Channel panel

What Channel is, and where the duty comes from

Channel is the support end of Prevent. The Home Office describes it as "a programme which focuses on providing support at an early stage to people who are identified as being vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism", and the statutory Channel duty guidance summarises its method as a multi-agency approach that protects people by "identifying individuals at risk, assessing the nature and extent of that risk, developing the most appropriate support plan". It is not an investigation and it is not a sanction. It is a safeguarding programme with a counter-terrorism purpose, and that combination is what confuses people on both sides of a referral.

Prevent is one of the four strands of the United Kingdom's counter-terrorism strategy, and the Prevent strategy's own description of its job is to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. Channel is its early intervention arm: a multi-agency safeguarding programme that provides support at an early stage to children and adults who are at risk of being drawn into any form of terrorism, from Islamist to extreme right-wing, before any offence has been committed. The guidance has moved away from the word vulnerability and now speaks of a person's susceptibility to radicalisation, which is assessed rather than assumed; a referral from a teacher, a nurse, a colleague or a member of the public is the start of that assessment, not its conclusion. Extremism on its own is not the test. The question the panel asks is whether the person is at risk of being drawn into terrorism, and whether a tailored support package would reduce that risk.

The law behind it is the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Section 26 places the Prevent duty on specified authorities, including schools, further and higher education, the NHS, local authorities, the police, prisons and probation and registered childcare providers: they must have "due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism". Sections 36 to 41 then require each local authority to have a panel in place to assess people referred to it and to arrange support, and require the partners named in the Act to co-operate with that panel. The programme is called Channel in England and Wales. In Scotland the same arrangement is a Prevent Multi-Agency Panel, or PMAP, and the guidance covers both.

Three things follow from that framing and they are worth stating before the process, because most misunderstandings come from forgetting one of them. Channel is voluntary: nobody is supported by it without their consent. It is confidential: the guidance says that where a referral is adopted, "insofar as possible, the details of those interventions should remain confidential and should not be routinely disclosed outside of the partners involved in the Channel process". And it carries no penalty: the person "should therefore not be subject to any negative consequences as a result of their involvement in Channel", unless criminality later becomes apparent. It does not create a criminal record.

Charities and care providers are not, in general, specified authorities under section 26, but that does not put them outside Prevent. Anyone can make a referral, a charity delivering education or health services under contract will usually be bound by the duty through that contract, and a care provider whose resident or service user is referred will be asked to take part in the information gathering described below. The record-keeping question in section 05 applies to all of them.

How a referral reaches a panel: Notice, Check, Share, and the gateway

The guidance expects a referral to come at the end of some thought rather than at the start of it. "Prevent referrals are often likely to be made by people who come into contact with those who appear to be at risk of radicalisation, usually following a degree of deliberation on the part of the referrer", and it asks the referrer to follow the Notice, Check, Share procedure before making a referral to the police. Notice is the change in behaviour, language or association that prompted concern. Check is the conversation with someone who can help you weigh it: in a school or college that is the designated safeguarding lead, in a local authority the Prevent lead, in the NHS the safeguarding team, and in any organisation the local authority Prevent officer or police Prevent team, who will take a call before a form. Share is the referral itself, normally through the national Prevent referral form to the local police Prevent team, or through the public route on GOV.UK if you are not a practitioner. The guidance is explicit that a concern that does not survive the Check stage should go to other support instead, and that is the correct outcome, not a failure of nerve.

Every referral is then triaged by the police, not the panel. "All Prevent referrals are triaged in the first instance by specialist police officers and staff", who decide whether "there are reasonable grounds to suspect that a person is at risk of radicalisation". The guidance calls this the gateway assessment. It draws on police databases and other resources, and it has three possible outcomes. A referral that shows no susceptibility to radicalisation is not suitable for Channel and is signposted to other services, and the guidance requires that "the reasons for that referral and details of onward signposting must be recorded appropriately". A person the police "reasonably suspect pose a serious or imminent risk of terrorism offending" is unlikely to be recommended for Channel at all and is managed in a police-led space instead. Everything in between goes forward.

