Schools are back for another academic year in the UK, but beneath the homework deadlines, detentions, and canteen lunches bubbles a worrying undercurrent of today’s politics, and it only looks set to worsen.
This summer brought a total explosion of anti-migrant sentiment, with divisive rhetoric around foreigners embedding itself firmly in mainstream political narrative.
Far-right mobs assembled outside hotels housing vulnerable asylum seekers across the country, and just this month, the capital’s streets were flooded with thousands of nationalist protesters chanting anti-migrant, Islamophobic slogans and waving incendiary, racist placards.
As a secondary school teacher, I can’t help but feel alarmed at what this summer’s division and hostility mean for the year ahead. Real life does not stop at the school gates. Politics does not pause for the 3 o’clock bell, and children are caught in its grip.
I’ve lost count of the footage showing children at anti-migration protests, shouting racist remarks or holding offensive signs. And even when they are not present, most adults at these rallies have young people in their lives. That means potentially hundreds of thousands of children across Britain are being exposed to racist rhetoric from someone they love and trust, rhetoric now emboldened and legitimised by a political class peddling the same ideas.
Schools reflect the communities they serve, and many classrooms in major cities are melting pots of young people from every racial, ethnic and religious background.
Young asylum seekers may sit beside children taught that foreigners are the enemy; Black and brown students beside kids who spent the weekend draped in St George’s flags, chanting ‘go home’; Muslim children beside classmates raised in homes where casual Islamophobia is the norm.
It is a scandal, an utter dereliction of duty, to begin the school year without a national agenda to confront this.
Where is the urgent protocol from the Education Secretary? Where is the inquiry into how these children were radicalised into far-right action? Where is the expansion of Prevent, the investigation into the communities consumed by these protests? Instead, there is silence, and any teacher will tell you this amounts to a safeguarding catastrophe on every side.
Black and brown children, once safe at school, now face classrooms that mirror the dangers of the street. White children, radicalised in their homes or communities into far-right beliefs, are abandoned to a culture that dresses fascism up as national pride.
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When flag-wielding racists are portrayed by media and politicians as concerned citizens, the children dragged along become young patriots with an admirable love of country rather than vulnerable children radicalised by their parents’ extreme beliefs.
Without a nationwide plan, this is a ticking time bomb and it will be black and brown children, young asylum seekers and refugees who have already endured the unthinkable, who pay the price when classmates can’t distinguish between the non-white peer beside them and the supposed foreign enemy their parents rail against at home, or between slogans acceptable at a protest and those shouted in a maths lesson.
If that weren’t damning enough, the double standards are glaring. When pro-Palestine protests became regular in October 2023, then education secretary Gillian Keegan wrote to schools warning that solidarity for Palestine risked spreading “an atmosphere of intimidation and fear” in classrooms.
She announced over £3 million of extra funding to protect Jewish institutions, with no mention of Muslim ones, despite Islamophobia surging after October 7 and reminded teachers of their statutory duty to refer suspicious behaviour to Prevent.
It was a blatant attempt to smear all Palestine solidarity as antisemitic and extreme, while recruiting teachers to police pro-Palestine sentiment on school grounds. In other words: protesting genocide triggers millions in funding, an expanded counter-terror strategy and urgent nationwide guidance, yet violent nationalism on our streets warrants nothing.
The reason for this double standard is obvious. Advocacy for Palestine challenges the status quo, while white supremacist nationalism upholds it by design. But more than that, schools have long been used by the state to embed its interests in the minds of the next generation. As a teacher of eight years, I’ve seen this troubling trend take shape in many ways now coming to a head as far-right ideas resurface among the young, particularly men.
A decade ago, Prevent became a binding obligation on public workers like doctors, social workers and teachers. My colleagues and I are legally required to refer pupils to counter-terror police if they show a wide range of vague, arbitrary “symptoms”, from questioning foreign policy to seeming withdrawn or tired.
At the same time, “British Values” became a mandated part of the curriculum, tied directly to Prevent. This places us in a contradictory bind: we must teach democracy and freedom of expression while spying on students who show solidarity with anything the state deems threatening — Muslim identity, or Palestine itself.
Though Prevent remains a duty across sectors like healthcare, it is most deeply embedded in schools; 40% of referrals last year came through education. I’d argue this is by design.
After nearly a decade of engaging with it as a teacher, sitting through mandatory training year after year, it feels deliberately positioned to catch young people at their most vulnerable and criminalise normal markers of adolescence as extreme, un-British or illegal. The goal is clear: to manufacture citizens who are compliant, malleable, and loyal only to the British state and Western liberal values.
Palestine, the great moral question of our time, exposes the hypocrisies of our system. The stark double standard between protests against genocide and protests against foreigners shows how Prevent has always been about manufacturing consent for liberalism’s bloody legacy in a new generation. Students have been questioned by counter-terror police for wearing pin badges and excluded for asking to raise money for Gaza.
Media hysteria erupted over children missing lessons to attend protests, most of which took place on weekends, dragging even petty truancy into counter-terrorism if you happen to be Muslim. I know of teachers whose September training days this year included entire sessions on how to suppress any discussion of Palestine in the classroom.
Many individual teachers do try to instil moral justice in their pupils, but even the best efforts of overworked, underpaid staff cannot undo the system’s sinister warping for the state’s ends.
This school year begins in a climate more hostile than ever for ethnic minorities, especially Muslims, and advocacy for Palestine more criminalised than ever before. Children are not separate from this climate; they are shaped by it: spied on, silenced, and left to battle the nation’s divisions on the playground.
Nadeine Asbali is a freelance writer and secondary school teacher based in London. She is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain
Follow her on X: @nadeinewrites
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.