Why colleges have a role to play in a society struggling with division

By Amy Woodrow, Director of Student Experience, Quality and Safeguarding and Senior Mental Health Lead at City of Bristol College

I left the recent Association of Colleges (AoC) conference, specifically the session on “the role of colleges in tackling extremism and promoting inclusion”, feeling both inspired and deeply concerned. I applaud the leaders who spoke; their positive, proactive stance on such a complex and current topic is exactly what our sector needs. Each acknowledged the weight of the challenge. Each spoke with conviction about their role. And perhaps most significantly, each refused to look away from a problem that is intensifying across our nation.

Their courage matters. Not because it makes headlines or wins awards, but because it addresses a question every college leader should be asking right now: What are we going to do about the young people in front of us who are being drawn toward hatred, polarisation, and violence?

The answer cannot be that it is "someone else's job". The evidence is too stark, the need too urgent, and colleges' capacity too significant to step back from this work.

Yet, the stark reality is that while the demand for colleges to act as positive agents of social cohesion is increasing, the necessary resources and supporting infrastructure are rapidly collapsing.

Divisive narratives are most effective when they can prey on genuine feelings of injustice and neglect. In places like Bristol, where our college is, this sentiment is fuelled by pronounced economic inequality.

While the city is often perceived as affluent, there are reportedly pockets of profound deprivation heavily concentrated in South Bristol (e.g., Hartcliffe & Withywood) and parts of East and Central Bristol. When communities living in close proximity experience such vastly different outcomes, it fosters a powerful feeling of relative deprivation - the perception that the "system has failed".

This economic hardship is intrinsically linked to a vacuum of opportunity. Young people, especially young men, who lack clear pathways to employment and stability are highly susceptible to the false promises of extremist or criminal groups, who offer a sense of belonging, purpose, and sometimes, financial incentive.

The college, however, is the opportunity engine. By providing genuine, skills-based pathways to stable employment and higher education, we directly undermine the core recruitment message of extremists. The mission of further education is fundamentally anti-extremist because it delivers the hope and self-efficacy that structural inequality often denies.

This leads to the most pressing issue for college leaders: statutory partners (local authority, police, and health) are placing more and more responsibility on colleges without providing the corresponding resource or clarity.

The thematic Child Safeguarding Practice Review into serious youth violence in Bristol—triggered by the tragic murders of Max Dixon (16), Mason Rist (15), and Darrian Williams (16) in early 2024 offers a sobering case study in systemic failure. None of these three children were invisible to services. All were known to education, social care, police, health, and voluntary sector organisations.

The review identifies systemic breakdowns with direct implications for colleges:

• Siloed Working: Education was disconnected from the safeguarding partnership at strategic, operational, and practice levels. Services worked in silos, with agencies holding multiple overlapping meetings discussing the same children without clear coordination or accountability. Data wasn't integrated; intelligence wasn't shared.
• The Education Pathway: The most significant finding for our sector concerns the education pathway itself. All three boys had experienced low school attendance, multiple suspensions, managed moves, or outright exclusions. Some had undiagnosed or suspected special educational needs (SEND). In effect, these young people were systematically excluded from the one institution designed to be their bridge to adulthood. As the families themselves said, the boys had been "let down by the entire community".
• Referral Complexity: The review also exposed the complexity of referral pathways. Staff in schools didn't understand referral thresholds. They didn't know what happened after they made referrals. Families hardest to reach and most at risk were pushed further away by complicated processes.

When education and support services don't communicate or share information, when vulnerable young people fall through cracks between organisations, when alternative provision becomes a pathway to further isolation rather than genuine support, we create the very conditions for extremism to take hold.

This is where colleges occupy genuinely unique terrain. Our staff and infrastructure make us a crucial point of leverage.

Unlike schools, which young people are legally compelled to attend, colleges are places where post-16 learners choose to show up. That choice, that active engagement, creates a different, more powerful relationship foundation.

We reach young people at a critical moment: school leavers, including those excluded from or disengaged with mainstream education. We engage students with SEND, low literacy levels, and mental health challenges - all risk factors for extremism. We bridge between school and employment at precisely the juncture where young people are making decisions about their identity, their future, and where they belong.

Our staff relationships are our most powerful safeguarding tool. Personal tutors, safeguarding advisors, mentors - they know students in their complexity. Students often confide concerns to college staff they wouldn't report to police or social services.

Beyond the safeguarding apparatus, colleges offer exactly what extremism exploits: belonging, opportunity, and hope.

Our programmes offer genuine pathways to employment, addressing the "lack of opportunity" repeatedly cited as a driver of youth alienation. Our personal development curriculum challenges extremist narratives directly, embedding critical thinking skills that help students resist misinformation and polarising media. And our involvement with the No Place for Hate steering group demonstrates our commitment to making inclusion the bedrock of our culture.

The research is clear: young people drawn to extremism are not primarily ideological actors. They are vulnerable young people seeking community, significance, and safety. If we offer that in college, we make that space hostile to extremism.

However, here's the challenge every college leader faces: you're being asked to do more with less.

Demand for college places is increasing. Young people from excluded backgrounds, students in alternative provision, young people with SEND - they all need college places. The complexity of their needs is increasing: mental health crises, trauma, exposure to extremist content, experiences of violence, addiction and discrimination.

And the ecosystem meant to support them is disappearing.

Youth services have been decimated. Voluntary sector organisations working with young people are similarly squeezed. Local authority budgets for early help and child protection are under severe strain. Meanwhile, college budgets have been pressured, support services cut, and per-student funding squeezed year after year.

The evidence on this is unambiguous. When youth centres close, crime increases (including violent crime) and educational attainment worsens (by as much as a whole GCSE grade lower). Young people without mentors and social connection show worse outcomes across every measure. Alternative provision students who are isolated are more likely to offend and face post-16 disadvantage.​

At the AoC Annual Conference, the question was “what is the role of colleges”, however, it is not the role colleges to solve this alone. It's for colleges to acknowledge that this is unsustainable, to make the case collectively for investment, and to work more effectively within existing constraints while advocating loudly for systemic change.

Colleges have demonstrated their commitment, but we cannot be expected to plug a national systemic gap with our existing FE funding streams. We need policymakers and statutory partners to recognise the sector’s indispensable role as a critical service.

Our call is not for increased responsibility, but for targeted, sustainable funding and simplified, coordinated referral pathways. Only with the right resources can we truly deliver on the promise of inclusion and fulfil our duty to safeguard our students and secure the cohesion of our communities.

Young people are being radicalised. Democratic values are being rejected. Vulnerable young people are being isolated and exploited. And in your college, right now, there are students for whom college is the last point of institutional contact, the last trusted relationship, the last chance to experience belonging and hope before they make choices that will determine their lives.

The college leaders who spoke at that conference session understood this. They stepped forward publicly, on a difficult topic, because they recognised their responsibility. They modelled what leadership looks like when the stakes are high, and the path is unclear.

What you need is the commitment to keep showing up - to keep noticing young people who are isolated or vulnerable, to keep pushing for systemic change, to keep modelling what democratic values look like lived in practice.

The young people in your college are watching. They're noticing which adults look away from hard conversations and which ones step forward. They're paying attention to whether your college is genuinely a place where they belong, or whether it's just another institution processing them through.

Make it count. Because somewhere in your college right now is a young person standing at a crossroads. Extremism, radicalisation, and hatred are offering them community. Your college can offer them something better: genuine belonging, opportunity, critical thinking, hope, and adults who refuse to look away.

That's the college further education needs to be. That's the leadership your sector is called to offer. And that work begins now, in your institution, with the young people in front of you.