structurally vulnerable students at the sharp end of this fearful governmentality to interrogate it and unmask its divisive effects. In the post Brexit, post-lockdown juncture the development of research-informed alternatives to FBVs, and new civics based on human rights frameworks that valorise religious, cultural and ethnic difference are essential if educators are to oppose the reductive and restrictive discourses of the FBVs/Prevent assemblage, for as Foucault argues, critique is not simply negative, The critical ontology of ourselves…has to be conceived of as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. (Foucault, in Rabinow, 1991: 50)

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References Amnesty International. (2021, February 16). UK: NGOs condemn appointment of William Shawcross and announce civil-society led review of prevent. https:// www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2021/02/uk-ngos-condemn-app ointment-of-william-shawcross-and-announce-civil-society-led-review-of-pre vent/ Asbali, N. (2022). Prevent is Islamophobic by design not by accident. The New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/05/prevent-isislamophobic-by-design-not-accident Bowcott, O. (2019). Lord Carlile removed from Prevent Review after legal challenge. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/ 19/lord-carlile-prevent-review-legal-challenge Brooks, C. (2021). The Core Content Framework and the fallacy of a teacher training ‘curriculum’. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2021/09/02/the-corecontent-framework-and-the-fallacy-of-a-teacher-training-curriculum/ Cameron, D. (2011). PM’s speech at Munich Security Conference. https://www. gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault debate on human nature. The New Press. Commission on Religious Education. (2018). Final report. Religion and Worldviews: The Way Forward. A national plan for RE. https://www.commissio nonre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Final-Report-of-the-Commis sion-on-RE.pdf Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. (2021). Commission on race and ethnic disparities: The report. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/974507/202 10331_-_CRED_Report_-_FINAL_-_Web_Accessible.pdf Cushing, I. (2022). Raciolinguistic policy assemblages and white supremacy in teacher education. The Curriculum Journal, 1–19. https://doi.org/10. 1002/curj.173 Dearden, L. (2022). Government’s Rwanda policy to deport asylum seekers is lawful, High Court rules. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/uk/home-news/rwanda-policy-high-court-lawful-b2247872.html Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus. Bloomsbury. DfE. (2011). Teachers’ standards. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1040274/Tea chers__Standards_Dec_2021.pdf DfE. (2019). ITT core content framework. https://assets.publishing.service.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/974307/ ITT_core_content_framework_.pdf DfE. (2022). Political impartiality in schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/political-impartiality-in-schools/political-impartiality-in-schools

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Dreyfus, H., & Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault. Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. The University of Chicago Press. Elgot, J., & Dodd, V. (2022). Leaked Prevent review attacks double standards on ‘far right’ and Islamists. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ uk-news/2022/may/16/leaked-prevent-review-attacks-double-standards-onrightwingers-and-islamists Flanagan, R. (2021). Teachers’ personal worldviews and RE in England: A way forward? British Journal of Religious Education, 43(3), 320–366. Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. Foucault, M. (1991). The Foucault reader (P. Rabinow, Ed.). Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002). Michel Foucault. Power. Essential works of Foucault 1954– 1984 (J. Faubion, Ed., Vol. 3). Penguin Foucault, M. (2000). Michel Foucault. Ethics. Essential works of Foucault 1954– 1984 (P. Rabinow, Vol. 1). Penguin. Foucault, M. (2004). Society must be defended. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2010). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan. Home Office. (2021 November 2018). Individuals referred to and supported by the Prevent Programme, April 2020 to March 2021. https://www.gov.uk/ government/statistics/individuals-referred-to-and-supported-through-the-pre vent-programme-april-2020-to-march-2021 Home Office. (2019, August 12). Lord Carlile to lead independent review. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/lord-carlile-to-lead-independent-rev iew-of-prevent Hook, D. (2005). Genealogy, discourse, ‘effective history’: Foucault and the work of critique. Qualitative Research in Psychology., 2(1), 3–31. Lockley-Scott, A. (2019). Towards a critique of fundamental British values: The case of the classroom. Journal of Beliefs and Values., 40(3), 354–367. Mason, R., & Syal, R. (2022, December 28). Government refuses to disclose whether Prevent strategy will be redacted. The Guardian. https://www.the guardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/28/government-refuses-to-disclose-whe ther-prevent-strategy-will-be-redacted OfSTED. (2021). Research review series: Religious education. https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/research-review-series-religious-education/res earch-review-series-religious-education O’Grady, K., & Jackson, R. (2020). ‘A touchy subject’: Teaching and learning about difference in the religious education classroom. Journal of Beliefs and Values, 41(1), 88–101. ONS. (2020, December 14). Why have Black and South Asian people been hit hardest by Covid-19? https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommu nity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/whyhaveblackand southasianpeoplebeenhithardestbycovid19/2020-12-14

