The Prevent duty in early years, without the jargon

Prevent is the piece of safeguarding training that makes new starters frown at the sign-up sheet. Counter-terrorism? Here? Between the sand tray and the sleep room? It can feel like a duty written for somebody else’s workplace, and that feeling is exactly why it’s worth taking seriously, because a duty that feels irrelevant is a duty nobody performs well.

A duty on the whole team, not just the leader

Since 2015, all schools and registered early years providers have had a legal duty to have due regard to preventing people being drawn into terrorism. Nearly a decade on, it’s easy to treat Prevent as a box on the induction checklist, but the duty extends to every practitioner in the setting, not only managers and safeguarding leads.

In practice, that means staff must be alert to any reason for concern in a child’s life, at home or elsewhere, including awareness of the expression of extremist views. There are also specific expectations placed on those in leadership positions, from policy through to training, and Ofsted has incorporated Prevent into its inspection framework, so leaders should expect inspectors to ask about it and staff to be asked what they’d do with a concern. That includes knowing your local referral routes and being able to describe your setting’s approach in plain terms.

What this can look like from a nursery

Nobody is suggesting a three-year-old is being radicalised at the water tray. The early years angle is the same one that runs through all safeguarding: you see children and families every day, at close quarters, over months and years, and that gives you a view of a child’s world that almost no other professional gets.

Radicalisation is something that happens to people around a child, and sometimes, later, to the older siblings you meet at pick-up. A parent whose talk at the door has taken a sharply hateful turn. A child repeating language at the lunch table that plainly wasn’t learned from CBeebies. A sudden change in a family’s circumstances, contacts or behaviour that sits uneasily with what you know of them. None of these things is proof of anything, and most will have innocent explanations. The training point is narrower: know what extremism and radicalisation are, know who may be susceptible, and know what to do rather than shrugging it off because it feels far-fetched.

If something worries you

Here’s the reassuring part. Responding to a Prevent concern uses the same muscle as every other safeguarding concern. Notice it, record it accurately, and take it to your designated safeguarding lead, who can seek advice and refer on where needed. Prevent isn’t about early years staff diagnosing extremism; it’s about noticing and passing on, so that people with the right expertise can offer support. And support is the right word, because the aim of the strategy at this level is to help individuals at risk before anything happens, not to criminalise them.

It’s worth rehearsing the mundane version of this at a staff meeting, the same way you’d rehearse a fire drill. Who is the safeguarding lead this week? Where do concerns get written down? What happens if the lead is on leave, or the concern involves the lead? Five minutes walking through the boring mechanics does more for real-world readiness than any amount of solemn policy prose.

Whole-team training makes all of this feel routine instead of alarming. Our Prevent Strategy course takes about an hour online, covers the duty from government strategy down to what-do-I-do-on-Tuesday, and works well in inductions and annual refresher plans alike. Teams come out of it calmer about the subject, not more anxious, which is precisely the goal.

Prevent will probably never be the most-used part of your safeguarding knowledge. Like the fire blanket in the kitchen, that’s not an argument for going without it.