Tag Archives: violent extremism

Tackling extremism: it’s now time to deliver

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By Ewan King, OPM director.

Ewan King

I was delighted to be given the opportunity to chair and speak at a national event earlier this month organised by Public Policy Exchange on The New Prevent Strategy: Strengthening the Framework to Fight Home-Grown Extremism in the UK. The controversy surrounding the Prevent strategy and the concept of extremism itself always makes me a little anxious prior to speaking at these events, but the level of debate, constructive challenge of different views, and willingness to debate difficult subjects, was impressive throughout. I shouldn’t have worried.

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How can universities tackle extremism?

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By Ewan King, OPM director.

Ewan KingThe new revamped Prevent Strategy, which aims to stop people becoming or supporting terrorists, calls for a much more targeted approach to preventing extremist activities. Part of this more targeted approach is a stronger focus on tackling extremists in specific sectors and institutions where the risk is deemed to be greatest. While extremism can arise in many different locations – from local sports clubs to mosques and family homes – the Government is keen to use scarce resources on tackling the issue where the threat is most real.

Since it was discovered that some of the most dangerous of recent terrorists – including Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – had spent time in UK universities, one of these sectors of most interest to the Government has been the Higher Education sector. Continue reading →

New Prevent strategy: resource bank

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By Sanah Sheikh, OPM associate fellow.

Sanah SheikhAt OPM we’ve already commented widely on the Government’s new Prevent strategy, which seeks to stop people becoming or supporting violent extremists. You can read our most recent post, summarising the key points of the strategy and discussing likely implementation issues here.

The strategy sets some demanding objectives for local authorities, local partners, and national organisations and sector bodies. New initiatives funded by the Government will need to be rigorously evaluated and much more strongly targeted on those who are most vulnerable to violent extremism. The strategy also indicates that there will be a broader conceptualisation of violent extremism, to include right wing and other forms of extremism, and not just Al-Qaeda inspired extremism.

Over the last four years, OPM has worked with a wide range of organisations responsible for delivering on the Prevent agenda. Through this work, we have been able to generate a good deal of evidence and insights into what works in relation to preventing violent extremism. The links to some of these resources are presented below, and you can also find them on our Knowledge site that we regularly update. We hope you find them useful. Continue reading →

Just out – the new, improved Prevent strategy

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There is always a risk in delaying a policy in such a sensitive area as counter-terrorism. A five month delay (the new Prevent strategy was first expected in February this year) seemed like a very long one given that stopping terrorism is always a pressing issue. But on reflection, maybe the delay was necessary, the last Prevent strategy had some major flaws, and there was an overwhelming need to get it right this time.

So how does the new strategy stack up? Well first of all, there is something about the tone of the report, which while critical of elements the past approach, does not seek out a scorched earth policy, deriding everything that went before. There is clearly a willingness on behalf of the authors to accept that some elements of the past approach – such as the Channel Strategy – were worth building on, rather than totally dismantling. Those who may have inadvertently provided funding to extreme organisations did not do this ‘deliberately’.

Then there are the positive changes proposed, which, if one were to follow the evidence trail – from the Parliamentary Review of Prevent, through to many independent critiques of the strategy – show that the Government has listened and responded to concerns.

Key aspects of the new Prevent

Firstly, the strategy intends to engender a much more focused, and targeted approach to tackling extremism. There will no longer be funding for broad brush, scattergun approaches, which led to the focus of the strategy being diluted or appearing confused in intent. While socially useful in other ways, using Prevent funding to pay for young Muslim five-a-side football teams, or to build the leadership skills of Muslim women which was common under the last strategy, will no longer be tolerated. There will be a renewed focus on important issues of integration and cohesion, but they will not be the focus of this strategy.

The strategy message is clear: ‘Prevent must not assume control of or allocate funding to integration projects which have a value far wider than security and counter-terrorism: the Government will not securitise its integration strategy. This has been a mistake in the past’.

Secondly, funding for Prevent will no longer crudely be linked to demographics or, more explicitly, allocated in proportion to the number of Muslims in a particular area (although the 20 local authority areas that will receive money do have high Muslim populations). Instead, funding will be directed to where there is a prevalence of risk.

Thirdly, there is a stronger focus on making sure that funding allocations and impact of investment is properly assessed and evaluated. Projects which don’t clearly met the objectives, and more importantly outcomes, associated with Prevent, will no longer be funded. This is important. As an organisation that has applied rigorous evaluation approaches to assessing the impact of Prevent (see our work in CLG’s Guide to Evaluating Prevent Programmes), we were often surprised by how little Prevent activities were systematically evaluated.

