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.

You’ve literally referred to the “motives” you’re drawing from people’s posts several times.

Where is the “hate” on this thread? Please quote.

As I said, you don’t seem to understand what the programme was set up to do. It doesn’t have infinite funding and can’t do everything. It is intended to prevent terrorism. I do believe many ideological movements, including both far right and far left are capable of terrorism but it should be assessed on the level of threat, and the report the government commissioned found that in practice it wasn’t proportionately focusing on the main terror threat in this country, Al Qaeda and Isis. Probably because a lot of the people working for and with it don’t understand fully what it’s for either. Anyway, this misunderstanding seems to be endemic in the lanyard class, as people call it, so it’s a pointless exercise my arguing with you about it.

I feel very frustrated by the way this thread has been derailed. The issue is about the competence and motives of organisations training staff and governors. We have seen too many examples of rogue activist as well as well meaning trainers encouraging and defending particular biases. We've seen it in PHSE. The government is trying to introduce education on disinformation etc. This will only be successful if the biases of those delivering training are scrutinised and challenged.
This example is a big fail in my opinion and I'm pleased that others have received better training. My issue is the 5000 governors trained with no complaints.

The issue that I have with the choice of scenario is that I can't think of a situation in which a teacher could confidently know that a rumour is without foundation without this being properly investigated, and so I consider the premise of the question to be flawed.^

Yes, this is the point of the thread.

However, I don't think it's at all accurate to suggest that governors were being taught to treat alleged abuse by particular groups as disinformation, as that very clearly wasn't the case.

Except that, in that question, they were being taught that. You can never safely dismiss abuse allegations as disinformation, misinformation, or a conspiracy theory.

If the staff governor had reporting overhearing kids discussing an EDL video claiming that Muslim grooming gangs are everywhere in the UK coming for white girls and the kids were sharing it to try to keep each other safe, that might be a different matter because the EDL are known racists and the claim is not specific to the area. Even then, the failsafe option is still to refer it to DSL, because there might be a new technology (e.g. an encrypted messaging platform) or legal loophole being adopted by gangs everywhere to facilitate grooming. But the scenario was talking about a local gang deploying specific, novel tactics. This can never safely be dismissed without investigation.

I agree with you @Imnobody4, and I’m sorry if I’ve contributed to derailing. My point was that a couple of people decided that they had better experience of what was intended because they had had “similar training”. I said that I’d had Prevent training which disproportionately focussed on the “far right”. An example of an approved narrative I felt existed, which we also see in how discussions about grooming gangs, sexual violence by immigrants etc are managed. That’s all.

Yes, it seems to me that they were alluding to people they perceive as “far right influencers” eg Tommy Robinson types.

It's a fundamental flaw to have "Prevent training" separately from the rest of safeguarding training. Protecting kids from extremism and protecting them from sexual abuse cannot be separated from each other. Think of how cults use the control they have over their members to facilitate sexual abuse. Think of how the (majority white, I hasten to highlight) manosphere's entire raison d'être is male grievance that women have the right de jure to say no to sex and finally have sufficient structural power to do so de facto by earning their own money and living alone, and how many mass killings that manosphere adherents have perpetrated. Think of how the muslim extremist group Boko Haram abducted the Chibok girls and married many of them off to its members.

Extremism is a route to power, and whenever men hold power, some of them will abuse it to get sexual access to women.

Yes.
I hate rapists and I hate people who make it more difficult to seek justice for their victims.

@Imnobody4 made a good spot. I'm going to abuse the bigly letters because this is important to highlight.

"My issue is the 5000 governors trained with no complaints."

5000 adults with accountability for children's safety at school didn't see this question and say "wait, what?" 5000. Accountable for the safety of your children in schools.

I referred to questioning the motives of one poster, who made ludicrous allegations against me without any foundation.

With regard to your own posts, I was genuinely seeking clarification of what you were actually saying. If you don't want to clarify, that's fine.

The thing is, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, "far right influencers" aren't necessarily lying this time.

To be fair, all safeguarding training that I've done includes reference to Prevent. The Prevent specific training just goes into more depth because you can't generally cover everything adequately in a relatively short session.

Our Prevent training at work is a separate session from safeguarding training. I'm in HE.

Indeed.

I don't disagree with that all concerns and allegations must be escalated to the DSL (or the LADO if appropriate). Any and all safeguarding training that I have attended has made this extremely clear. And if I had to bet on it, I'm pretty certain that the Goveror Hub training would have done the same in the section which was actually focusing on what to do about concerns or allegations that might arise.

The point of the scenario as it was used in this particular training was not to provide any guidance at all on how governors should or shouldn't respond to safeguarding concerns/allegations. It was to help governors understand the differences between misinformation and disinformation. As I have said, it was a stupid example that was predicated on a flawed premise, but it absolutely didn't tell governors that they should dismiss any concerns raised.

Does the safeguarding training make no reference to Prevent? They usually do.

Absolutely. And what many people term as ‘racism’ is in many situations, just normal people attempting to have normal conversations about topics that concern them.

So it’s a bit like the way that claims that ‘transphobia’ was rampant were created by expanding the definition of transphobia to include ribbons tied to a fence, women’s rights stickers and calling a man a man.

Ditto Islamophobia to an extent. The definition in the Labour Party website is so wide it risks catching discussion of all sorts of serious issues. That may be deliberate.

I certainly understand the point of the programme. And it is based on an assessment of the level of threat, but that assessment is carried out at the level of the specific individuals referred I to the programme, rather than the perceived threat from specific ideologies. This seems like a sensible approach to me.

