Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answers by Baroness Barran on 18 January (HL5056 and HL5057), what steps they take to ensure that radical Islamism is not being taught in madrassas in the UK; whether they have any evidence that radical Islamism is being taught in those settings; and if so, what further steps they intend to take.

The government is committed to ensuring all children are safe, wherever they are educated, including safe from extremism and radicalisation. The department is actively working with the education sector, national partners, and local partners to safeguard children and young people from these risks. In addition to the work that we do with schools and colleges to ensure our children and young people are resilient to extremist ideology, we jointly fund with the Home Office a network of experts who provide frontline support to education providers

We have also established an online form to allow concerns regarding extremism within the education sector to be reported directly to the department, to complement our existing counter extremism helpline, and we encourage anyone with a concern to use this service.

As mentioned in my answer of 18 January, in instances where the department becomes aware of a provider where extremist activity might be taking place, we will also work closely with relevant agencies, such as the local authority, Ofsted and the police to act. In those rare cases, such as the case of Umar Haque in 2018, which saw the attempted radicalisation of several children in a London Madrassa through devious and sophisticated grooming techniques, we have worked closely with safeguarding partners to intervene and safeguard the children, and to act against the perpetrators. In the case of Umar Haque, we saw multi-agency action result in the conviction of him and his associates under the Terrorism Act 2006.

However, while there are many legal powers in place to protect children in out-of-school providers including madrassas, which have been proven to be effective, we have not ruled out further action.

As outlined in my previous answer, the department has been taking forward a package of activity aimed at further enhancing safeguarding in this sector. This includes the provision of over £3 million of targeted funding to pilot ways in which we can boost local capacity further to identify and intervene in out-of-school providers of concern, and testing the utility of existing powers held across multiple agencies, such as local authorities, the police and Ofsted, to safeguard children attending these providers.

These pilots were taken forward with the intention of building our evidence base to inform our national next steps for supporting safeguarding in the sector, including the need for any legislation. This work concluded at the end of last year, and we are currently evaluating the outcome of these pilots. We will set out our next steps to this work in due course.