School governors told to ‘dismiss’ grooming gangs concerns

[NoNever]

Article in the Telegraph.

Quote “ School governors have been encouraged to dismiss concerns about grooming gangs as “disinformation”, The Telegraph can disclose.
Thousands of governors undergoing safeguarding training this year were presented with a scenario involving rumours of “men belonging to a particular religion” committing “violent crimes against women”.
They were asked to identify the scenario as an “online safety risk” because children were spreading “disinformation”.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/11/04/school-governors-told-to-dismiss-grooming-gangs-concerns/

This is infuriating. For decades girls were told to shut up about grooming gangs and this is the training school governors are being provided in 2025.

And it doesn’t surprise me that the far right are the “fastest growing source of referrals” at all. The report I read was quite clear that they found it unbalanced.

So do you think an entirely separate process should be set up to deal with the growing threat from the far right, with separate referral mechanisms and separate partnerships etc to respond to this, separate training courses etc? Or is it your view that we don't need to respond to the radicalisation by far right groups?

From my perspective, there are economies of scale and benefits from having a single reporting mechanism for end users in dealing with these issues through a coordinated approach, but happy to hear other views.

No, it doesn't surprise me either. The far right are increasingly active in my area.

The last government held their hands up and admitted they had a problem in some areas following the report. See this extract of their implementation of the report’s findings (my bold):

Progress update

We are clear that Prevent is a counter- terrorism capability, a duty, and that its aim is to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. This is set out in CONTEST 2023, the new Prevent duty guidance, and the new Channel duty guidance.
We have updated the GOV.UK Prevent duty training courses to ensure they use the terminology of Islamist extremism and extreme right-wing, and to make it clear that the primary threat to the UK emanates from Al-Qaeda and Daesh. We have incorporated additional threat information into our new face-to-face training package, which is currently being piloted, and we are developing a dedicated training package on ideology with the support of CCE.
Rigorous criteria for Prevent-funded project activity has been adopted, to ensure that Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are delivering projects that tackle the prevalent terrorist and extremist threats in that area, and that funding is allocated accordingly.
The new Prevent Security Threat Check (see recommendation 12 for details) is now in use across the system, including for all RICU commissions. This makes sure that work is focused on the current threat and proportionate across ideologies. Guidance for RICU analysts has been implemented to ensure this standard is met.
CCE will also have a continued role in ensuring thresholds are being applied consistently and proportionately, across the breadth of Prevent.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-prevents-report-and-government-response/independent-review-of-prevent-one-year-on-progress-report-accessible

This is something of a derail, but my intention was to make the point that there is often an “approved narrative” that applies to these training sessions, such as my Prevent one. To me, this seems like an example of same.

I think funding and support should be proportionately allocated on the basis of the terrorist threat to the UK as per the intended focus of the programme. So right wing extremism would need to be assessed as to how much of a credible terrorist threat it is and dealt with accordingly.

I don't disagree with the principle. We might disagree on the degree of threat that is currently being posed by the far right.

I'm still not clear as to whether you think there should be a separate infrastructure to deal with threats from the far right, whether you think it's ok for these to be dealt with by Prevent, or whether you don't think the far right presents a sufficient threat to warrant being dealt with at all.

Prevent is about ideology, and that includes both right wing and left wing ideology as well as religious ones. However, the number one credible threat to the security of the UK and its people is and always has been (after the Good Friday agreement) Islamist terrorism as the report was clear on and the government acknowledged. Yet most referrals are either not based on ideology (and aren’t taken up) or they are “far right” indicative that there is still a problem with people not understanding the focus of the programme which is to prevent terror attacks on British soil.

So perhaps you could stop insinuating that I don’t care about far right extremism.

I'm not insinuating that at all, I'm just trying to understand your perspective.

I’ve explained my perspective, and my reason for bringing it up. You do seem to be focussed on imagined “motives” rather than what people are saying.

I agreed with you until your last sentence. There was, in my opinion, an implication that may not have been intentional, that because the rumour sounded suspiciously racist, it must therefore actually be racist, and racism isn't permitted, so the rumour must be quashed. It is very easy for us lo make assumptions – and indeed I may be making one in my interpretation of the incomplete facts I have read about this.

