Religion,Schooling, Community,and Security: Exploring Transitions and Transformations in England

Education is a complex social practice. In the United Kingdom context, schooling is further nested within the complex social practices of community governance, quasi-market public choice, and religion. This essay explores the shifting definitions of community and education in the context of the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which places a duty on all public bodies, including schools, to prevent violent extremism. Drawing on analyses of the “Trojan Horse” moral panic in Birmingham schools in 2014 and guidance documents operationalizing the educational policy changes that followed, two distinct discourses can be observed, derived from different policy directions. One discourse is the social, concerned with integration and at times assimilation toward national norms; and the other is the communal, concerned with internal cohesion and development within the Muslim community. These can be characterized as societal “we identities” in vertical tension (Buzan, 1998).