The Children’s Commissioner is blaming Prevent for problems it was never meant to solve

Last year around 10,000 people were referred to it and just over half were children. This week the Children's Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, published a report arguing that thousands of those children are being failed: referred, then sent back to school with nothing. This argument rests on a core misunderstanding of the Prevent process and remit, resulting in yet another alarmist distraction from the heavy work underway.

Prevent has not been short of scrutiny. From allegations that it focuses too much on Islamism to allegations that it focuses too much on the far right. From allegations it does too much to it does too little. And because of this heavy critique, robust investigative reports have examined its effectiveness.

William Shawcross reported in February 2023 with thirty-four recommendations, all accepted. Lord Anderson reported on the Southport and Amess failures in 2025; the government accepted every one of his recommendations in July, and a Prevent Commissioner is now in post to oversee delivery.

Practitioners are in the middle of implementing it all: a new assessment framework, a new case management system, revised thresholds, mandatory case reviews. That work is slow, unglamorous and largely invisible. What we don't need is another cook in the kitchen, especially one who has largely misread the data.

The problem starts with her headline number. She says 71 per cent of referred children had no clear extremist ideology, and frames the report around children fixated with violence. The 71 per cent is four categories stacked together: no ideology identified, no ideology but some other vulnerability, multiple ideologies, and fascination with violence. Only the last one is what she's describing, and it's 8 per cent or 818 referrals. Yet on the radio on Tuesday morning the Commissioner said 70 per cent of referred children are violence-fixated. That is roughly nine times the real figure.

Her second claim is that these children are turned away because Prevent only cares about ideology. The government's own figures say the opposite. When a violence-fixation case reaches a Channel panel, the meeting where professionals decide whether to offer support, it is accepted 82 per cent of the time, against 88 per cent for far-right cases and 88 per cent for Islamist ones. Violence-fixated cases now make up 14 per cent of everyone receiving Channel support, more than Islamist extremism at 12 per cent. Adoptions in that category rose from 19 in late 2024 to 88 by mid-2025. This is the category the system used to ignore, and it has clearly stopped.

The figures show a threshold working. Every category where a real concern was identified ends up with between a quarter and a third of cases receiving support. That isn't a system missing risk; it's a system separating worrying cases from anxious referrals. Of course, the case everyone reaches for, Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, was referred three times and closed three times, but that was years before the violence-fixation category existed at all. In the boroughs I worked in, his case would have been escalated for specialist support nonetheless, but this was us going beyond our remit - a remit specifically tasked with handling ideological extremism but incidentally capable of doing so much more.

Prevent was built under a 2003 Labour government and put into action post 7/7 to stop people being drawn into terrorism, which requires an ideological motive. It was never designed for children who are simply drawn to violence, and it is handling thousands of them anyway, accepting them for support at close to the rate of ideological cases. It is doing more than its remit, not less.

And then there is the assumption underneath the whole report. To know that the children turned away were dangerous, you would need to read the actual cases, or track what happened to those children afterwards. The Commissioner has neither. She has spreadsheets — ages, referral sources, outcomes — and interviews with the teachers who made the referrals. Those interviews tell you the teachers were worried and frustrated. They don't tell you the children were a risk. We have the horrific case of Southport to know the cost of not escalating a case, but with over 8000 cases not escalated last year, there is no evidence to suggest we have 8,000 Rudakabanas in classrooms, but instead evidence that shows these are thresholds not being met.

Where she is right is that a worried teacher in this country has one door to knock on, and it says counter-terrorism on it. But that isn't Prevent's failure. Prevent does not need substantive overhaul. It needs support where non-terror threats are using the only system available.

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Dr Charlotte Littlewood is a former Prevent practitioner and Counter Extremism Coordinator for the UK government.

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