Fourthly, there is an explicit recognition in the strategy that the trust of communities have previously been broken down in relation to Prevent, with concerns centring on accusations (denied again by Government) that Prevent was used as a proviso to spying on communities. There will be a renewed focus on building trust for this new strategy, with the Home Office committed to ensuring that ‘data collected about people for the purposes of Prevent [will be] necessary and proportionate’.

Some questions of the new Prevent

The most significant departure in the new strategy from the one that went before relates to the Government’s commitment not to engage with extremists, even when they do not espouse violence. This means that there will be a growing number of organisations who, because of their opposition to ‘mainstream British values’, cannot be included in any Prevent related activity. Despite the issue of whether isolating extremists will actually push these people further underground – and out of the reach of the police or those dedicated to bringing them back into the mainstream – there is a more practical problem. Who will do the counter-radicalisation work with vulnerable people?

Presently, some of the main individuals who are currently involved in steering vulnerable people away from violent extremism, are currently, or where in the past, extremists themselves – although not necessarily violent extremists. There is a relative lack of organisations that have expertise in this area, and can prove they have never had a link to extremism. Where will new organisations with appropriate expertise arise from?

In general, the Prevent strategy holds many positives. But a significant amount of time has elapsed since Prevent was at the forefront of professional’s minds – energy and focus has been lost in many local areas. This strategy will need to be supported through a range of awareness raising, training and research activities to rebuild commitment and action, and to ensure that local public servants and community groups clearly understand their role in supporting implementation.

By Ewan King, OPM director

Ewan King

A leader may be gone, but risks are still presented by violent extremists

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The death of Osama Bin Laden is undoubtedly a blow to Al Qaeda and the movement of radicalised terrorists around the world who subscribe to its violent and aggressive rhetoric. Research on long standing terrorism movements, such as the Shining Path in Peru, whose charismatic leader Abimael Guzman was captured, does show that leaders are important, and that when they are removed, the movement often declines. But it is unlikely to be a defining moment in the battle that rages across the world to reduce the threat posed by terrorism.

The powerful narrative pushed by Al Qaeda and its affiliates remains powerful and compelling to many disaffected Muslims across the world and in the UK. The risk factors associated with violent extremism – such as the existence of highly unequal and polarised communities, the belief that the Muslim community is under attack, and lack of opportunities, especially for young Muslim men -remain largely in place, providing the oxygen from which extremists breathe and flourish.

The recent report, Keeping Britain Safe by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Homeland Security, raised worrying issues about the continued prevalence of extremists on UK University campuses, pointing to just one area which needs the attention of those involved in preventing extremism. This report may exaggerate the threat, but a threat remains none the less.

Need for a positive strategy to tackle the causes and threats of violent extremism

But what this death does provide is the opportunity to press the case for a stronger, more positive strategy for tackling the causes and threats of violent extremists. People are talking once more about the threat of terror, the nature of the threat which remains, and how to proceed to tackle the threat that persists.

Two separate, but linked, strategies are promised that will address these challenges head on: a revised approach to Preventing Violent Extremism (to be released by the Home Office), and a new National Strategy on Integration (from Communities and Local Government). Some of the content of these strategies, fore-grounded in recent speeches and presentations by ministers and civil servants, seem positive, and appear to explicitly respond to many of the problems levelled at the last Government’s approach to Prevent.

For instance, there is intent to reduce the extent to which Prevent activities indiscriminately focus on the entire Muslim community – causing many to believe that the past approach labelled all Muslims as potential extremists – and focus much more on where there is a real problem. The integration strategy, recognising that integration can reduce the risk of extremism, will try to promote values that are common to all, and find ways to enable communities of different backgrounds and faiths to work for common goals.

These strategies are long overdue. People we work with that are involved in Prevent have reported that their efforts over the last four years to tackle extremism are losing focus and momentum. This comes at a time of growing risks posed by the austerity measures, rising youth unemployment, and conflict within communities for ever scarcer resources. We hope that these strategies provide the clarity of focus and direction that will help them get back on track.

