In late May, British media reports emerged about an east London council's $550,000 project, seeking to identify the early signs of radicalization through surveys conducted among children as young as 10-years-old in schools with a sizable Muslim minority.
"The survey itself possesses the potential to jeopardize the overwhelmingly harmonious community relations we currently enjoy in the United Kingdom between citizens of the various ethnic and religious heritages who make up the British People. Which is certainly not, in any sense, a desirable outcome and surely cannot be the intention of those who put this survey together," Paul Salahuddin Armstrong said.
The Waltham Forest council pilot project, dubbed the "Radicalisation Leading to Terrorism Programme," distributed questionnaires to sixth-grade students across five of its schools. Parents complained of not being warned in advance, instead learning about the school-wide surveys from their children.
"In addition, they are likely to mess around and prone to silliness. What if, in such a moment, a child answers the questions in a silly manner, and this was put on file and held against them?" he said.
The project comes amid a high terror threat in the United Kingdom, which was raised from "substantial" to "severe" in August 2014, due to increasing numbers of Britons travelling to Iraq and Syria to join radical militant groups there.
In mid-May, Scotland Yard estimated that as many of 700 potential terror suspects had travelled from the United Kingdom to Syria to join the numerous militant groups. Over half of them are thought to have returned home, where they may pose a significant threat.