Islamist plot in schools: At last, Ofsted knows it must act

For Salma Yaqoob, the former leader of the Left-wing Respect party, Rosa Parks, the black American who in 1955 refused to sit at the back of the bus, is almost certainly, and rightly, a heroine.

Yet last week, Ms Yaqoob fiercely supported a school which in 2014, according to an official report, makes girls sit at the back of the classroom.

There was “more than a whiff of McCarthyism” in allegations of a plot by hardline Muslims to “Islamise” secular state schools and drive out non-Muslim head teachers in her home city of Birmingham, wrote Ms Yaqoob.

It was all “hysteria” based on a “dodgy dossier,” and denied by the schools concerned, so it must be untrue.

By appointing Peter Clarke, a former counter-terrorism chief, to investigate, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, had “managed at a stroke to increase fear and suspicion between Muslim and non-Muslim in the city”.

Nor was Ms Yaqoob alone in her views. Birmingham city council’s chief executive, Mark Rogers, said two weeks ago that there was no conspiracy, merely “new communities” raising “legitimate questions and challenges” to the “liberal education system”.

The Bishop of Birmingham, David Urquhart, accused the media of “demonising sections of the community”. Parts of the BBC have been doing their best to make the story go away. Even the local chief constable, Chris Sims, described Mr Clarke’s appointment as “desperately unfortunate”.

All these people may soon look fairly silly. As we disclosed yesterday and today, official inspection reports from Ofsted and the Department for Education (DfE) substantiate many of the allegations against the schools.

Of the 17 so far inspected by Ofsted, the education watchdog, only one has been given an entirely clean bill of health. Five are to be graded “inadequate” for leadership and management and placed in “special measures” (a further one already has been), allowing the removal of their entire leadership teams.

Nine more where the plot is deemed less advanced, or where secular head teachers are resisting, will be graded “requiring improvement,” given enhanced support and monitoring.

The separate DfE inspection report into three of the schools, Park View and Golden Hillock secondaries and Nansen Primary, leaked to this newspaper, details how core principles of equality and secularism were transgressed.

Contrary to its denials, the inspectors found, Park View did practise forced and discriminatory gender segregation in many classes, with “boys sitting towards the front of the class and girls at the back or around the sides” and students “required to sit in the places which they were given by teachers”.

At Golden Hillock, five Christian students in Year 11 “have to teach themselves” GCSE religious education because all of the teacher’s time was given “to the students who are doing the Islamic course”.

Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman, an extremist preacher who “is known to extol … the stoning of homosexuals, anti-Semitic views [and is] sympathetic to al-Qaeda”, was invited to address students at Park View, the inspectors found.

The curriculum at the two schools had been “Islamised”, with GCSE subjects “restricted to comply with conservative Islamic teaching”.

Children told the inspectors that in biology the teacher “briefly delivered the theory of evolution to comply with the syllabus”, but told pupils that “this is not what we believe”.

In biology, the inspectors also found that “topics such as body structure and the menstrual cycle were not covered in class, though pupils needed them for the GCSE exam … students told us that as Muslims they were not allowed to study matters such as reproduction with the opposite sex”.

At Park View, a “madrassah curriculum” was followed in personal, social and health education, the report said. At Golden Hillock, any discussion of sexual orientation or intimacy was banned, affecting “the broad and balanced teaching of many subjects, including art and English literature”. At Nansen, there were “no lessons in the humanities, arts or music” for Year 6, and “limited” teaching in Year 5. Arabic was compulsory for all students — almost unheard of at primary level.

To be fair to Ms Yaqoob and the others, none of them, presumably, knew about these reports before they spoke. Yet there has never been any real shortage of evidence that bad things have been happening.

In the past six months, five non-Muslim head teachers at the schools concerned, covering a tiny area of Birmingham, have left their posts. The extremist preacher’s visit to Park View was published on the school’s own website.

Ms Yaqoob’s “dodgy dossier” — an anonymous letter, with a number of inaccuracies — has never been used by this newspaper as a source. Instead we have for weeks been reporting specific, detailed and multiple-sourced allegations by teachers, former teachers and Muslim parents against named schools and individuals at them, something we could not do if we were not sure of our facts.

Most sources spoke off the record — some staff have been explicitly threatened with dismissal for speaking out — but some witnesses went public.

Nigel Sloan, a former teacher at Park View, saw Mozz Hussain, now the principal there, delivering “mind-blowing” anti-American “propaganda” at assemblies. Mohammed Zabar, the parent of a child at the supposedly secular Oldknow Primary, was among many of our Muslim sources. He told us that his daughter had been “programmed” and would “come back from school saying she’s been told her hair is un-Islamic, or that trousers are not Islamic”.

He said the Arabic teacher at the school, Asif Khan, had admitted leading children in chants which attacked Christmas and Christian beliefs.

“If I wanted a religious education for my daughter, I would have sent her to a faith school,” he said. “I want her to grow up to mix with all races and communities. It’s important people know that it is Muslim parents who are concerned about this and are standing up to it.”

This newspaper also disclosed leaked messages of a group called Educational Activists which pursues, in the words of its administrator, Razwan Faraz, an “Islamising agenda” in Birmingham schools. Mr Faraz, the brother of a convicted terrorist, is deputy head at Nansen. A number of other group members are governors or teachers at the schools targeted.

The group has held regular meetings in conjunction with the “Mualim [Teacher] Network”, run by Mr Faraz, and the Muslim Parents’ Association (MPA). The MPA and its director, Tahir Alam, who has documented hardline views, have clear links to many of the schools where questions have been raised. At Oldknow, Achmad da Costa, the chairman of governors, is a co-director with Mr Alam of the MPA.

Another director of the MPA, Shahid Akmal, is chairman of governors at Nansen. Mr Alam is chairman of governors at Park View. “We have established an overlapping web of connections with a group who work together,” said one senior DfE figure. “The driving force appears to be explicitly Islamist.”

By ignoring or downplaying this evidence, much of it in the public domain, the authorities in Birmingham let down Muslim parents like Mohammed Zabar, dozens of their own worried teachers, and the very principles of multi-culturalism and liberalism that they claim to uphold.

They left Mr Gove with little alternative but to send in his own man. West Midlands Police, in particular, has a bad record of whitewashing Islamists. In 2007, after a Channel 4 documentary exposed violent and racist preaching in Birmingham mosques, it took action against the TV company, falsely claiming that the bigots had been misrepresented. The force had to pay six-figure damages to the film-makers.

It is not surprising, perhaps, that some of the schools should try to conflate an attack on Islamism into an attack on all Muslims. The vice-chairman of governors at one of the schools, Oliver Coss, wrote last week that local Muslims are “used to accusations of 'Islamism’ or 'extremism’ being hurled at them”.

But at least over this story, the brazen attempts by Islamists and their supporters to play the race and Islamophobia cards seem to be failing.

Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, yesterday made clear that “we cannot have head teachers forced out; teachers undermined; curricula rewritten; and cultural or gender-based segregation”.

Mr Gove and Ofsted have acted, though they know they, too, face embarrassment. Only two years ago, the inspectorate graded Park View “outstanding”. The Government’s academy reforms, removing many schools from local authority control, probably did make it easier to change some, though not all, of the schools.

After the inspection reports are published next month, it seems likely that some of the schools will appeal, or take legal action, as Park View has already threatened.

Mr Clarke, meanwhile, will make system-wide recommendations about the appointment of governors and the role of local authorities.

The process may be slow, but in the end it looks increasingly likely that the authorities will do the right thing.