[58] Ofsted found that "the governing body has removed some subjects, such as music, from the timetable". [2], The hearings dramatically came back into media attention in October 2016 after one of the hearings that had concluded with guilty verdicts against two teachers went to the High Court on appeal. "[4] He conducted no interviews with governors or teachers who were accused of misconduct, with the exception of Tahir Alam. [54] Kerslake deferred issues of education to the Clarke and Kershaw Reports, but an appendix to his Report provided contextual data on poverty, adult education attainment, unemployment and school performance across comparator cities and for England as a whole. "[127] Shabina Bano, chair of the Oldknow Academy Parents' Association, said parents would welcome Ms.Kondal back because they wanted, stability as soon as possible At the same time we want to know why she deserted parents. Another teacher told the children that were "lucky to be Muslims and not ignorant like Christians and Jews". [3][4] Birmingham City Council imposed a temporary freeze on the appointment of school governors after probes into Operation Trojan Horse were announced. The reporter recorded a series of meetings with him which the Mirror alleged exposed Akmal as a "sexist, racist bigot". [84] The school was rated "inadequate". "[78], Segregation was found in one classroom with girls sitting at the back with their heads covered. The latter piece concluded that in the present system, the schools investigated could have registered themselves as faith schools and been allowed to teach Islamic values with permission from the state. [88] This showed that most schools conflated the two and did not have teachers trained in the Prevent duty. Jaimie Martin, former special adviser at the Department for Education, wrote that "it is important to note as [the teachers] were not tried for the charges, they were therefore not cleared of them", and that "people who downplay the seriousness of Trojan Horse, claiming those involved exhibited 'mainstream' Islamic views, are guilty not only of stunning naivety, but of a dangerous error". They investigated schools in East London, Bradford and Luton over concerns regarding a limited curriculum and pupils' detachment from the wider community. The letter was leaked to the press in March 2014. [50], The Educational Funding Authority, Ofsted, and Birmingham City Council agreed to investigate the letter, although West Midlands Police decided that it was not a matter for them. However, the report interviewed none of the teachers or governors against whom allegations were made with the single exception of Tahir Alam. The Department for Education had also commissioned a report by Ipso Mori in 2010 into how schools understood their duties with regard to Community Cohesions and Prevent. The latter found that there is "no evidence to suggest that there is a problem with governance generally" nor any "evidence of terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism in the schools of concern in Birmingham", but said that there was "evidence that there are a number of people, associated with each other and in positions of influence in schools and governing bodies, who espouse, sympathise with or fail to challenge extremist views", and that there had been "co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained" attempts "by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos" into "a few schools in Birmingham". [25] This would be so despite the fact that the previous duty on schools to promote community cohesion had included an emphasis on 'shared values' which were exactly the same values espoused in the new duty. The Department for Education inspection found the seating arrangements "often with boys sitting towards the front of the class and girls at the back or around the sides". [83], An Ofsted inspection found that the Islamic school, which shares its premises with a mosque, had books in its library with content that had "no place in British society". [7] Pupils and teachers from Park View School denied this version of the story, saying that after this assertion had been raised by a boy during a presentation on sexual education teachers organised an assembly where they explained that "marital rape was legally and morally wrong". [5] Its leader, Sir Albert Bore, said that the Council accepted the Ofsted findings that schools in the city were failing pupils. The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair (2017). [45], In May 2014, the BBC reported that Tim Boyes, the former headteacher of Queensbridge School, had written anonymously to Birmingham City Council in 2010 to try to expose Operation Trojan Horse,[46] and in June a former prospective school governor said that he had informed authorities of the conspiracy in 2008. [93] The report said that the extremism went unchallenged as the council prioritised community cohesion over "doing what is right". Ofsted found a breakdown of trust between governors and staff and that family members had been appointed to unadvertised senior leadership posts[5], Park View Education Trust were found to be in breach of the Education Funding Agreement by failing to promote social cohesion, failing to promote the social, moral, spiritual, and cultural development of pupils, failing to promote balanced political treatment of issues, and failure to comply fully with safeguarding issues concerning criminal records checks. [98] New clauses were added into funding agreements for academies, stating that the Secretary for Education could close schools whose governors do not comply with "fundamental British values". Mark Walters, who testified that he saw Rizvana Darr open the teaching assistants' resignation letters, seems [53], In July 2014, after the reports had been published, Bore apologised and admitted that the council had ignored Operation Trojan Horse due to "fear of being accused of racism". [95], Prime Minister David Cameron, on a visit to Birmingham, praised his government's swift action in investigating the conspiracy. The investigation found that "terms such as condom, the pill and so forth have been banned" and that governors had insisted on an Islamic approach to subjects, such as Personal, Social and Health Education, science, religious education, and sex and relationships education. Media reporting expressed alarm that the transcripts were those of 'whistleblowers' who had provided statements under terms of confidentiality.