Fundamental British Values

Vini Lander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138096240
• eBook ISBN: 9781351601047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book seeks to investigate how the pedagogic space of schools and classrooms has been defined by the UK government's counter-terrorism 'Prevent' strategy, most notably through the requirement on teachers not to undermine 'fundamental British values' as part of the Teachers Professional Standards. The term 'fundamental British values' migrated from Prevent to the statutory framework that regulates teacher professionalism and has effectively securitized education practice. The Prevent strategy was conceived in response to the 7/7 bombings in London by so-called 'home-grown' Muslim terrorists. The need for teachers to promote British values is an attempt to forge a cohesive British identity among young citizens within a multiracial, multicultural and multilingual society. However, as the chapters in this book illustrate, the state project to harness education to engender belonging – or as some would argue, civic nationalism – whilst simultaneously undertaking surveillance of children and young people from the Muslim community for signs of radicalization, has led to the perception of a hierarchy of citizens or, conversely, 'insider-outsider' citizens.

The imperative to promote, and not undermine, fundamental British values has, in some instances, transformed the safe space of the classroom where children and young people's right to explore their perceptions of current affairs, citizenship and belonging has been curtailed for fear of surveillance by teachers who may interpret their utterances as either undermining British values or to be signs of radicalization. This book explores these dilemmas for teachers and the implications for their professionalism, and examines how racist nativism has pervaded society, educational policy and practice through the promotion of a Britishness perceived by many as a raced, classed and exclusionary discourse. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education for Teaching.

‘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

Francis Farrell

Faculty of Education, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a critical investigation of a group of 11 religious education (RE) student teachers’ views of the promotion of fundamental British values (FBV) undertaken in 2015. Using qualitative methods, data were collected in two semi-structured group interviews. Drawing from the perspectives of Foucauldian methodology and critical theory, this paper examines the extent to which student teachers were able to align the FBV discourse with their own personal and professional positioning. Findings demonstrate little consensus about what constitutes Britishness. There is evidence of dissonance in the student teachers’ views that FBV sends out contradictory messages. The student teachers are committed to the development of learners’ moral imaginations, but are concerned by the capacity of FBV to alienate learners and its incompatibility with the pluralism of RE. The paper argues that it is through the development of teacher subjectivity in the alternative discourses of critical RE and research that practitioners will be able to make adjustments that can accommodate and re-appropriate the demands of policy.

Introduction

The Conservative-Liberal coalition and the current Conservative government have initiated a phase of unprecedented change and reformulation in education policy and practice in England and Wales. De-regulation, accelerated academisation, free schools and a less prescriptive national curriculum are the outcomes of a neoliberal education discourse which seeks to reduce the role of the state, ‘marketizing social relations’ (Shamir in Ball 2012, loc. 170) by contracting out its role to a new polity of actors and private interests. From the critical perspective of this paper, these reforms are another ruse of power which is re-coding techniques of domination within the new social world of the neoliberal imaginary (Ball 2012). However, official DfE policy discourse (DfE 2010) purports to free teachers from bureaucracy obfuscating the reality of the intensified control market logics exert over teachers (Wright 2012).

Ironically, it was the very freedoms espoused in this DfE discourse that contributed to the alleged, ‘failure of some mechanisms of school leadership and governance’ (Arthur 2015, 311) in some Birmingham academy schools which triggered the so-called ‘Trojan horse’ affair. The ‘Trojan horse’ controversy exposed the limitations and contradictions of DfE policy which privileges private values over agreed ‘public’ civic values. By removing these schools from local authority control and monitoring the DfE had essentially removed them from local accountability. The result was, and still remains, a profound ‘confusion about the role and function of public education’ (Arthur 2015, 311). The imposition of no notice OfSTED inspections and a statutory requirement ‘actively’ to promote fundamental British values quickly followed, underlining the fragility of government discourse on teacher freedom, or perhaps revealing its disingenuity. As the political catalyst which produced the statutory requirement actively to promote FBV (DfEb 2014, 3), the effects of the Trojan horse enquiry were seismic, constructing a policy milieu in which Islamic and British values could be seen as ‘incompatible’ (Hoque 2015, 23).

