Pupils as young as 5 are being exposed to violent extremism online, teacher trainers have revealed.

But efforts to tackle the problem are being hindered by a “dearth” of resources for primary teachers and complacency in some schools, government advisers said.

Draft new Department for Education guidance on implementing the government’s Prevent anti-terror strategy, seen by TES, suggests schools could start introducing topics such as radicalisation and extremism to pupils from the age of 4.

But Ann Connor, a DfE specialist adviser on counter-extremism, said she was concerned that primary schools do not have the teaching resources they need to do this.

“What we have noticed, as a team, is there is a dearth of anything really below about Year 8,” she said.

The official was speaking at a conference in Birmingham where Sara Khan, co-founder of the counter-extremism organisation Inspire, which has trained thousands of teachers, warned: “Radicalisation can begin at a much, much, younger age [than 12].”

She revealed the concerns expressed to her by one primary head as an example of the extremism that infants were being exposed to. “On the one hand, he was dealing with a pupil - a white six-year-old boy whose father was a member of the BNP and who was encouraging his son to watch violent videos against Muslims and encouraging acts of violence against Muslims,” she said.

“But the same headteacher also told me that he was also dealing with a case of a Muslim five-year-old girl whose father was making her watch beheadings online. That is a common scenario I hear. The reality of teachers, how they are having to deal with parents who are in some cases radicalising their own children.”

Overreactions in schools

Last year, TES revealed that the number of people referred by education institutions to Prevent had exceeded the number of referrals from the police for the first time.

Unions claimed that teachers worrying about Ofsted checks on how Prevent was being implemented had triggered overreactions in schools.

But the government is concerned that some schools are still not doing enough.

Schools minister Lord Nash admitted the government knew that “some teachers lack confidence in implementing the Prevent duty”.

“We don’t want teachers to feel isolated in tackling these issues,” he told the same Birmingham conference, organised by the Since 9/11 educational charity last month.

“In recognition of the important role that schools play in tackling extremism, we are exploring what additional resources we can make available to schools to support them.”

‘One white six-year-old boy was shown violent videos against Muslims’

DfE advisers have revealed they are concerned that some schools are not taking the risk of extremism among their pupils seriously and are failing to take account of what they may be exposed to online.

“They say, ‘We don’t have any problems with that because we are not in that kind of bit of the country’,” Ms Connor said.

Her colleague Val McGregor added: “Too often in certain areas where [schools] don’t think they are hotspots...they’ll say, ‘We are in Suffolk and we don’t really find we have got an issue.’

“What they fail to understand at leadership and teacher level…is that the children that we know about - the girls from Syria that lots of us have been looking at and working with - they live in a virtual world.

“Children are very vulnerable. E-safety is probably something that is the biggest risk.”

On Tuesday, “Safer Internet Day” took place in 120 countries, including the UK, in an international campaign to reduce online risk. But Ms McGregor said there was more to do.

“There are so many vulnerable children,” she said. “I have got three special schools that I work with and some of the boys in those schools are becoming confused between reality and what’s happening on the internet.”

The draft DfE guidance on Prevent, the anti-terror duty which became statutory for schools in July 2015, says they should try to cover a range of topics including digital awareness and conspiracy theory.

It calls for schools to produce a curriculum map across all year groups identifying when and where these topics will be taught.

Ms Connor said: “From our point of view the counter-extremism curriculum goes across the school - in every lesson, in every approach.”

Ms Khan backed the call to start early. “They should be learning from primary school,” she said. “Absolutely right from the beginning. I don’t even know why we would consider from the age of 10.”

@Eleanor_Busby