The government has ordered the takeover of one of England’s first state-funded Muslim secondary schools, an institution where a child died and offensive books were found in the library.
The books stated that a husband can beat his wife and insist on having sex with her. They were found in the library of the Al-Hijrah School in Birmingham, which became state-funded in 2001.
Amanda Spielman, chief inspector at Ofsted, the schools regulator, said Al-Hijrah would be taken over by an independent academy trust on the orders of the Department for Education.
The move follows a damning report by Ofsted inspectors who visited the school, which has about 750 pupils, after Mohammad Imaeel Ashraf, 9, collapsed there in March. He was taken to hospital but died soon afterwards. His funeral was attended by more than 2,000 people. An inquest into the death, initially reportedly linked to an allergic reaction to fish and chips, will be held later this summer.
In a report published last month the inspectors gave the school an “inadequate” judgment, the lowest ranking. They found bullying, a chaotic playground, weak teaching, pupils who were not “sufficiently” safe and staff who did not know what to do in medical emergencies.
The Department for Education confirmed that the school’s management would be handed to an outside trust.
For more than a year the co-educational Islamic school has fought through the courts to try to suppress an earlier critical Ofsted report that said its segregation of girls and boys for all lessons from the age of 5 to 16 was a breach of the Equality Act.
Last week appeal court judges were asked to make a definitive ruling in the case. If Ofsted wins, up to 20 faith schools that teach boys and girls separately will be reinspected and may have to change their arrangements.
Spielman said she found it “deeply frustrating” when legal challenges were “used to delay things that in our view urgently need to happen. It is rare for schools to go to court to challenge a report but sometimes the stakes are high.”
The chief inspector, who studied in the sixth form at the fee-paying St Paul’s Girls’ School, said she had decided to take the case to appeal because it is “a really important point of principle”.
Boys and girls taught separately in mixed state schools might not be prepared for life in modern Britain, she said. Ofsted has spent more than £66,000 on legal fees. Birmingham city council helped to pay Al-Hijrah’s legal costs, including at an earlier High Court hearing where the school was successful.
“I am deeply concerned about the idea that total segregation of children within a mixed school is acceptable,” Spielman said. “The master of the rolls said it was a very important case and I think that is right.
“Segregating boys and girls in a mixed school feels as though it is depriving both boys and girls of a big part of the benefits of a school.
“We have single-sex schools and I am not challenging that but the idea that you have . . . a mixed school and yet you do not have social development, stimulation, all the things that come from mixing the sexes, makes me uncomfortable.
“What pupils were missing out on in Al-Hijrah was the chance to interact with the opposite sex, to prepare them for adult life.”
Birmingham city council said both it and Al-Hijrah’s interim executive board were “co-operating fully” with the DfE to find a suitable academy sponsor.