Geo politics: education in the fog of war

John Brenkman states that since 9/11, ‘the fog of war has enveloped political thought’ (Brenkman 2007, 1). For education in England and Wales, the Trojan horse enquiry is a critical point in the process of the securitisation of education that has its immediate origins in 9/11. By securitisation I am using Buzan et al.’s definition (1998). In this definition, securitisation, like Foucault’s concept of discourse (Foucault 2002), constitutes the objects of which it speaks, ‘the enunciation of security itself creates a new social order wherein “normal” politics is bracketed’ (Balzacq 2005, 172), necessitated by ‘the designation of an existential threat requiring emergency action or special measures’ (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998, 27). From the genealogical perspective of this analysis, the roots of the war on terror lie in a legacy of orientalism and racism which stretches beyond 9/11 (Said 2003). The new racisms of radicalisation discourses have a lengthy provenance and demonstrate that racism ‘never stands still’ (Taras, 2013). The Islamophobia that permeates the securitisation discourse is an expression of a neoliberal imaginary drawing on older constructs of, ‘the supposed historical incompatibility of European and Islamic values’, which fuses ‘them with racist ideologies of the twentieth century to construct a modern concept’ (Taras, 2013, 419). Kundnani has shown how neo-conservative ideologues have skilfully mobilised and constituted the ‘clash of civilizations’ discourse to produce the new subjects of the radicalisation ‘moment’, such as the theologically motivated terrorist, in order to mask their own complicity in the foreign policy debacle of Iraq. The only acceptable Muslim in this discourse is a-political and de-politicised (Kapoor 2013;Kundnani 2015). For Kundnani there is a racial subtext to the entire discourse which operates on the, ‘unfounded assumption … that Islamist ideology is the root cause of terrorism’ (Kundnani 2015, 10). This strategic ‘move’ then enables US and UK politicians to effect a ‘displacement of the war on terrors political antagonisms onto the plane of Muslim culture’ (Kundnani 2015, 10). Already ‘othered’ by a legacy of dominant colonial narratives, Muslims thus become the ‘ideal enemy’, ‘racially and culturally distinct and ideologically hostile’ (Kundnani 2015, 10).

There is consensus amongst scholars that the domestic war on terror is largely the product of the political fantasies of neo-conservatives both in the USA and the UK (Brenkman 2007;Kundnani 2015; Leach 2012). Former Education Secretary Michael Gove’s requirement for teachers to promote fundamental British values is an expression of a cultural ‘island fantasy’ of a democratic Britain far removed from the historical realities of its colonial past.

Brenkman’s fog of war metaphor is powerful. Like real fog, political fog masks, obfuscates and cloaks the tactics of elites. It also permeates the policy networks of government from the macro to the capillary level of policy implementation in the classrooms of schools and colleges throughout England and Wales. What is being taught in English schools is shaped by the wider geo-political environment to constitute the ‘securitized social’ of education policy and practice. By drawing our attention to the micro spaces of classrooms and colleges, we are also engaged politically, reporting on sites where the micro physics of power operates (Foucault 1980). In doing so, education becomes the strategic but contested site of the competing discourses of the neoliberal war machine and pluralist, critical democratic models of education. Brenkman captures the high stakes involved in this contestation because it calls democracy in the USA and the UK into question. The war on terror is a cultural contradiction in the democratic project of the West because the steps taken to protect democracy risk ‘desiccating its very values and institutions’ (Brenkman 2007, 15) and:

When the reasons by which citizens are persuaded to give their consent are, as with Iraq, erroneous (weapons of mass destruction) and deceptive (Iraqi ties to al Qaeda), the very fabric of democratic deliberation is damaged. (ibid., 11)

Given the wider geo-political context and the paradoxes, Brenkman identifies the very notion of promoting democracy through fundamental British values requires critical problematisation. The issue becomes even sharper when it is considered in relation to RE. In the most recent iteration of a non-statutory framework for RE (designed for use by Standing Advisory Councils on RE in the local determination of the RE curricula), the RE Council espouse a clear liberal, pluralistic model of RE, which amongst its aims advises that programmes of study provide opportunity for students to: ‘Describe, explain and analyse beliefs and practices, recognising the diversity which exists within and between communities and amongst individuals’ (RE council 2013, 11)

As a methodological framework the review recommends that Key Stage 4 students:

use ideas from phenomenological approaches to the study of religions and beliefs to research and present skilfully a wide range of well-informed and reasonable arguments which engage profoundly with moral, religious and spiritual issues. (RE Council 2013, 25)

