Ofsted withdraws trainings that link autism and extremism
6th July 2026
In a freedom-of-information response to RSI and in response to a parliamentary question, UK education body Ofsted has confirmed that it has withdrawn nationwide training materials claiming that autistic people are more susceptible than others to becoming ‘extremists’ — almost a year to the day since RSI exposed these trainings.
In June 2025, RSI uncovered Ofsted trainings for school inspectors claiming that autistic people are more likely than others to become extremists due to their ‘special interests’ and what Ofsted said was a tendency to find friends online. The trainings attracted widespread political, media and public criticism, and kickstarted a national campaign calling for Ofsted to remove these harmful statements and end its targeting of autistic people under the ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism programme.
In response to a Parliamentary question by MP Adam Dance, the Department for Education confirmed on 10 June 2026 that:
‘Ofsted are now delivering the renewed education inspection framework, with new training for inspectors, including updates on the Prevent duty, which no longer includes reference to children with autism’.
RSI has also confirmed via a freedom-of-information request that Ofsted has removed the harmful references to autistic people in these training materials (see below).
This is a crucial step in the fight to tackle harmful stereotypes and misconceptions about autistic people, and the targeting of neurodivergent people under Prevent, which RSI believes reflects bias.
However, the problem does not end here. Official statistics show that a significant proportion of referrals to Prevent involve people with diagnosed or ‘suspected’ autism, suggesting that a wider range of bodies in the UK may be looking at autistic people with suspicion. It is not clear what, if anything, Ofsted or other bodies such as the Home Office plan to do to address the wrong information they have previously spread. More fundamentally, the government continues to operate Prevent based on the deeply flawed assumption that you can predict how dangerous someone is based on what they appear to think.
RSI will continue to push back against harmful rhetoric that links neurodivergent people with ‘extremism’ and violence, and we have published a literature review demonstrating that there is no reason to view autistic people as posing any heightened threat of violence. We are also calling for the government to scrap Prevent altogether, and instead adopt evidence-based strategies for violence prevention.
This story was also reported in The Guardian.