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Correction to: Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity

Correction to: F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7 The original version of the chapters 1 and 3 was inadvertently published with some typographical and referencing errors, which have now been corrected. The correction has been updated with the changes.

The updated version of these chapters can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_11

C1

Index

A Abnormal, 144, 157, 209, 229, 246 Academies, 53, 152, 242 Academies act, 2010, 38 Academisation, 39, 53, 242 Ajegbo, Keith, Diversity &Citizenship Review, 28, 106 Alam, Tahir, 50, 52, 53, 143 al-Qaeda, 6, 26 Anti-racism framework for ITE, 239 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 133 Archive, 135 Assemblage, 13, 15, 45, 158, 239, 240 FBVs/Prevent assemblage, 13, 15, 240, 246, 247

B Baker, Kenneth, 22 Bataclan attacks, 171 bin Laden, Osama, 26 Biopolitics, 146, 149, 152, 234, 238

Biopower, 145, 146, 149, 150, 233 Birmingham Agreed Syllabus 1975, 82 Birmingham City Council, 8, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 55 The Birth of the Clinic, 133 Black Lives Matter, 67, 68, 225 Black Papers, 21 Blair, Tony, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31 speech to Labour Party Conference, 1996, 24 Blunkett, David, 30, 44 Boyes, Tim, 52, 53 Braverman, Suella, 238 Brenkman, John, 1, 43, 173, 176 Brexit, 9, 64, 147, 215, 216 British Educational Research Association (BERA), 173 Brown, Gordon, 30, 31 ‘golden thread’ speech, 31 Bush, George, 26, 116, 197 Byrne, Liam, 29

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Farrell, Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7

251

252

INDEX

C Cameron, David, 31, 38, 39, 58, 124 Bratislava Security Council Speech, 136 Daily Mail British values article, 56 King James Bible Speech, 44 Munich Security Council Speech, 40–41 resignation, 64 Times article, 136 Cantle, Ted, 25, 92 Channel, 13, 42, 59, 66, 141–145, 236, 247 Charlie Hebdo attacks, 171, 198, 223, 228, 229 Christian values, 30, 44, 84, 123, 204 Circular 1/94, 90 Civic nationalism, 2, 4, 32, 76, 96, 99, 166, 225, 238 exclusionary forms, 41 Clarke, Peter, 49, 51 Clegg, Nick, 31 Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), 29 Commission on Religious Education (CoRE), 242 A Common Place, 29 Community cohesion, 6, 7, 19, 25, 27, 42, 97, 143, 193, 246 as legal duty, 92 Conroy, James, 97 Conservative Liberal Democrat Coalition, 7, 20, 31, 38–43, 64, 152, 233 Academies policy, 53 CONTEST, 27, 42 Cook, Robin, 31 Cool Britannia, 24 Core Content Framework (CCF), 65, 239