For those that go forward, a Channel case officer leads a more detailed assessment using the Prevent Assessment Framework, and the local authority gathers information from partners. The diagram in the guidance allows roughly five working days for that pre-panel information gathering. The section 36 decision, that the referral is appropriate for consideration at Channel, is then recorded on the Home Office-approved case management system, and the guidance is unambiguous that "all assessments and minutes of Channel meetings must be recorded on this system". It is also good practice, the guidance says, for the police or case officer to contact the referrer where clarification is needed, which is the point at which the quality of your own note starts to matter.

Who sits on the panel, and how it decides

The panel is a local authority meeting. The Act requires local authorities to chair Channel panels, and the guidance expects the chair and a deputy chair to be senior officers of the local authority, with the police present at every meeting. Around them sit standing members drawn from the local partners named in the Act, which in practice means education, health, children's and adults' social care, housing and probation, with others co-opted for a particular case. Panels meet monthly, and each meeting considers new referrals, live cases and cases due for review. The decision to adopt or reject a case is made at the first panel at which it is considered. Every case is carefully assessed against the Prevent Assessment Framework before it reaches the table, so the panel's decision is about whether a support package would help, not whether the referral was justified.

Adoption is not the same as support. "Once a Channel panel has made the decision to adopt a case, consent is obtained before Channel support is provided." The consent visit is undertaken by whichever agency is best placed to have that conversation, no later than the point at which support is offered, and "where this involves under 18s, the consent of their parent or guardian is required". Where consent is not secured, "the case will need to be closed to Channel" and the person is signposted elsewhere. That closure is recorded like any other, which is why a referral that ends in non-consent still leaves a trail.

Where consent is given, the panel develops a support plan and sequences interventions "to reflect both need and risk". The interventions are what most people imagine Channel to be, and they are wider than mentoring:

• Ideological or theological mentoring from a Home Office-approved intervention provider, which is the intervention specific to Channel.
• Education, training or careers support, where disengagement from those is part of the picture.
• Mental health, and drug or alcohol support, through the ordinary services, sequenced so that they do not compete.
• Family and housing support, because the assessment framework looks at the whole situation rather than the ideology alone.

There is no fixed length. The guidance sets a clear expectation that a case "remains open until either" the panel "deems that the terrorism susceptibility has sufficiently reduced to warrant exit", or "the terrorism risk has increased, and the case is escalated to the police for consideration". A panel that closes a case because the calendar says so is not following the guidance.

Closure, the reviews at six and twelve months, and confidentiality

Closure is a handover, not an ending. The guidance expects a lead professional to be identified at the point of closure, a closure notification to be given to the person or their family where that is appropriate, and mainstream services to continue where they are needed. Then the panel keeps watching: "all adopted cases will be subject to review at least 6 and 12 months from closure". Where concerns remain at the twelve-month review the case is reviewed for a further twelve months, and where concerns still remain twenty-four months after closure, a re-referral into Prevent must be made. A referrer who is still in contact with the person, a school or a care provider most obviously, may be asked to contribute to those reviews, and should expect the request to come without much notice.

Confidentiality is the rule, and disclosure is the exception with a legal basis. The guidance names the routes through which Channel documentation can be requested: courts, including family and coroners' courts and tribunals; the Independent Office for Police Conduct; the Crown Prosecution Service; and subject access requests. That last one deserves attention from every organisation that made or contributed to a referral, because the person referred has the same right to their personal data as anyone else, and your referral form, your emails about it and your case notes are within scope. Exemptions exist, including where disclosure would prejudice the prevention or detection of crime, but they are applied to the specific information, not claimed over the file as a whole.

A school, college or charity does not hold the panel's minutes and should not try to. It holds its own record of what it noticed, checked and shared, and of what came back. Section 05 describes that record. The panel's documents are the local authority's, controlled by their author, and the guidance's confidentiality declaration applies to everyone who sees them.

