I’m sure that the government’s counter-terrorism Prevent strategy was conceived with the very best of intentions. With the UK struggling to control home-grown extremism, there was understandable pressure to do something.

However, a year on from the implementation of the new guidelines, the strategy is felt by many to be stifling free speech in schools and encouraging teachers to avoid “toxic” issues of extremism.

As always in such cases (or so it seems) the innocence of the blameless majority is compromised by our efforts to control the activities of the few.

I do not underestimate the threat. Radicalisation is a potential problem all over the country; it isn’t confined to minority groups and like abuse, no sector of society is exempt from the danger. But our management of the issue needs to be proportionate. For example, is it right to add the burden of a fully fledged Prevent strategy protocol to that already carried by teachers in sparsely populated, underfunded rural communities?

In many such areas it is often difficult to recruit teachers at all and those who are doing the job are managing the huge demands of delivering the curriculum and taking care of the welfare needs of their charges. Is it not possible to develop a context specific strategy that balances the needs of any given community with the message it delivers? Is it not possible to be a little more creative?

In all communities, regardless of location and demographic, the desirable answer must lie in effective integration and the cultivation of a proper understanding of our culture and values rather than run the risk of heightening the sense of alienation and disaffection in children and young people, many of whom already struggle with the baggage associated with being “different”.

Management of the issue needs to be proportionate 

I am the first to recognise that the threat is far greater in densely populated areas where the influences and activities of those who seek to radicalise young people generate real and present dangers. Those of us who are far removed from the bustle of major cities have little understanding of the challenges faced by such schools.

However, in more rural communities where the risk is less extreme, the government could do worse than talk with the independent schools that have been successfully integrating students from different cultures for many decades. Currently overseas students make up 35 per cent of pupils in the independent sector.

Many schools provide specialist Esol courses for young people who arrive here, typically alone, with limited English, to face an alien culture often thousands of miles away from home or any kind of family support. Nonetheless, in as little as one academic year they will most likely have been successfully supported to assimilate into the British way of life. They will have made friends from all nationalities, rubbed shoulders with people of the opposite sex and those with different faiths, they will have participated in the daily existence of school life; they will have walked the walk of British values.

At the end of their time here, most will realise how much they have absorbed British ways and mores. Many will go on to a UK university before, usually, returning to work in their own home countries. They will take with them the values that have become part of the person they are; informing and influencing future relationships, decisions and careers.

I know that we are privileged to be to able manage things as we do and I know that comes at a price. But the principles are transferable and there is experience and willingness to share in abundance. Perhaps the home secretary might add this fundamental issue to the list of areas in which productive partnerships between state and independent schools could prove fruitful.

Sue Freestone is headteacher of King’s Ely in Cambridgeshire