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Radicalisation has become a highly influential idea in British policy making. It underpins and justifies Prevent, a core part of the UK's counter-terrorism strategy. Experts have theorised the radicalisation process, often beset by a weak evidence base and mired in fundamental contestation on definitions and explanatory factors. Experiential experts have been active contributors to these debates, presenting a challenge to the low-ranking role often given to experiential knowledge in evidence hierarchies and a contrast to policy areas in which it remains poorly valued. This paper draws on interviews with radicalisation experts to examine the dynamics of this pluralisation in practice. With a focus on credibility contests, it explains how experiential experts can claim authoritative knowledge and the challenges they face from those who prioritise theory-driven empirical data as the basis for contributions to knowledge. The paper draws out the implications for understandings of expertise of this newly conceptualised, evidence poor and highly applied topic area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates how the July 2005 London terrorist attacks affected Muslim teenagers' education plans and decisions. The attacks triggered a violent backslash against the Muslim community, which could have affected their incentives to continue in full-time education. I examine panel data on educational attitudes from the "Next Steps" Survey in England and use the month the survey was administered to divide individuals into treatment and control groups. I find that the attacks negatively affected the education plans of Muslims, but not those of any other major religious group. The probability of planning to continue in non-compulsory full-time education decreased by around 4.4% points for Muslims after the attacks. This corresponds to a 69% increase in individuals who were not sure whether to continue or drop out of full-time education. However, this change in plans appears to be a temporary reaction, since it did not affect students' actual decisions two years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Counter Terrorism and Security Act (CTSA) in 2015 placed responsibilities for national security on Higher Education (HE) in England with implications for lecturers' roles and responsibilities as they engage with students. The principal aim of this inquiry was to develop an understanding of lecturers' pedagogy in the context of students' academic study of Prevent in the fields of primary education and early childhood education (ECE). Panopticism was adopted as a theoretical lens to reveal the means by which the policy and structures of counter-terrorism reach into the university classroom. Subsequently, practitioner inquiry was applied as a method to examine the assumptions that underlie pedagogical decisions made by lecturers in this context. Findings from this small-scale inquiry indicate that lecturers held complex assumptions relating to both the aims of the CTSA and students' agency as learners. Such assumptions informed the way lecturers modified pedagogy in their attempts to create spaces for students to construct critical knowledges of the implications of counter-terrorism policy. Within the literature on the implications of CTSA for pedagogy in HE, this article highlights the value of practitioner inquiry as a critical tool for research into teaching and learning in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]