And not only that it was “transphobia” but that it was either “hate crime” or a “non crime hate incident” just to put up “anti trans” women’s rights stickers. Islamophobia (and other things) can be used in the same way and I find that concerning.

I totally agree with you and compiled the following statistics, when someone on another forum was claiming that the main threat to the UK was from the far right. Since 7/7/2005 (the London bombings) to 14/11/2021, there have been 94 people killed in the UK and 1987 people injured by Islamic terror attacks and 3 people killed by far right attackers. Many people think that Rotherham was the only place where Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs were operating, which is untrue, they were operating in the following cities and towns - Rochdale, Keighley, Leeds, Halifax, Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Huddersfield, Manchester, Newcastle , Oxford, Peterborough, Blackburn, Telford and others. In each case, there were hundreds of young, predominately white girls being abused by thousands of mainly, Pakistani background Muslims. One particularly horrible case was the 15 year old Bradford girl, who had been raped and abused by Pakistani men since she was 13. She was then forced to marry her abuser in an Islamic ceremony aged 13. Her senior, male, Muslim social worker was present at the ceremony and had actually recommended that she stay with the man. He, Anwar Meah, is still working (as far as I know) for Bradford social services. He was investigated by the police at the time, but no further action was taken. How about - being complicit in an under age illegal marriage?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89ezepnj0jo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-48106927

No you don’t IMO understand it, but you’re not alone in that as I said. We’ll have to agree to disagree. The report I mentioned is a very interesting read, and the government agreed with Shawcross that the main terror threat (and therefore the main focus of the programme) was Islamist terrorism and there should be a “back to basics” approach taken focussing on ideological radicalisation, and took up many of Shawcross’s recommendations.

Thank you for this, and I also appreciate the genuine engagement.

I'm sure it's true that accusations of racism are sometimes misplaced, perhaps because of misunderstandings or clumsy wording etc. I absolutely don't believe that people are racist simply for having concern about small boats/immigration/grooming gangs etc, but I do find that a lot of people tend to express such concerns in very racist ways.

You say that you don't think the majority of people in the country have suddenly become horrendously racist, and I do agree with that. I don't think that the majority of people are racist, but there is a growing minority who are, and they are incredibly vocal about it. Racism has massively increased in recent years - either because people have become more racist, or perhaps just because they feel more emboldened to show it. And when you repeatedly see the incredibly damaging impact that the massive increase in racism is having on the people that you care about, then of course you become less and less willing to tolerate it.

I agree that respectful dialogue on both sides, with genuine engagement and care over language, is what's needed. At the same time, I don't think we should shy away from saying when we think people have got things wrong.

Thank you for taking the time to engage.

I'm happy to agree to disagree.

Re Shawcross - there was a lot of criticism of the report at the time, as I recall, but it was my understanding that the recommendations were mostly accepted and implemented by the previous government.

The Shawcross report I keep banging on about gives lots of examples of how Prevent failed in cases of Islamist terror attacks. The main terror threat to the UK is not far right, that’s a particular form of agenda pushing which the left promotes. Shawcross felt that radicalised Islamists were referred to the programme at a very late stage, sometimes when it was too late for any effective intervention. “Far right” referrals have often been because someone has said something perceived as racist, when they are at a very early stage of radicalisation. Shawcross also felt the far left should be considered more.

from the report (my bold)

3.46 While the products related to Islamist terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology, mostly Islamic State and al-Qa’ida, much of the material covering extreme right-wing falls well below the threshold for even non-violent extremism.
3.47 This material tends to deal with broader themes and often covers content that relates to narratives on social media. These products not only covered non-violent far right extremism, but also examples of centre-right debate, populism, and controversial or distasteful forms of right-leaning commentary and intolerance. Some of this material falls well short of the extremism threshold altogether.
3.48 I saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on right-wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”. The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon.
3.49 A RICU analysis product from 2019, which discussed a cohort of social media users it termed “actively patriotic and proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”.
3.50 Another RICU product about far-right radicalisation online named a highly popular American podcast host, claiming that this individual had been described as a gateway to the far right. It was suggested that he had hosted a disproportionate number of influencers from the “far right of the political spectrum,” although no examples were provided.
3.51 I do not consider the above to be appropriate subjects for RICU analysis or Prevent’s attention, particularly as little care was made to clarify that these mainstream conservatives should not actually be considered part of the far right themselves. The analysis products in question did not present sufficient or convincing evidence that this material is relevant to countering terrorism or meeting Prevent’s objectives. Their inclusion in RICU’s output is liable to confuse practitioners about where they should focus efforts to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism.
3.52 I have seen nothing to suggest that RICU has formally adopted an official policy of applying radically different standards to different ideologies. In practice, however, the bar for what RICU includes on Islamism looks to be relatively high, whereas the bar for what is included on extreme right-wing is comparably low.
3.53 This risks creating false equivalence in the minds of Prevent practitioners about the scale and nature of the threats from extreme right-wing and Islamism. That makes it more difficult to respond proportionately to the unique challenges of these two different ideologies. It also short-changes those, such as Muslim communities, who are threatened by extreme right-wing terrorism and deserve a robust response to this threat. Conflating the dangers posed by the extreme right-wing with the vote to leave the European Union and the views of mainstream Conservative politicians fails to help provide that response.
3.54 This inconsistency goes to the heart of the fundamental question of how Prevent should approach ideology as part of its objective of tackling radicalisation.
3.55 RICU’s analysis products convey the sense that for the extreme right-wing, non-violent trends and narratives are of crucial importance, but that for Islamism, it is largely only the terrorist ideology and the narratives of the most serious jihadist groups that are relevant.