Need for evidence-based overarching strategy

What we are told is that there needs to be an overarching strategy, or road map, which explains how planned public service reforms, the Big Society, and community empowerment will mesh to provide the necessary levers and support to tackle the risks associated with extremism, such as highly polarised communities or the lack of support available to vulnerable young Muslims in the criminal justice system.

There is a growing body of information that exists about what works in promoting more resilient and integrated communities. OPM, for instance, has just been commissioned to evaluate the Sacred Spaces project – funded by Creativity, Culture and Education, which aims to promote cross-faith learning and understanding within supplementary faith schools. The results of a large scale review of promoting resilience in schools – conducted by OPM and NfER – are also due shortly, and could greatly add to the debate.

Following the death of the leader of Al Qaeda, we all need to ensure a long-term trend in the decline of violent extremism.

For more information about OPM’s work on building more integrated and resilient communities, please refer to our briefing paper.

By Ewan King, OPM director

Ewan King

Tackling the new threats of terror

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As terror strikes again in Northern Ireland, with the tragic killing of a young Catholic member of the Police Force, it is important to reflect on what can be learnt from past approaches to countering terrorism. All the evidence shows that a rash, punitive response, which targets the whole community rather than the perpetrators of the crime will not produce the desired effect – which is to isolate, and ultimately, drain away the little support such antagonists have within their communities.

This killing raised for me a number of important issues. The first is that we still face a threat from all forms of violent extremism, and not just Al Qaeda inspired extremism from within Muslim communities. In this context, the Coalition Government’s likely adoption of an approach to preventing violent extremism that responds to all forms of extremism, rather than simply Al Qaeda inspired terrorism is welcome. Violent extremism, as history attests, can arise in many different communities, in the name of many different goals.

The second point is that however tempting it is to embark on a harsh and brutal counter terrorist response, it is important for security forces, and political representatives in the community, to hold back and use the next few months to gain more information about what is driving the threat, how deep the threat is, and to explore and understand the conditions which seem to be making it possible for a small and determined group of terrorists to recruit willing accomplices.

The short term security response to terrorist acts

Louise Richardson, one of the world’s most celebrated experts on terrorism, argues that terrorists flourish on gaining both ‘reaction’ and ‘renown’ from their terrorist acts. Through their violent acts, they either succeed in gaining an overreaction from the Government and security forces – a misstep which in the past led to counterproductive acts like internment without trial, and the army on the streets – or renown, in that undeservedly, they become heroes or martyrs to their communities.

In this way, the temptation to overreact and to engage in forms of ‘collective punishment’ should be resisted. Careful and targeted policing will undoubtedly find the culprits in the long run. Encouragingly, from the messages coming from politicians and the police so far, there appears to be no desire to return to approaches of the past.

The conditions which allow extremism to flourish

Louise Richardson also argues that violent extremists emerge out of, ‘a lethal cocktail containing a disaffected individual, an enabling community and a legitimising ideology’. In the case of this recent terrorist atrocity, there is need to explore some of the causes in the recent upturn in organised terror in Northern Ireland.

Disaffection is likely to spring from a range of factors, including the high level of youth unemployment in some local communities, a perceived lack of influence and power that young people have over their lives, and the problem of some people holding deep grievances against forces which they struggle to control, such as the current political class and the police. It is likely that an enabling community of some shape or form does exist in parts of the community, but there a reasons for this too, namely the sense of community decline and dislocation from the advancement which is undoubtedly benefiting other parts of the community where prosperity and progress are on the rise.

Longer term strategy to tackle these conditions

There needs to be a long term strategy which seeks to address and counter some of these root causes of extremism. This requires looking at the nature of the grievances some people hold, tackling problems of isolation and disaffection, and providing positive alternatives for those who might seek to become part of local violent terrorist groups.

We know from evaluations and research into prevention of violent extremism, including studies by OPM into how school based approaches can reduce some of the causal risk factors associated with violent extremism, that there are ways to reduce these risk factors over time. Initiating creative approaches to break down barriers between young Catholics and Protestants and enabling young people to air their grievances and consider the issue of terrorism from a wide range of perspectives will encourage young people to grasp the futility and moral abhorrence of violent extremism.

This is not to suggest that the acts which took place should not be condoned in the strongest possible terms – terrorism is a crime, and it destroys families and communities. A security response will be required, but in parallel, there will also need to be the more challenging, longer term task of building the conditions in which it is harder for terrorists to emerge in the first place.

OPM have recently written a paper on building resilience and integration which touches on some of the issues in this blog.