What the referrer should have written down

The Channel duty guidance tells the panel what to record and where. It tells the referrer almost nothing, because the referrer is outside the process. But the referrer's organisation carries duties of its own that turn on that record: the Prevent duty to have "due regard", the safeguarding duties in Keeping children safe in education, which treats a radicalisation concern as a safeguarding concern handled by the designated safeguarding lead, and inspection, where Ofsted and the CQC will ask how a concern was recognised and acted on. Every stage of the route in sections 02 to 04 has a matching entry in the referrer's file:

1. Notice. What was observed, by whom, when, in what setting, and in the words used, not a summary. A change in behaviour, language, friendships or online activity, dated. If a colleague reported it to you, the date and form of that report.
2. Check. Who you discussed it with, when, and what was decided. If the decision was not to refer, the reason and any support put in place instead, because a concern that later escalates will be measured against this note.
3. Share. A copy of the referral as sent, the date, the route used and the recipient. Whether the person or, for a child, the parents were told, and if not, why not.
4. The acknowledgement, any call for clarification and what you said, and the outcome in whatever terms it was given to you.
5. Your own actions meanwhile. A referral does not suspend your duty of care. What you did to support the person while the process ran, and who was told on a need-to-know basis.
6. Later contact. Any request from the panel, at the six- or twelve-month review or at any other time, and your response.

Where the person is a pupil, this sits in the child protection file, kept separately from the pupil record and transferred with it under KCSIE arrangements when the child moves school; the DfE retention rules for that file apply. Where the person is an adult, it sits in the safeguarding record under your adult safeguarding procedures. In both cases access is restricted to the people who need it, and the file is not a place for speculation about ideology: record what was seen and said, and let the assessment be the panel's.

The first record is a conversation, and it is usually on a phone

Notice does not happen at a desk. A teaching assistant sees something on a Friday and messages the DSL that evening. A youth worker at a charity mentions a comment to a colleague in the staff group chat. A care worker texts the manager about what a resident has been watching. A college tutor is sent a screenshot by a student who is worried about a friend. In every case the first record of the concern, the one with the date, the words and the person who noticed, is a message on a personal phone in an app the organisation does not control.

That message is the Notice entry in the list above. It is also personal data about the person referred, disclosable to them on request, and potentially evidence in the proceedings the guidance lists. When the panel's case officer calls to ask exactly what was said and when, the honest answer is often that it was in a WhatsApp group and the person who sent it has since left. Consumer messaging apps are built so that nobody but the participants can ever produce the conversation, which is the right design for a family and the wrong one for a safeguarding record.

This is not a criticism of the staff involved. They noticed, and they told someone, which is the whole point of Notice, Check, Share. It is a records question about where the noticing lands, and it belongs to the leadership team and the safeguarding governor or trustee rather than to the individual. The question for your next safeguarding meeting is short: when a member of staff first raises a concern about radicalisation, where does that message go, and could you produce it in a year?

Official guidance and your next step

The primary sources are the Channel and Prevent Multi-Agency Panel (PMAP) guidance, statutory guidance issued under sections 36(7) and 38(6) of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, the Prevent duty guidance for specified authorities under section 26, the Home Office's Get help if you're worried about someone being radicalised page, which is the public referral route, and Keeping children safe in education for schools and colleges. Quotations are from the Channel duty guidance as published on GOV.UK on 13 September 2026; the guidance page was last updated on 14 October 2025. Free Prevent duty training is available from the Home Office online.

This guide is a practical starting point for organisations in England and Wales, not advice about any individual or case. Your designated safeguarding lead, your local authority Prevent officer or police Prevent team, and, where there is an immediate risk, the police on 999, come first.

Then do one thing: find out who your local authority Prevent lead is and how your organisation contacts the police Prevent team, and write both into your safeguarding policy where the Check stage is described. A concern raised at nine on a Friday evening should not depend on someone remembering a name.