A full discussion of the pedagogies of RE is beyond the remit of this paper, but it may not be inaccurate to suggest that the dominant discourse that continues to shape RE is phenomenological (Miller 2013). Phenomenology aims at the non-judgemental understanding (verstehen) of the believer’s world view. It purports to avoid imposing the cultural perspective or bias of the student or scholar on the religious phenomena studied. However, despite the dominance of phenomenological approaches, RE is a contested pedagogical space and there are serious concerns about the need for greater consensus about the aims of the subject (Orchard 2015, 42) and critiques of the capacity of phenomenological pedagogy to offer pupils the criticality required to engage with the questions of meaning and value produced by the post 9/11 ‘moment’ (Gearon 2013;Miller 2013;Moulin 2012). But at the risk of oversimplification, the highly creative debates in the academy about RE pedagogy indicate preference for meaning-making social constructivist pedagogies which refine the phenomenological approach, in favour of more nuanced interpretive, reflexive and student-centred methods, most notably evident in the work of Jackson (1997, 2004). Writing in support of Brunerian folk pedagogy as a model for dialogical constructivist RE, Orchard makes a statement few RE teachers would dispute:

Contentious moral and ethical issues, beliefs about ultimate meaning and purpose that matter to children and young people and which have the potential to create divisions within communities are grist to the mill of the child-focused RE teacher. (Orchard 2015, 49)

This methodology contrasts with the essentialist narratives of the war on terror discourse and its new Muslim subject the ‘fundamentalist’ radical, as Kapoor argues: ‘The war on terror works to continuously remove subjectivity from Muslim bodies so as to dehumanise and make abject’. (Kapoor 2013, 1032)

The aims of open pluralistic, critical RE are incompatible with the disciplinary incitements of the war on terror discourse as enacted in DfE education policy and it is to the national context that we now turn in order to assess critically the implications of Prevent for liberal, democratic education practice. Revell recognises this tension and the implications for RE highlighting that: ‘RE is more likely than some subjects to fall under the regulatory gaze because its subject content involves diversity, values and morality’ (Revell 2015, 59).

From the geo-political to the national context: the domestic face of the war on terror

The miasma produced by the fog of war has permeated the social body of the UK from policy-making to the micro levels of community life. A recent YouGov survey (2015) commissioned by Islamic Relief asked 6640 people what words they associated with Muslims. The most popular response was ‘terrorist’, other words included ‘extremist’ and ‘misogynistic’ (Daily Telegraph,2015). The figures for referrals to Channel, the UK government’s multi-agency support mechanism for individuals referred as being at risk of radicalisation, enacts the securitisation discourse by constituting the ‘at risk’ ‘radicalised’ subjects of policy. Figures have increased annually since it was introduced, growing cumulatively from 5 in 2007 to 3934 in 2014 according to the most recent data available from the NPCC. 56% of those referred were Muslims (NPCC 2016). In 2012, half of the referrals were for people under the age of 18 and the youngest was a 3-year old from London (Khaleeli 2015).

Given these statistics, it could be argued that the discursive constructs of ‘radical’ and ‘extremism’ embedded within the policy assemblage of terrorism legislation are enabling the surveillance of undesirable subjects, ‘as a normalised necessity’ (Kapoor 2013, 1041). This is the muted racism of the neo-liberal war machine which justifies its disciplinary and regulatory techniques as safeguarding communities and building better social relations. However, these strategies are confusing and contradictory as exemplified by Secretary of State for Communities, Eric Pickle’s letter to British mosques in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks (Department for Communities and Local Government 2015). Pickle’s letter securitises the traditionally non-security space of community relations by sending out an ambiguous message muddling the alienating rhetoric of Prevent with a commitment to, ‘promoting community cohesion and “shared values” more broadly’ (Richards 2011, 143).

Policy and political rhetoric has been unrelenting in its positioning of British Muslims as a suspect community, creating dissonance within the liberal educational project of pluralistic RE. The war on terror is now embedded in the safeguarding policies of schools and colleges. The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act passed in 2015 requires schools, both maintained and independent to have due regard to the need to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface: Securitisation and Values
• Introduction to Fundamental British Values
• 1 ‘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
• 2 Britishness as racist nativism: a case of the unnamed ‘other’
• 3 ‘I’d worry about how to teach it’: British values in English classrooms
• 4 Towards an overlapping consensus: Muslim teachers’ views on fundamental British values
• 5 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
• 6 A place for fundamental (British) values in teacher education in Northern Ireland?
• Index