When Prevent Says No: Who Holds the Safeguarding Risk?
A child is repeatedly watching extreme violence online.
They are fascinated by mass casualty attacks.
They talk about weapons.
They may be sharing violent material, engaging with dangerous online communities or displaying increasingly concerning behaviour.
A school or college is worried enough to make a Prevent referral but the referral does not meet the threshold.
What happens next?
That question sits at the heart of a significant new report from the Children's Commissioner for England and it should concern every safeguarding professional.
The figures demand attention
New analysis from the Children's Commissioner shows that Prevent referrals involving children have increased from 2,918 in 2016–17 to 4,715 in 2024–25.
The numbers behind those referrals tell an even more important story.
Of the 4,715 referrals involving children in 2024–25:
79% were closed without progressing through Prevent
71% had no clear extremist ideology identified
nearly three in five came from education settings
at least 65% of referrals from schools and colleges were returned to education settings
of those returned, 93% had never progressed to panel or through the Prevent programme
For RLB, one question immediately follows:
If Prevent isn't the right pathway, who owns the safeguarding risk next?
"No ideology" does not mean "no risk"
This is perhaps one of the most important messages within the Commissioner's findings. Many of the children being referred do not fit our traditional understanding of radicalisation. There may be no coherent political, religious or ideological motivation.
Instead, professionals are seeing children who may be:
fixated on extreme violence;
consuming disturbing online content;
fascinated by previous attackers;
vulnerable to exploitation;
experiencing bullying or instability;
participating in harmful online communities; or
presenting with multiple and complex unmet needs.
These are not necessarily straightforward Prevent cases but they are absolutely safeguarding concerns, and that distinction matters.
The danger of threshold thinking
Safeguarding systems inevitably need thresholds but thresholds can create unintended gaps when professionals begin to interpret:
"This service isn't taking the referral"
as:
"There is no longer a safeguarding concern."
Those two things are not the same.
A child not meeting the threshold for Prevent does not mean their susceptibility has disappeared.
A child not meeting the threshold for children's social care does not mean they do not need help.
A child not meeting the criteria for one service does not remove the professional responsibility to understand what is happening for that child.
This is where professional curiosity becomes critical.
Instead of simply asking:
"Does this meet the Prevent threshold?"
we also need to ask:
What is driving this behaviour?
What is this child experiencing?
What are they accessing online?
Who else holds information about them?
Is the risk escalating?
What support is actually being provided?
And crucially:
Who is responsible for coordinating the response now?
The safeguarding system must see the whole child
The Children's Commissioner is calling for children currently referred to Prevent to be assessed through local safeguarding teams, including Counter Terrorism Policing where appropriate, so they can be directed towards the most suitable support. That feels significant because radicalisation rarely exists neatly in isolation from other vulnerabilities.
Safeguarding professionals may also be seeing exploitation, trauma, violence, harmful online content, isolation, mental health needs, neurodevelopmental needs, family difficulties or other contextual risks.
Indeed, the report found that information about children's mental health and neurodevelopmental needs was missing from 60% of referrals. Safeguarding cannot become a process of finding the correct box for a child. We have to understand the child behind the behaviour.
Online harm changes the picture
The findings also reinforce something safeguarding professionals increasingly encounter:
The online and offline worlds of children cannot be separated.
Children can move rapidly between violent content, misogynistic material, extremist narratives, self-harm communities, pornography, conspiracy content and other harmful online spaces. Their susceptibility may not fit neatly within one safeguarding category.
That makes professional curiosity, information sharing and multi-agency working more important, not less.
We need practitioners who can recognise the significance of patterns rather than waiting for a child to present with a perfectly defined safeguarding label.
What should DSLs and safeguarding leaders be asking?
This report provides an important opportunity for organisations to review their own practice.
Consider:
What happens when one of our referrals doesn't meet another service's threshold?
Do we simply record the outcome and close the concern?
Or do we reassess?
Do our staff understand that Prevent is a safeguarding responsibility, not simply a referral process?
Are we confident recognising concerning behaviour where there is no obvious ideology?
Are we considering the child's online world as part of our assessment of risk?
Do we triangulate information across services, professionals and previous concerns?
Do we challenge and escalate when concerns remain?
And perhaps most importantly:
Can we identify who is actually holding the risk?
A referral should never be the end of professional curiosity
One of the most important principles emerging from this report is simple:
Making a referral is an action. It is not an outcome.
Safeguarding responsibility does not disappear because an email has been sent, a form completed or another service has decided its threshold has not been met. If the concern remains, our curiosity must remain. If the risk remains, our response must remain and if a child continues to demonstrate behaviour that suggests vulnerability or potential harm to themselves or others, someone must remain responsible for understanding why.
The Children's Commissioner's recommendations should prompt serious discussion about how Prevent interacts with the wider safeguarding system but organisations do not need to wait for national reform to ask a much more immediate question:
When a referral comes back, what do we do next?
Safeguarding cannot be about passing risk from one service to another until eventually it belongs to nobody. It must be about ensuring that somebody sees the whole child, somebody remains curious, and somebody takes responsibility for what happens next.
That is what moving beyond compliance looks like.
RLB supports education providers and organisations across the UK with Prevent, safeguarding audits, DSL development, training, supervision, policy and strategic safeguarding support.
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