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It’s the only thing the Office for Students intends to release this week, so enjoy it!
“New data on rejected speakers at English universities” – that, at least, was how last year’s release of 2021-22 Prevent annual monitoring data was heralded by the Office for Students.
Then, of course, we were still reaching to justify wide-ranging new powers around freedom of speech on campus – and data collected for the purposes of ensuring that students are not radicalised was seen as one of the key datapoints in that debate . This is despite the documentation itself noting:
If we consider it to be relevant we may use this information to inform other areas of regulatory activity, although we recognise the limitations of the data in this respect
This caveat is repeated in today’s release of 2022-23 data, which – given the pre-election period restrictions – is mercifully presented without the Office for Students’ expert commentary. The data on external speaker events is just one arm of monitoring that includes data on Prevent referrals and on relevant staff training. Though there are standardised definitions, in interpreting this aggregated data we need to keep in mind that each provider will have its own procedures and processes suitable to a number of operating contexts.
From what we are presented, it would appear to be reasonable to say that there were more Prevent related cases at each stage of the pipeline (Prevent lead involved, external advice sought, formal external referral made) than in 2021-22. Prevent itself became heavily politicised during this period, with former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s response to the Shawcross Review highlighting what she saw as a “cultural timidity” in dealing with Islamism and with briefings suggesting that she felt the way the duty was applied disproportionately focused on far-right extremism.
The figures show that reports flagged as Islamist or far-right radicalisation fell as a proportion of all reports over the last three years, with most growth being seen in the “mixed, unclear, or unstable ideology” strand.
On the external speakers question 2022-23 saw 39,475 events or speakers approved through institutional external speaker processes and 340 rejected – a rejection rate of 0.9 per cent. The majority of events or speakers that were not approved (220) failed for procedural reasons (the example given being timescales set out in provider policies – imagine a situation where a provider gets two hours notice of Jeremy Corbyn appearing on campus). Both the total number of events or speakers approved and the number rejected are higher than the previous two years of comparable data. The proportion of rejections rose very slightly (the previous year of data saw 0.8 per cent rejected)