NCAS conference: Call for madrassas to be regulated

Speaking at the National Children and Adult Services (NCAS) conference in Bournemouth, Gail Hopper, director of children’s services in Rochdale, said it is difficult to monitor where the schools, also known as madrassas, have been set up.

Hopper said she has called on the Department for Education to tighten regulatory requirements on madrassas.

“One of the biggest issues of concern we are dealing with is the supplementary education settings – the madrassas,” Hopper said.

“They are unregulated. There is an expectation in the [government’s] Prevent strategy that suggests we should know where they all are, what they are doing and whether children are being radicalised through them, but we all know that’s in the ‘almost impossible’ category.

Hopper said Rochdale Council started trying to identify where all the madrassas in the borough were after learning that one of the young people referred to an anti-extremism programme it runs had been a tutor in one.

“You can just see what happens from then,” she said. “Young people from the age of six upwards are spending up to four hours an evening in these settings, and people don’t know where they are."

She said concerns within the authority about madrassas increased when an investigation into sham marriages and human trafficking led to police searching a building being used for a madrassa.

“The police in their initial trawl of the building found Viagra, sex aids, and condoms in a setting where six- to 14-year-olds were being taught,” Hopper said.

“My concern is some of those settings are being run by people who you would not want looking after children. We have done a lot of work with our planning colleagues around applications and we are systematically working our way through the borough and looking at where all these unregulated education settings are.

"For us to have half a chance of addressing some of these things, these madrassas need to be regulated.”

Hopper also raised concerns about the way the courts are dealing with cases of children at risk of radicalisation.

She said High Court judges dealing with cases where families had attempted, or were suspected of planning, to travel to Syria are focused solely on “preventing flight”.

“The judiciary are not focused at all on the more nuanced issues and the more sophisticated concerns about what are the messages these children are having growing up and what impact will it have on them? It’s how do you stop them going. And that really feels like a blunt instrument to me.

“At what point does a different parenting style and different parenting beliefs become a child protection issue?

Sally Rowe, director for children’s services in Luton, said working to safeguard a child who is in a family environment where they are being exposed to extremist views is a difficult challenge.

“What you normally put in a child protection plan to protect a child who is at risk of neglect isn’t what you put in these child protection plans,” she said.

“We’re using a number of strands to work in families in different ways to how we have done before but I think it’s still early days.”