“I need to tell you about the Houses of Parliament visit,” said Mr Abdulaleem, our attendance and community officer. “There was a bit of a problem…”

I was concerned. The visit involved a group of our Year 10 and Year 11 boys who, over the previous few months, had led one of our initiatives around the Prevent duty and our exploration of British values. They had previously struggled with attendance, attitude and their approach to learning, but the project, supported by Rochdale Borough Council and M6 Theatre Company, had encouraged the boys to share their thoughts and their writing, and to build relationships. It was having an impact.

And now this - what could have gone wrong?

Mr Abdulaleem explained that the issue revolved around one of the boys, who had a somewhat fiery reputation in school before this project. Our staff had worked extremely hard over the years to get him into Year 11 and help him to be a success.

Unfortunately, there were two lighters in his pocket when he went through the X-ray machines at the Houses of Parliament. One was in the shape of a gun, the other a bullet.

My tummy somersaulted as potential national headlines flashed through my mind. As a new head, I felt like I was looking at the shortest headship in history.

Mr Abdulaleem told how security went into lockdown, with the officers shouting “Clear the room!” The police drew their machine guns and pointed them at our little group of travellers. Mr Abdulaleem described how he slowly looked down to see a red dot on his chest…

Against the odds

There can be difficulties when leading a multicultural school in an area with a high level of social and economic deprivation that you don’t get elsewhere, especially in the high-pressure environment created by the Prevent duty. When you work in Rochdale with the negative press we get, you can also feel as if the odds are stacked against you.

However, at Falinge Park High School we have turned this situation on its head, challenging the negative associations and using them to our advantage. We’ve taken a controversial and potentially divisive piece of legislation - aka, the Prevent duty - and used it to equip our children with the best skills for the future.

We wanted to get our students’ skills in oracy at a level where they could compete with those from the best independent schools. We also wanted to empower our students to deal with the issues the Prevent duty raises and to discuss them openly.

Finally, we wanted to empower some of the boys who found engaging in education difficult to see this issue as something they could take responsibility for - a group that the media would also have you believe is at risk of radicalisation.

So we set the group of boys a task: for nine months they would discuss, write and learn about British values and the issues around Prevent and then perform a 40-minute piece of drama to their peers incorporating what they had learned. Supported by staff and the wider community - particularly the Bengali community in which they reside - they engaged with this task more fully than we could ever have imagined.

They worked cohesively, pulling together something that was truly remarkable

In May, the time came for the performances - three of them in fact. There was poetry, rap, bilingual drama, comedy and a beautiful, silent piece in which they held aloft quotations from the Bible, Koran and Torah. They worked cohesively for nine months pulling together something that was truly remarkable, and I’m not ashamed to say I’ve wiped away a tear every time I’ve seen it.

What these students demonstrated is that you can tackle difficult concepts and issues, and they’ve done it in an optimistic and inspirational manner. The Prevent duty should be about open debate, not fear. By trusting students and handing over power to them, you can achieve that transparency and vibrancy.

We took many lessons from the project, which we will keep in mind when we do this again. Here are the key points if you want to hand some power to your students, too.

1. Encourage debate and challenging conversations in your classroom.

2. Give yourself time in the curriculum to talk. This helps to tackle external pressures and puts harmony and valuing diversity as a priority. It helped us to remain a family and a community in difficult times.

3. Value the process as much as the end result. The boys practised each week after school and I did allow them to come out of curriculum time - even English and maths. This raised some eyebrows at the start, but the time to have quality conversations was vital to the project’s success.

4. Work with your community and your local authority. Seek out the community officers and make a point of getting to know members of the community and parents. It takes time, but it is worth it.

5. Don’t be afraid of Prevent. For this, I leave it to a boy in the group - Nabeel. His monologue tells the story of how, on his way to visit his mum in hospital last summer, he rushed across the park in his uniform and was stopped and searched by a police officer. Nabeel was incredibly upset and believed that the reason he was stopped was because of his race. In the performance, one of the most powerful lines comes from him. He looks at the audience and says: “But it won’t prevent me; no police officer will ever prevent me; no legislation will prevent me: no, it won’t prevent me from getting good grades - and I will.” In August, he was predicted all Cs. He got three A*s, five As and two Bs.

So, what happened to our students at the Houses of Parliament?

Luckily the police realised it was a genuine mistake and were brilliant with the boy in question. They talked together and it addressed some misconceptions about the police that the boys held.

It was fitting that the incident ended in constructive dialogue, because that is what underpins our approach to Prevent and British values. It should underpin yours, too.

Janice Allen, headteacher at Falinge Park High School in Rochdale