By Ewan King, OPM director

Ewan King

What should be in a new Integration Strategy?

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The Government, and in particular the Communities and Local Government Department, is to produce a strategy on integrating communities. This strategy, fore-grounded in a speech by Baroness Neville-Jones – the Minister for Counter Terrorism – falls out of recent announcements about the future of Prevent, the current strategy which aims to stop people becoming terrorists. It reflects the clear commitment by the Government to separate interventions aimed at tackling extremists and stopping terrorists, from those aimed at building more integrated and cohesive societies.

Two reasons why a change of focus to Prevent is welcome.

Firstly, the focus on tackling terrorism – the real goal of the Prevent strategy – became dangerously conflated with a broader approach aimed at building cohesion within the Muslim community. The result was that Muslim communities felt that they were being stigmatised as terrorists, regardless of whether some of the Prevent funded work was intent on bringing about real benefits for the community. For more of our insights on the future of Prevent see our recent public service briefing on the issue.

Secondly, building a more integrated society is a good thing. There are a number of areas in England that are highly polarised and segregated on the basis of social class, race and faith. Views on immigration have hardened, with most people wanting to see immigration reduced. There is a worrying increase reported of enmity towards people who follow Islam (Lowles 2011). For some that are most critical of our record on building a multi-cultural society, there is a belief that we have ‘allowed groups to live separately with no incentive to integrate and every incentive not to’ (Goodwin 2009).

In these ways, a fresh approach to integration is necessary. But what should a new Integration Strategy contain?

Building on we know works should be the foundation of any future strategy

Firstly, the strategy should build on, and not unnecessarily unpick, much of the good work that is already taking place to build more integrated and cohesive communities. If integration is ultimately about ensuring that ‘everybody integrates and participates in our national life’, then there is a huge amount of good practice already out there, although it is by no means consistently applied. Through citizenship education, local cohesion strategies, strategies to mix social housing, social action projects and inter-faith initiatives, there have been many success stories in integrating people from disparate communities. For example the charity the Three Faiths Forum aims to help young people become confident, sensitive and effective communicators when discussing faith and belief. It supports young people to learn about how different people understand and live their faiths and beliefs and to find common ground between people of different faiths.

Need to increase and improve provision of ESOL courses

Secondly, the strategy needs to address the problem of accessing English language education. ESOL – English for speakers of other languages – is one of the only means through which many people without English as a first language can improve their English skills. But funding for this has been massively stripped back. New funding, and new forms of delivery – including through volunteer teachers – needs to be found urgently to replace what may be lost.

Put social interaction and mixing at the heart of all policy initiatives

Thirdly, there needs to be a strong focus on how social interaction and mixing can support greater integration. Improving the level and quality of interactions between members of a community, as a way to build positive relationships, is seen as central to strengthening community cohesion, and social capital and therefore integration. Social mixing and interaction can promote higher levels of inter-group collaboration, reduce prejudice and tension, and increase a sense of people being ‘in this together’. For example, the new National Citizen’s Service, which OPM are evaluating as part of a consortium, deliberately seeks to ‘socially mix’ young people, believing this will break down differences and promote cohesion.

What other policies or initiatives developed as part of the Big Society can build a similar approach? How can local community assets – such as council buildings, schools, community centres – be used to actively bring people together? What is the role of the new ‘community organisers’ in getting people to interact and work together to build social action. How can the new powers being established, such as the new community right to challenge, give people a greater say over how can make a greater contribution to integration?

The strategy needs to be honest about the huge structural barriers that stand in the way of creating a more integrated country. The school system, which will be characterised by a growing number of independent state schools and faith schools which lie outside local government control, poses a real obstacle to greater levels of social mixing. Economic decline and worklessness, can be hugely damaging to levels of social cohesion and social capital. The new strategy provides on opportunity to pull this picture together.  

Avoid over-simplification of shared ‘national’ values

Finally, the strategy should avoid providing a simple definition of shared values, based on nationality. While many people increasingly identify with being English, which is by no means a problem, not all people do. It is more likely that more people will subscribe to a broader set of inherent values which cut across nationality and race. These include an attachment to democracy, the use of a common language, charity, fairness and respect for difference, and it is more likely that these values – as opposed to one more narrowly defined by nationality – will bring more people together under the umbrella of ‘integration.’

By Ewan King, OPM director

Ewan King

David Cameron’s Munich speech: what was new, what does it tell us?

