There is one line in the Home Office fact sheet on this year’s figures for Prevent – the UK’s counter-radicalisation referral scheme – that is more informative than the rest of the report combined: referrals for ‘fascination with extreme violence or mass-casualty attacks’ peaked at 286 between April and June, before falling to 183 over the summer. The Home Office’s explanation? The schools broke up.

Nothing about the threat actually changed (unsurprisingly) with the fact that the sun comes out in July. All that happened is that children went home – and, with them, so did much of Prevent’s ability to see the threats in our midst.

I know this system from the inside. From 2015 to 2018, I worked as a Prevent practitioner in London and later as a counter-extremism coordinator. Prevent is often spoken about as if its figures provide an insight into extremist trends in the UK. That isn’t right, though: it’s a referral system that relies disproportionately on schools, as these are one of the few places where people encounter the state every day. In doing so, it misses the real Islamist threat the UK faces and paints a picture that the most radical people in our society are 11- to 15-year-olds.

Schools generated 34 per cent of Prevent referrals (3,496 in total) in the past year, more than any other source. Those aged 11 to 15 accounted for 36 per cent of all referrals and 37 per cent of cases taken on for deradicalisation through Channel, the government’s follow-up support programme for referred individuals.

So when the report says extreme right-wing concerns once again outnumber Islamist ones (just eight per cent of referrals were for Islamism), it reflects the machinery we’ve built to observe extremism, rather than the true picture of the country. Of course right-wing extremism is real and growing. Think of the neo-Nazi jailed last year for stabbing an asylum seeker or the attempts to burn down a Rotherham asylum hotel during the 2024 summer riots. But this is nowhere close to the majority of extremism cases. Indeed, MI5 says around three-quarters of its counter-terrorism caseload relates to Islamist terrorism. The government’s own counter-terrorism strategy, Contest, attributes 67 per cent of attacks since 2018 to Islamist terrorism, against around 22 per cent to the extreme right.

Schools miss a lot, and through fear or political sensitivity, avoid dealing with a lot more. Take the fact that, according to the latest figures, Islamist referrals peak among those aged 31 to 40. Incel referrals peak at 18 to 21. Left-wing referrals peak at 26 to 30. Extreme right-wing radicalisation, meanwhile, is picked up disproportionately among the young (and online) – where schools are, of course, most likely to encounter it.

Then there’s the issue of who gets referred. It isn’t exactly easy to refer a suspected Islamist, not least as Islamists are well versed in intimidating schools (as we’ve repeatedly seen in places like Birmingham). There is also a factor of white guilt: a white teacher may feel far more comfortable referring pupils for far-right sympathies than children from a minority-ethnic background for beliefs they claim are part of their faith.

Then there’s the fact that Islamist extremism is often concealed in the language of human rights or legitimate political activism, or in personal religiosity that people often feel should not be challenged, making it harder to recognise and harder for teachers to police. The average teacher is primed to notice far-right anti-migrant sentiment or white supremacism, but not to notice when Islam, an already unfamiliar faith, becomes politicised.

One thing the Prevent numbers miss completely, as there is no box for it, is anti-Semitism, which arguably should be measured in its own right. It is a hatred that unites Islamist, extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing ideologies, and may be easier for a teacher to spot than the ideology from which it stems. When anti-Semitism is at a record sustained high, and a Jewish person is more likely than any other minority to face violence for their faith, this is an unforgivable blind spot.

Some of the rising figures may also reflect better awareness of Prevent, rather than a rise in extremism as such. Referrals rose 39 per cent to 10,293, the highest on record. The proportion reaching a Channel panel went from 13 to 21 per cent, the proportion adopted for support went from 11 to 18 per cent against a long-run average of 13 per cent, and the number of people adopted more than doubled. Of closed cases, 85 per cent exited with no further radicalisation concern. Much of these rises reflect the aftermath of the Southport attack working through the system. The Home Office credits public awareness of Prevent after the attack, and Lord Anderson traced the record January quarter to publicity around Axel Rudakubana’s trial. There is some good news here. Infamously, Rudakubana was referred three times and his case was closed three times, with no ideology identified. That is the category the system used to ignore: referrals for fascination with extreme violence reached 818 this year, and adoptions by Channel in that category rose from 19 in late 2024 to 88 by mid-2025.

What we need is better training for schools on the ideologies they are missing, and other institutions trained to refer as readily as schools do – primary care, mental-health services and probation are all trained in spotting radicalisation, but not nearly as often. They are obvious places to increase support. If radicalisation doesn’t respect the school calendar, neither should our safeguarding system.

When schools refer an Islamist case, they need to know the government will do more than it has done when schools face extreme anti-blasphemy protests or anti-LGBTQ+ protests. With teachers still in hiding or without their jobs following these incidents, there is zero incentive to ensure such referrals are made.

This Prevent data release is not a map of the extremist threat but a map of the system and its vulnerabilities – it should be a wake-up call to upskill public-sector workers and improve what forms of extremism the risk list can identify. What it absolutely does not show is that the far right poses a greater threat than Islamism.