The intersection of counter terrorism with early childhood education and care policy in England – the power of the panoptic schema

In 2015, the Counter Terrorism and Security Act placed a duty on registered early years childcare provision in England to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. This paper reports a small-scale qualitative study that applies Panopticism to explore the policy architecture of the Prevent Duty and practitioners’ experiences as they work within its panoptic schema. The study found that the Prevent Duty is embedded in nurseries through a triple lock of government policies. Practitioners are deputized into the functions of state security. The positioning of practitioners within the schema is complex; while they are subject to surveillance by inspectors, they also exercise power through acts of self-regulation and surveillance. However, some practitioners adopted a critically reflexive stance; they questioned the purpose of the Prevent Duty and evidenced a critical knowledge of the way in which their work is governed by its schema.