A second head teacher in Oldham has claimed that what he called a “Trojan Horse playbook” was used to drive him from his post at a high-profile free school project in the town.
Rick Hodge told The Sunday Times he resigned from the headship of the Phoenix Free School in 2013 after a “campaign of harassment to browbeat me” from the school’s founder, Affan Burki, a former British Army officer.
Burki and a colleague denied the allegations last night and branded Hodge a “Walter Mitty” character.
The Phoenix scheme received wide publicity in the national media — and backing from figures including the free schools campaigner Toby Young — after announcing it would recruit its teachers entirely from former military personnel.
It was intended to serve both white and Asian communities. However, nearly all the governors were Muslim.
Hodge said he started to have “deep suspicions” after overhearing one individual connected with the project discussing the proposed dress code for female staff.
“He went completely off on one about how not wearing a hijab would effectively turn all Muslim women into whores,” Hodge said.
He said no threats were made against him but that he was constantly “accused of lying and thievery” by Burki and resigned after two months.
The school, which had secured approval from the Department for Education (DfE) and recruited its first intake of pupils, subsequently had its funding withdrawn and never opened.
Burki said he had fallen out with Hodge after he “failed to provide anything that he said he would do”.
He said: “I would more than happily hold him to account and I think he found it quite galling that there was a young retired Muslim army officer holding him to account.” He denied any extremist motive.
The DfE said the grant had been withdrawn because the school “was unlikely to meet the required educational standards”.
Hodge came forward after The Sunday Times revealed that a serving Oldham head, Trish O’Donnell, had complained in December of a “Trojan Horse agenda being played out” in her school with a long campaign of “death threats”, “threats to blow up her car” and “aggressive verbal abuse”.
A secret Oldham council report into O’Donnell’s allegations, produced earlier this month and leaked to The Sunday Times, found some parents at the school had displayed “extremely problematic” behaviour in “seeking to mobilise other parents and the wider community” against O’Donnell.
The report said officers believed parents had attempted to “secure changes at the school to reflect their interpretation of Islam” but that this did not constitute a Trojan Horse-type plot.
The Phoenix project was part of wider attempts to tackle low educational standards in Oldham and address the racial divide that has dogged the town for decades, and led to riots in 2001. The disturbances were triggered by a series of racist attacks, some by whites against Asians but more by Asians against whites, according to the official chronology.
In a seminal report that followed the disturbances, a panel led by the academic Ted Cantle warned that communities in Oldham and some other north of England towns lived “parallel lives”.
Cantle told The Sunday Times last week that despite “real efforts” to promote better communication, Oldham’s intense physical segregation had barely changed since 2001.
“People do not meet naturally in the street, the workplace, at school, in the way they would in London,” he said. “And the narrative on both sides has got worse. But in this country we have not got an integration policy. We have no performance measures or targets to aim at, and no agencies with an explicit aim to integrate different communities together.”
To measure segregation, academics use the “index of dissimilarity”, where 0 represents complete integration and 1 equals apartheid South Africa. In 2001 Oldham’s segregation score between Pakistanis and whites was 0.83. After years of initiatives, action plans and political concern it now stands at 0.84.
The level of racial polarisation and mistrust reflected in the “Trojan Horse” allegations was clear in Oldham last week.
Drinkers in the Grouse Inn, the last pub in the now predominantly Pakistani district of Clarksfield — the area served by O’Donnell’s school — were happy to be quoted using racist epithets, including the N-word and the P-word. Asked whether there was anywhere white people and Pakistanis met, one of the customers said: “In the ambulance after a fight.”
Divisions in the local Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities are also intense. Arooj Shah, a rising star in the local Labour Party, said she had endured years of harassment from a “minority of venomous Asian men” after being elected to the council in 2012.
Shah said that influential local Pakistani Labour members spread damaging rumours about her, any male councillor who supported her was said to be her lover and a picture of a nude model with her head superimposed on it was posted to her.
She eventually lost her seat in last May’s elections. “If you’re even slightly progressive or liberal, they’ll come after you,” said another local professional Muslim woman.
There are some encouraging signs. The Waterhead Academy, which has an almost equal mix of white and Asian pupils, is the result of the merger of two nearly mono-racial secondary schools and studies show that its pupils of different races are — slowly — making friends.
Cash appeal to overturn ban
The man at the centre of an alleged Trojan Horse plot by Islamic extremists to take over secular state schools in Birmingham is appealing for funds to help him overturn a ban on him having any involvement with schools, write Richard Kerbaj and Sian Griffiths.
Tahir Alam has already raised £11,000 by crowdfunding towards his target of £18,000 to pay for a landmark tribunal case that opens next month.
In 2015, the Department for Education issued its first such blanket ban on Alam, former chairman of governors at Park View Educational Trust in Birmingham, after he was accused of “undermining British values”.