It is often stated that when someone alleges abuse, we must believe them. In my opinion this isn't quite right (and dangerously so). I think it would be better ti say that when someone alleges abuse, we mustn't disbelieve them. We should take their words, and their feelings, seriously; we should not display doubt about what they are telling us; but we are very rarely in a position to judge the truth of the allegation. Safeguarding means taking action to lessen the chances of [further] abuse, and reporting the allegation as appropriate to safeguarding leads (and it may need reporting to police). It does not mean taking sides when there are two conflicting stories; it does sometimes mean taking active measures to prevent the alleged abuser from being in a position to abuse.

I’ll repeat what my point was in bringing up my experience of Prevent training (in 2016).

Referrals can come from a wide range of sources, and inevitably there will be people who don't understand what Prevent is for. Hence there are many referrals which are outside the scope of the programme and don't result in any intervention.

It is my understanding that referrals are individually risk assessed in order to decide whether or not they should be adopted by Channel. So there is already a process of assessing the threat and allocating resources accordingly. I'm sure that there will be individual instances of that process not working as it should, but the overall principle seems sound.

Apologies if I've misunderstood, but you seem to be saying that the far right shouldn't be the focus because they don't present a risk of terror attacks on UK soil? Please feel free to correct me if I've read that wrong.

I'm simply trying to understand what you're actually saying. You're the one that seems to be jumping to conclusions about the "motives" that you think I'm attributing. That's a shame as I was trying to have a civilised discussion. Oh well.

It does sound like we are agreeing here.

Have you actually looked into the detail of this, or have you just read the Telegraph article? I think the training was fundamentally flawed for the reasons that I have already outlined, but I don't agree that the implication of the training was that rumours which "sound racist" should be quashed. That isn't what the training conveyed at all.

If the Telegraph article had focused on the question of how the teacher could confidently know that rumour was false, then I would have agreed with it. I can't agree with the suggestion that governors were actually being taught to dismiss safeguarding concerns as misinformation, because the evidence just doesn't back that up.

Have you actually read what I wrote? "I may be making [an assumption] in my interpretation of the incomplete facts I have read about this."

Before I scroll, is there a report on this from anywhere but the Telegraph?

No absolutely didn’t mean to address it to you.
I know your stance. I’m not interested in further musings of someone with zero experience of it.

That's fine by me.

When I googled it last night, I saw a link to GN News.

Fair enough. I wasn't clear as to what you had looked at and what you hadn't. The trouble is that many people look at the headlines and reach conclusions without actually looking at the detail.

There is too much hate on this thread for reason unfortunately.

True. My take on this is that the debate on this has been stifled for so long that we haven’t quite got the hang of it.

Many need practice in wording our thoughts carefully on this complex topic as it is easy to have misunderstandings and we also need to get away from the people attacking every mention of small boats or immigrants etc as racist as it removes normal peoples means of calibrating their views.

I don’t believe that the vast majority of the country has suddenly become horrendous racists and I certainly am not, but I have been directly called a racist on several occasions recently although no clarification on exactly what I have said that they object to has been forthcoming. There are genuine racists out there obviously but I believe that they are in a small minority.

Most of what I share in the relevant threads is statistics from authorities like the Mayor of London’s website. Yet one poster started throwing out wild accusations of inciting racial hatred and hate crimes which does absolutely nothing to help.

We definitely need better words or terms to clarify what we are saying. I constantly have to repeat ‘not all Muslims/boat people/immigrants’ otherwise I get accused of generalising where I wasn’t. We need to be able to differentiate between the many decent people who follow moderate Islam in this country, respect our democracy and laws and also object to the ones that hate us and want to kill us.

We need to be clear about the extremists as well those in the middle who live fairly assimilated lives and are fairly quiet in their views but also believe that homosexuality should be outlawed, first cousin marriage is ok and democracy is there to be abused (the democracy issue has been found to be predominantly Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslims) and disapprove of our Western lifestyles but are keeping it quiet while slowly gathering political power and influence.

We can already see that they have considerable influence over the Labour government.

I do believe that talking on here is hugely valuable and so many are desperate to discuss the issues. I also value reading your points and having productive conversations.