Central Bedfordshire Council has admitted racially discriminating against two young boys and breaching their human rights after a school called the police after one of them told his teacher he had been given a toy gun as a present.
The Guardian reports that the brothers, aged seven and five and of mixed Indian and Middle Eastern heritage, were questioned by uniformed officers in March 2016 after the school raised concerns they might be at risk of radicalisation. The boy’s teacher has insisted she never doubted the weapon was a toy.
The school’s governors found teachers were unsure if they had a duty to report their concerns under Prevent, the government’s anti-radicalisation strategy, and called Bedfordshire police. The school cannot be named in order to protect the children’s identity.
After speaking to the boys, police officers quickly concluded there was no cause for concern and the children were returned to their mother, from whom they had been kept apart for almost two hours.
After a legal challenge, in which the children’s mother argued no white child would be referred to police for owning a toy gun, Central Bedfordshire council admitted the children were racially discriminated against and agreed to pay damages. It also admitted breaching their human rights in the way information about the staff’s suspicions was handled by the school.
The local education authority (LEA) has now changed its guidance to schools over Prevent, removing a mandatory instruction that they refer any concerns over radicalisation to police and requiring them to exercise professional judgment and consider other options.
The boys’ mother told the Guardian that the incident had made her children withdrawn, untrusting and frightened of what they said. She moved them to a new school following the incident, after her older son told her: “I don’t want to say the wrong thing, the teacher will call the police again.”
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The children have been raised with no religion, but were among a small number of non-white pupils at their primary school. The family speak English at home and the boys have picked up a few words of their father’s language. Their mother said she had overheard her older son urging his brother never to use any language other than English.
“He said: ‘You can’t say foreign words at school, because you don’t know who you can trust.’ I remember being gutted and thinking: what has happened to my children? Can I not even discuss elements of their culture that they should be celebrating?”
Debaleena Dasgupta, legal officer at civil rights organisation Liberty and solicitor for the family, said: “It’s positive that the LEA admitted the children were discriminated against, but this incident is an inevitable consequence of the government’s Prevent duty, which obliges teachers to be suspicious of their young pupils.
“As this case shows, even the most baseless and absurd suspicions can have serious ramifications. The Prevent strategy and the attendant policies and guidance are failing, and risk sowing alienation and marginalisation in our classrooms.”
Central Bedfordshire council said Prevent officers were not sent to the school and a referral was not made under Prevent in this case, but they apologised to the family for the way they had been treated. In a statement, the council said: “All schools receive regular training on the Prevent strategy to ensure that any potential incidents are dealt with sensitively and appropriately.
“Prevent referrals in Central Bedfordshire are falling due to school staff being more confident about how to handle incidents, so only the most serious, which cannot be dealt with at a local level, are referred.”