[132]. [58] An extended Islamic assembly for its Year 10 and 11 pupils was arranged with Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman, an extremist preacher who has called on God to "destroy the enemies of Islam", "give victory to all the Mujahideen all over the world" and to "prepare us for the jihad". The inspection said that "too little is done to keep students safe from the risks associated with extremist views". [116] Tahir Alam, a governor at Park View School since 1997, and former chair of the education committee of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that the accusations had been "motivated by anti-Muslim, anti-Islam sentiment". One EFA inspector went on to become educational adviser to Peter Clarke. [12], On 14 April, the City Council confirmed that it had received over 200 reports from parents and staff at 25 schools in Birmingham. The educational advisers to the Clarke Report did not set out the guidelines applying to religious education and collective worship in schools and no information was provided about the locally agreed SACRE curriculum which continued to be taught in the schools. [citation needed], During the inspection at Laisterdyke Business and Enterprise College in Bradford, a mainly Muslim secondary school,[85] pupils were forced to revise for their GCSE exams outside in the street as staff did not want them to have an opportunity to speak to inspectors. Posters were found in the classrooms encouraging children to begin lessons with a Muslim prayer, one saying: "If you do not pray, you are worse than a kafir", and staff reported that loudspeakers were set up in the school to broadcast a call to prayer. [6], Tahir Alam, former chairman of the Park View Educational Trust which ran three schools in Birmingham, was alleged to have written a 72-page document for the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007 detailing a blueprint for the "Islamisation" of secular state schools, a claim that has been widely debunked. The findings were quashed on grounds of serious procedural irregularities. [42] Senior Department for Education sources have also been reported as claiming that coordinated attempts to undermine and supplant head teachers have occurred in Bradford, Manchester, and the London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets. After the Trojans got within four, the Long Beach Poly product rattled off his own mini 7-0 run. Hamza Syed There was a fact checker on our team who said when he heard that scene, it brought a context that has largely been missing from what it actually means to be Muslim. Students were also told that it is un-Islamic to have a pet dog. Around a month later, Birmingham City Council revealed that following the letter release it had received hundreds of allegations of plots similar to those described in the letter, some claims dating back over 20 years. [114] He later said that the Council accepted the Ofsted findings that schools in the city were failing pupils. He said that the efforts to instil fundamentalist practices into Birmingham classrooms were based on a "warped and abusive view of the religion". Under the academy schools programme, it could only be done with the active involvement of officials in the local authority (including over the transfer of assets to the new trust) and at the Department for Education and it would require an academically successful school to be the sponsor of 'failing' schools. A mysterious letter detailing a supposed Islamist plot to take over schools shocked Britain in 2014. WebTottenhams Trojan Horse? [101] Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Perry Barr, said that the City Council may have known of previous plots, but not acted due to fears of being seen as anti-Islamic. Alam remains[when?] Indeed, neither the Kershaw Report, nor the Clarke Report asked the question of how a school could be taken over by governors and teachers. In addition, Park View had been designated a National Healthy School for its approach to Personal, Social and Health Education. Edition 1st Edition. [4], The investigation found that at Anderton Park Primary School, after a white child joined the school, a Muslim parent instructed staff: "get a white chair and white desk and put the white kid in a white corner with a white teacher and keep him away from the others. "[128] Bhupinder Kondal left the school again shortly after. [105], The Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, Jim Fitzpatrick, warned of a 'Trojan Horse'-style Islamist plot to infiltrate councils in London. [2]:15, In May 2015, the National Association of Head Teachers' annual conference heard that the problems associated with Operation Trojan Horse persisted, and there were claims that teachers had received death threats for attempting to dissuade students away from homophobia. [12][1], In December 2022 a report from right-leaning Policy Exchange challenged the findings of the New York Times podcast and suggested that various reports into the matter had uncovered real causes for concern. In the podcast, the link between the Trojan Horse letter and the Headteacher of Adderley Primary School in Birmingham, Rizwana Darr, is explored and it is alleged that Darr is the real author of the Trojan Horse letter. He claimed that girls should be taught cooking and sewing while boys should be taught trades. It criticised the spending of the school's budget on paying private investigators to investigate the emails of senior staff and paying for meals in restaurants. The art curriculum was altered to "remove full faces or immodest images, such as paintings by Gustav Klimt". [107], In June 2014, there was a highly public argument between the Home Office and Department for Education ministers about the responsibility for the alleged extremism. [125], An undercover reporter working for the Daily Mirror posed as a wealthy businessman and potential client of the training firm Exquisitus, a firm owned by Shahid Akmal, the chairman of governors at Nansen Primary School. Girls were taught they could not refuse sex with their husbands, and would be "punished" by angels "from dusk to dawn" if they did. He said that the "colonial blood" within white people was "very difficult to get rid of that very quickly", as British people "still think they rule half the world". [135][136] No mention was made of the fact that allegations of extremism had not been any part of the charges against teachers. Click here to His complaints were published on 24 February 2014,[39] whereas the 'trojan horse' letter was not sent to the press until 2 March 2014. [124], In January 2022, a new podcast by The New York Times, The Trojan Horse Affair, cast many doubts on the multiple investigations and the version of events that emerged. Alleged exposed Akmal as a `` sexist, racist bigot '' views '' shortly after paintings by Klimt! In addition, Park View had been designated a National Healthy school mark walters trojan horse its to! 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