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Last weekend saw the Prime Minister David Cameron deliver a speech to the Munich Security Conference that further hinted at the Coalition Government’s likely approach to counter-terrorism and community integration. Amidst all of the controversy caused by the timing and content of the speech, it’s worth conducting a more sober analysis of the policy content. Was there anything new we haven’t heard from ministers before? Is there a risk of the Government repeating some of the mistakes of the past?

What’s new?

At this early stage in policy development, with the Prevent agenda still currently under review, the speech offered little in the way of anything beyond what we already know from previous statements issued by ministers. As far back as before the 2010 general election, certain Conservatives were making clear their opposition to what has been called ‘state sponsored multi-culturalism’.

The Prime Minister mentioned banning Islamist extremist preachers from entering the UK and proscribing certain extremist organisations, but both of these policies were practised by the last government. There was also a brief nod to the National Citizens Service and extending local democracy as ways of developing integrated communities, but both have been trailed extensively by the Government.

That said, there were several passages in the speech which struck me as either implicitly or explicitly proposing something new from a policy perspective.

Key points

David Cameron said:

So we should properly judge these organisations: do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separation? These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations – so, no public money, no sharing of platforms with ministers at home’.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the government is already becoming more stringent in the criteria it uses to determine which organisations should be funded to help tackle Islamist extremism. On the one hand, this improved scrutiny should be welcomed – under the Prevent agenda, there is some evidence that public funding was provided to organisations without a sufficient understanding or knowledge of their values base and membership. On the other hand, the PM’s opaque reference to some Muslim organisations being ‘showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism’ may risk alienating those organisations that are working more effectively to tackle extremism.

There has often been a tacit understanding that the last government’s ‘Prevent’ agenda, when operationalised, encompassed both violent and non-violent Islamist extremism, but the speech makes this thinking more explicit: ‘governments must also be shrewder in dealing with those that, while not violent, are in some cases part of the problem’.

The risk of repeating the mistakes of Prevent

The central contention of the speech is that poorly integrated communities have provided a fertile social context for an Islamist extremist ideology to gain support. Whilst few would want to disagree with the argument that social integration (or the lack thereof) is a contributing factor to all forms of extremism, there are good reasons to separate the two both in terms of policy and delivery.

Closely associating poor integration with terrorist activity risks the conflation of community cohesion and counter-terrorism that has previously plagued the Prevent agenda. Some of the cohesion work that was Prevent funded came to be seen by the very target audiences they were trying to engage as attempts at ‘spying’ or intelligence gathering. If the Munich speech was an exercise in foreshadowing the government’s new approach, greater heed needs to be paid to this past mistake.

Whilst the speech acknowledges that extremism ‘cannot be limited to any one race or religion’, there was no mention of efforts to tackle far-right extremism in the UK, or the threat it poses. Again, this reluctance to engage with all forms of extremism was a powerful criticism leveled at the Prevent agenda, and must be dealt with in whatever new approach the government pursues.

Cause for optimism

The speech is far more encouraging where it attempts to draw a clear distinction between religion and ideology, and the Prime Minister is right to claim that the two are all too often conflated.

The PM’s reluctance to concede anything to what he characterises as the ‘hard-right’ view – that is, seeing Islam and liberal democracy as irreconcilable – should also be welcomed. It is clear from the speech that the government is concerned with a worrying and emergent trend of segregation talking place between communities in UK towns and cities, and what the best response might be.

Mr Cameron’s speech should be welcomed as one of the first contributions to the debate about counter-terrorism and integration on the part of this still relatively new coalition government, and I hope there will be many more attempts to address these issues – in this still relatively early stage of policy development, there is time to try and ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.

By Chris Reed, OPM research assistant.

Chris Reed

Learn more

For more detail please see our paper, Resilience and integration: a way forward.

If you would like to take part in a lively debate about these issues, come to our public interest seminar on 16 February.

A new approach to preventing violent extremism

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The government is reviewing the Prevent strategy, the policy framework that aims to prevent people from becoming or supporting terrorists. It has clearly signalled that the new approach will be radically repositioned in light of the widespread criticisms of the original strategy.

Although we are not yet clear on how the strategy will be delivered in practice, several themes are emerging from the policy announcements over the last six months.

Firstly, there will be a clear separation between counter terrorism activities and broader cohesion and resilience work. Future activity will focus almost entirely on the role of institutions such as universities, colleges, schools, prisons and mosques in preventing violent extremism.

