This blog post was published under the 2019 to 2022 Conservative government
By Sally Siner, Prevent Education Officer for Derby
Ready-to-go and quality assured classroom resources are extremely important for teachers, especially when it can feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to be done.
Time – or lack thereof – is the nemesis of many teachers: it feels like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to be done, much less everything one might like to do. Teachers are amongst the most committed, hard-working and creative people I know and are always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to engage young people in learning. Educate Against Hate’s Let’s Discuss classroom resources can save you time and provide expertise in teaching your students about extremism and radicalisation with free, thought-provoking and accurate resources. Here’s how:
Too many choices
If you were to google ‘extremism classroom resources’ you’d get over six million hits. It is doubtful you have time to go searching through this high volume of resources for that needle in a haystack.
And that’s the crux of it – not only are quality resources in this area hard to find, but teachers I’ve spoken to have admitted they are often reluctant to address such sensitive and contentious issues within the classroom – yet address them we must: arrests for terrorist offences are steadily declining overall in the UK, except that is, amongst the teenage cohort in which we are seeing an increase.
Trusted go-to resources
These new Let’s Discuss resources have been developed with teachers and students in mind by a range of experts across counter-extremism and education, including Prevent Education Officers. No specialist prior knowledge is required and each of the four packs contain teacher guidance, a classroom task, a video, and a PowerPoint presentation to aid classroom discussion. The idea is that a teacher could look at one of the four topics during a one-hour planning and preparation period and then be ready to teach the lesson. It’s our hope that these resources will give teachers the confidence to have difficult conversations that may arise from such topics, with the reassurance that these packs have been fact-checked and approved by government.
How to use
There are several ways in which you could use the four packs, topics of which are covered:
- Extreme right-wing
- Islamist extremism
- Left-wing, anarchist and single-issue extremism
- Fundamental British values
Taken as a whole, these could be used to form a single unit of 4-8 lessons in PSHE, Citizenship or similar. Alternatively, it’s possible to break these down into smaller bitesize chunks for use during tutor time, or two or more packs could be used during a drop-down day for an immersive examination of extremism.
Let’s Discuss is recommended for year 9+ with no upper age limit. Those in further education might like to use the resources as a springboard for an EPQ, for example.
However you choose to use these resources, we hope you will find them helpful and effective. We’d love to hear from you regarding how you’ve found teaching these lessons so we can improve and enhance new resources – please contact: counter-extremism@education.gov.uk.
Next steps: Visit the Let’s Discuss classroom resource packs.