By IRNA,
London : The Liberal Democrats Thursday criticised a government pilot scheme to extend the hunt for potential terrorists to local schools.
“The government should focus on teaching students the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) not ‘spotting’ extremists’,” said Farid Ahmed, the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for Walthamstow in east London, where the scheme was being piloted.
“It is vital that extremism is dealt with at the grass roots, though it is no surprise that the Government has cherry picked Walthamstow – an area with a very multicultural community – to launch this scheme,” Ahmed said.
“The sole purpose of this scheme seems to marginalise whole communities and is evidence once again of Labour’s failure to come up with realistic plans,” he said in a statement obtained by IRNA.
Under the scheme, called Learning Together to be Safe, pupils are being taught to spot extremists throughout the rest of London Borough of Walthamstow after being piloted at Kelmscott School for the last two years.
“Once again it seems that the Government is obsessed with setting up wacky and expensive schemes rather then deal with the issues at hand,” Ahmed said.
Education specialists from all over the country were reported to have attended a one-day event at Kelmscott School in Walthamstow on Wednesday, that included workshops demonstrating what was called “innovative techniques” to teach difficult subjects.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has also launched a learning together toolkit for all schools under the government’s controversial Prevent strategy for use in staff training, reviewing school practice and developing partnership working.
“The toolkit gives background information on the threat from violent extremist groups of various kinds and on what might make young people vulnerable, and practical advice for building resilience and managing risks,” the department said.
In December, the Institute of Race Relations also castigated the entire premise of Prevent, finding that it had been used “to establish one of the most elaborate systems of surveillance ever seen in Britain” to target the whole Muslim community.
The New Local Government Network has also called for the programme to be scrapped, warning that the government’s flagship scheme on tackling extremism was alienating Muslim communities and undermining community cohesion.