Counter-Terrorism & Security Act (2015), (CT&S), 2, 37, 56, 58, 115 Crisis racism, 37, 69, 216, 221 Critical Pedagogy, 120–122 Critical Race Theory (CRT), 9, 68, 117 Cultural racism, 93, 94 Cultural restorationism, 13, 14, 21, 22 D Dearing, Ron, 89–91 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., 13 Demos reports Britain renewing our identity, 24 Reclaiming Britishness, 24 Discipline, 15, 22, 63, 139, 142, 143, 145 Discourse, 11, 134–137 Discursive formation, 11, 134, 135 Dispositif, 138, 141 Dividing practices, 131, 140, 154, 172, 187, 231 Docile bodies, 141–145, 152 E Education Reform Act, 1988, 22, 84, 87, 88, 152 Empire Windrush, 20, 78 Enactments, 12 in-service RE teacher enactments of fundamental British values, 199, 201, 203, 204, 206 pre-service RE teacher enactments of fundamental British values, 181, 182, 184, 190, 192 teacher enactments of fundamental British values in research literature, 106, 107, 109–112, 114

INDEX

Ensemble, 13, 118, 138, 142, 150, 164 Erricker, Clive & Jane, 91 Ethical work, 211, 229, 246 Ethics, 172 The Examination, 142 Extremism, 3, 8, 28, 29, 40, 43, 44, 49 definition of, 43 F Fear, 63, 126, 152, 153 Floyd, George, 225 Foucault, Michel, 2, 11–13, 15 The Fourth ‘R’, 82 Fundamental British values, 1, 2, 8, 26 Fundamental British values as, FBVs/Prevent, assemblage, 13, 15, 154, 240, 246, 247 Fundamental British values as, FBVs/Prevent, discourse, 232 Fundamental British values, phase 1, 41, 42 Fundamental British values, phase 2, 55, 57 G Games of truth, 12, 133, 153, 161, 164 Genealogy, 12, 19, 105, 157, 232 as Enstehung, 19 as Herkunft, 19 Gilligan, Andrew, 47 Gove, Michael, 8, 38, 44, 49, 52, 118, 247 Governance of Great Britain, Green Paper, 31 Governmentality, 11, 13, 15, 30, 41, 48, 49, 150, 232 as governmentality event, 54, 57

253

as the state of fear (Etat de peur), 126 biopolitical, 190, 213, 222, 228, 229, 246 governmentality of fear, 151, 172, 228, 236 governmentality of unease, 69, 151, 208 multicultural governmentality, 99 Grimmitt, Michael, 6, 8

H Hage, Ghassan, 99 Heterotopia, 244 Homo oeconomicus, 152

I Ignatieff, Michael, 2 Iraq, invasion, 2003, 26 ISIS, 1

J Jackson, Robert and, the interpretive approach, 91, 173 Jenkins, Roy, 20 1966 speech, 79 Johnson, Boris, 65 July 2007, 7/7, 1, 7, 27, 37, 42, 49, 93, 99

K Kahn, Mohammed Sidique, 27 Kelly, Ruth, 28–30 Kershaw, Ian, 49 Kymlicka, Will, 78

L Liberalism, 149, 151, 233

254

INDEX

M Madness and Civilization, 157 Major, John, 23 Making Sense of Religion OfSTED, 2007, 91 May, Theresa, 58, 64 Mills, Charles Wright, 4 Modood, Tariq, 78, 95, 96 Morgan, Nicky, 55 Multiculturalism, 3, 75 and cultural racism, 93, 94 and Plowden report, 80 and Roy Jenkins, 21 as governmentality, 99, 100 backlash against, 78, 94, 185, 212, 216 definitions of, 76, 78 Murray, Douglas, 47 Muscular liberalism, 41 Muslims, 25, 27, 29, 41, 44, 45, 48, 54, 55, 61, 63, 95, 98, 120, 136 as suspect, 146, 191 in the media, 212, 219 Muslim Problematic, 54 Muslim teachers, 109 N Narratives: teacher narratives as subjugated knowledges, 158 Nash, John, 9, 57 National Curriculum, 1988, 22, 87 National day, 31 National Front, 23 Nationalism, English, 147 Nationalism, ethno, 183 Neoliberalism, 93, 118 New Labour, 24 New Right, 21 Norm, 11, 142–144 Normalising power, 3, 11, 12, 115, 132, 148, 158, 159, 175, 196, 199, 207, 213, 233–235, 246

