In this chapter, we set out the ‘security’ context of the Trojan horse affair in relation to the government’s Prevent strategy for addressing extremism and radicalisation. It is noteworthy that at the time that the Ofsted inspections of 21 schools in East Birmingham were being carried out in March–April 2014, guidance to schools on how to implement the 2011 Prevent strategy had not been issued by the DfE. In fact, this guidance was not issued until July 2015 – more than a year after several of the schools had been inspected and downgraded by Ofsted for their failures to address extremism or to implement Prevent. Thus, the schools were penalised for their failure to implement a policy that had not yet received full articulation. It is also unclear, as we shall see in the next chapter, whether the requirement to address extremism and implement Prevent was applied to all schools in this period.

So, why were these schools penalised for an alleged failure to implement a policy agenda that had yet to be fully articulated? To answer this, we need to examine the evolving nature of Prevent in that period – especially in relation to the changes to Prevent that followed the formation of the David Cameron-led coalition government in 2010 that significantly altered its remit and purpose. In particular, the definition of extremism within Prevent shifted towards a much wider focus on countering extremist attitudes – broadly defined – rather than preventing violent extremism, while its implementation shifted away from engagement with Muslim communities and organisations to a focus on charging personnel in public sector institutions with a responsibility to spot and report on signs of radicalisation.

These changes embedded a significantly expanded approach to the remit and implementation of Prevent, and were, following the passing of the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, imposed as a statutory duty across public sector institutions, including schools. As we shall see, at the time of the Trojan Horse episode in 2014, however, the Prevent policy was in flux, and the schools became entangled in an evolving counter-extremism agenda, in which the purported facts of the Trojan Horse affair were used to justify the expansion of the conceptualisation and remit of the government’s counter-extremism agenda.