Promoting British values, facilitating controversial discussions

Outstanding organisations are expected to place the promotion of fundamental British values ‘at the heart’ of all that they do. Are you confident that inspectors will judge your work to be outstanding? And in particular, how are teaching staff in different curriculum teams contributing to the Prevent Duty by promoting fundamental British values? Do they have the knowledge and confidence to discuss sensitive or controversial topics? Do they take advantage of what is going on in the world? Are they preparing learners thoroughly for life in Britain's complex, diverse and multicultural society?

Ofsted expect outstanding providers to actively look for opportunities to have discussions around topical, and at times sensitive and controversial issues – in group tutorials, workplace learning and classroom practice, for example. Why? Because handled well, promoting fundamental British values provides an opportunity to increase the resilience of students to challenge extremist ideology, including far-right extremism. It can help challenge unbalanced media reporting to which students may have been exposed. It can help break down the ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentalities that so often fuel fear, mistrust, prejudice and ultimately ‘obias’ and ‘isms’; Islamophobia, faith-based extremism, far right extremism, racism and xenophobia, for example.

In my experience, there are staff in every college who are confident and skilled at facilitating sensitive or controversial discussions. But there are also staff who are nervous of such discussions, reluctant to initiate conversations and fearful of the consequences if things go ‘pear-shaped’. This raises a number of challenges, including:

• how do we identify and implement robust strategies to share skills and expertise to help staff overcome the fear factor?
• how do we provide practical and effective staff training that provides clarity on what it means to promote British values for different job roles and responsibilities, and how do we evaluate this training to measure its impact and ensure it leads to a genuine change in staff practice?
• how do we ensure that all staff recognise and embrace their role and responsibility to promote British values?

I will be speaking about this at the AoC’s Prevent Duty conference on 19 October 2016. You can view the programme and book your place on the conference website here.

I am also facilitating, on behalf of the AoC, a one-day event ‘Understanding Ofsted: Equality, Diversity, Fundamental British values and the 2015 Inspection Framework’. This takes place on 29 November 2016. You can find out more information or register for the event here.

Below are just four of my most popular workshops on promoting British values, which have been recently updated with the very latest findings from Ofsted.

• Promoting fundamental British values; taking a whole-organisational approach  (download the publicity here)
• Equality, Diversity, British values and classroom practice; Everything teachers need to know (download the publicity here)
• Equality, Diversity, British values and Workplace Learning; A meaningful rather than tick-box approach (download the publicity here)         
• Equality, Diversity, British values and Business Support; excellent working relationships and customer care (download the publicity here)

You can see more on the training page of my website here. Interested? Don’t hesitate to get in touch via my contact page here