Secondly, there is likely to be a stronger focus on integration and shared ‘British values’ as a way of bringing communities together to provide a buttress against extremism.

Finally, there is likely to be a stronger focus the Big Society agenda, which through its strong focus on participation, citizenship and volunteering could help mitigate some of the risks associated with extremism.

Making it work

This change of direction should be largely welcomed. Certainly, the last government’s approach to Prevent had many flaws. In a new briefing paper written by OPM, we explore in more depth some of the issues and challenges that will need to be addressed when a new approach to Prevent becomes a reality later this year.

Firstly, we argue that not all of the wider cohesion and resilience building work should be discarded. There are many examples of projects, which have successfully tackled the wider range of risk factors associated with violent extremism, such as polarisation, discrimination, and socioeconomic grievances, for example, leadership and citizenship programmes for young Muslims and debates and dialogues aimed at exploring and addressing deeply held grievances.

There are also risks posed in relation to the concept of integration. While improved integration should be the long-term goal for any community, it is also important to recognise that many communities will take time, and support, to integrate. For example, newly arrived migrants may first need to establish a sense of ‘home’ by associating with people from their own communities before they are able to participate in wider society.

Also, there is a need to ensure that integration is not interpreted as assimilation as this may serve to undermine some of the good work that has been done under the cohesion agenda over the last few years.

Similarly, the Big Society, while holding great potential, needs to be sensitive to the need to involve those who are most at risk in terms of isolation and exclusion from mainstream society. In a recent paper we wrote on community organising in the Big Society, we argued that some communities will need additional attention and support if they are to become active members of society. The same applies in relation to the Big Society and extremism.

The government will soon bring greater clarity to some of these issues and debates. We urge careful consideration of how complex, and highly-contested concepts such as integration, shared values and the Big Society relate to preventing violent extremism and resilience.

Learn more

For more detail please see to our paper, Resilience and integration: a way forward.

If you would like to take part in a lively debate about these issues, come to our public interest seminar on 16 February.

By Ewan King, OPM director, and Sanah Sheikh, OPM associate fellow

Webpage containing Ewan King's profileWebpage containing Sanah Sheikh's profile

Why access to English language education could be a major barrier to integration

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The Conservative Party, prior to entering a coalition government, was clear that it wanted a new approach to community cohesion: one that was underpinned by the notion of integration. In a repudiation of core tenets of multi-culturalism, the party promised a national strategy on integration that focuses on bringing people together around ‘shared values’ and the common use of the English language.

We are now beginning to see the first signals of a more fully formed conceptualisation of integration feeding through into the policies of the coalition government. The National Citizens Service, for which pilots will be launched early next year, explicitly links this new initiative with the achievement of integration and the ‘mixing of people from different backgrounds’. In announcing the review of the Preventing Violent Extremism strategy Theresa May, the Home Secretary, explicitly makes the connection between integration and the reduction of extremism:

Stopping radicalisation depends on an integrated society. We can all play a part in defeating extremism by defending British values and speaking out against the false ideologies of the extremists.

There is much to credit a stronger focus on integration as a route to reducing polarisation between different communities and for enhancing cross-cultural collaboration. However, there is one major stumbling block where urgent attention is needed – access to English language education. In much of our work with communities and with the further and higher education sectors, we hear time and time again that there is a lack of free or affordable provision of English teaching for those who do not speak English as a first language – or what it is more commonly referred to as English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). This is a problem that must be addressed if we are to really create a society that is able to communicate in a common language.

The Big Society agenda could play an important part in filling this gap in supply. For instance, are there more effective mechanisms for ensuring volunteers who are skilled in English language teaching are actively recruited into community settings to teach more people who don’t speak English. Could English language teaching to non-speakers be built into the teacher training curriculum so that more English language teachers are available outside the school setting? It is not just trained ESOL teachers that could contribute to the cause, since ESOL students can benefit greatly from access to people to just practice their new found skills with.

So, could community organisers, who will be established as part of the Big Society initiative, have a role to play not only in brokering access to teaching through other community-based avenues, but also in providing English language practice themselves?  And what role is there for corporate volunteering schemes in this picture?

Without urgent action in this area, we may find that we placing unfair expectations on people – to learn the English language when they may have neither the funds nor local access points to do so.  We hope this will be avoided.

By Ewan King, OPM director

Ewan King