O Objectivation, 131, 207 OfSTED, 175, 182, 189, 190, 201, 203, 209, 210, 225 OfSTED, and CCF, 239 OfSTED, and inspection of FBVs, 64 OfSTED, and Trojan horse enquiry, 8, 45, 49, 51–53, 55 OfSTED, Research Review Series, Religious Education, 244 The Order of Things, 133

P Panopticon, 145 Parekh, Bhikhu, 77, 95, 96 on religion, 97 Parekh Report, 77 Park View Academy, 8, 46, 49 Parr¯esia, 14, 161, 165 Patten, John, 89 Performativity, 152, 153, 159 Phenomenology, 4 Plowden report, 80 Policy actors, 167 Post-colonial perspectives, 116, 117 post qualitative inquiry, 160 Post racial, 68, 93, 94, 148 Post structuralism, 115 Post structural research on teacher enactments, 115, 116 Powell, Enoch, 21, 79 Power, 137–139, 157 Power/knowledge, 141 Prevent duty, 1, 59, 224 The Prevent duty: Departmental advice for schools and childcare providers, 141 Prevent Review, 237 Prevent Strategy Phase 1, 42 Prevent Strategy Phase 2, 42, 60

INDEX

Q QCA, 92 non-statutory framework for religious education, 92 Qualitative method, 160 R Race Relations Act (1965), 20, 79 Race Relations Act (1968), 21, 79 Racism auto-referential, 228 biopolitical, 149 hetero- referential, 228 state, 228 Racist nativism, 116 Referendum, to leave the European Union, 9, 15, 147, 215–217, 222 Religious education (RE), 5, 58, 80, 82, 84 and community cohesion, 97 and national curriculum, 88, 90 and Swann report, 85, 87 in initial teacher education, 240–242 in Spielman speech, 98 Rwanda asylum plan, 66 S Salafist, 8, 46 Schools Assessment and Curriculum Authority (SCAA), 89 Securitisation, 55, 58, 109, 151 Self-constituting practices, 164, 211, 230, 240, 241 Sex and Relationships Curriculum, DfE, 2020, 66 Shap Working Party, 83 Shawcross, William, 237 Smart, Ninian, 4, 82, 86 Sociological imagination, 4 Spielman, Amanda, 98, 99, 148, 149

255

Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE), 9, 57 Starkey, David, 39 State multiculturalism, 40 Subjection, mode of, 240, 246 Subjectivity, teacher/Subjectivities, teacher, 2, 11, 12, 14, 68, 76, 78, 116, 151, 206, 211, 213, 228, 240, 245 Subject review religious education, OfSTED, 244 Sunak, Rishi, 66, 67 Swann report, 5, 85, 87

T Teachers, of Religious Education, 166 Teachers Professional Standards (Part 2), 7, 41–42 Tebbit, Norman, 23 Technologies of the Self, 153 Telos, ethical, 16, 154, 211, 213, 229, 232, 240 Thatcher, Margaret, 21, 88 Trainee teachers, 107 Trojan Horse enquiry, 8, 45, 47–49, 51, 54–58 Twin Towers, 1

U UCL, 68 UKIP, 216

W Wilshaw, Michael, 52 Wilson, Harold, 20, 24 Windrush scandal, 68 Working Paper 36, Schools Council, 78, 82, 89, 243 Worldviews project, 244

256

INDEX

Wright, Andrew

and critical realism, 91

X Xenophobia, 6, 23, 66, 118, 147, 205, 212, 226, 228, 235 Xeno racism, 54, 64