Speaking on Channel 4 News the week before last, Samir Rauf, a teacher at Birmingham’s Oldknow Academy, cut an apparently convincing figure of injured virtue as he proclaimed the school’s innocence of charges that it had been taken over and “Islamised” by Muslim hardliners.
He said the claims made him “feel really angry”. Asked about reports in this newspaper that Asif Khan, Oldknow’s Arabic teacher, led nine- and 10-year-old children in anti-Christian chanting, he said: “As far as the staff are aware, nothing of the sort happened.”
Christmas had not been cancelled, Mr Rauf insisted, and as for Oldknow’s non-Muslim headteacher, Bhupinder Kondal, her absence was due merely to “sick leave, and I pray that she recovers quickly”.
Mr Rauf has since disappeared from our TV screens after this newspaper revealed last Sunday that he is in fact a key member of a group called “Educational Activists”, in which he discussed how to pursue an “Islamising agenda” in another school where he is a governor.
And last Monday, a few days after Mr Rauf’s interview, the wider lies and denials at Oldknow and the other Birmingham schools involved in the “Trojan Horse” plot were finally blown out of the water.
Even as the schools and their supporters continued to claim that there was “no evidence” of any plot, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, delivered a devastating judgment. There had indeed been an “organised campaign” targeting schools in Birmingham to impose a “narrow, faith-based ideology”, with the same people “highly influential across several of the schools”.
A “culture of fear and intimidation” had developed in several of the schools, with “headteachers, including those with a proud record of raising standards… marginalised or forced out of their jobs”.
There had been a “breakdown in trust” between staff and governors, who had “sought to make changes to the curriculum on the basis of their own personal beliefs”, with girls and boys “not treated equally”, music in one school removed from the curriculum against pupils’ wishes, and the children’s experiences “restricted”, making them “vulnerable to segregation and emotional dislocation from wider society”.
Separate reports into Oldknow and Park View, the two schools worst affected, found that an extremist, al-Qaeda-sympathising preacher had been invited to address children at Park View and that the curriculum had been restricted to “comply with a conservative Islamic teaching”.
Students following a non-Muslim course in one subject had to “teach themselves”, the report found, because the teacher focused attention on those following the Islamic course.
At Oldknow, Mr Khan was indeed reported to have made anti-Christian statements at assemblies. Christmas parties and the seasonal tree had been “stopped in the last year”, and at both schools there was forced gender segregation with girls put at the back of the class.
Subsidised trips had been organised from Oldknow to Mecca, music discouraged and contact with non-Muslims reduced or phased out.
In all, six schools would be placed into “special measures”, with their governors and leadership removed.
At the same time, across the city, Mrs Kondal, Oldknow’s headteacher, was confirming on the record for the first time that she was not on “sick leave”, but had “resigned against my will. I felt that I couldn’t carry on any longer. I’ve been really unhappy about what I’ve gone through.”
She spoke alongside several other Birmingham heads who described the pressure they had been put under by radical Muslim governors.
Ofsted’s judgment confirmed more than three months of reporting by The Telegraph, which, with the help of concerned staff, governors and parents in Birmingham – most of them Muslim – broke the main developments in the story.
Monday’s events came as a profound relief to many people, including Mohammed Zabar, father of a 10-year-old at Oldknow and one of few brave enough to go public about the problems. “I want to ensure that those involved can never be in a position to carry any influence in our schools ever again,” he says.
Mr Zabar’s courage has not been without cost – his daughter has been bullied at school and called a “Christian”, for which two pupils were suspended last week.
The other side, the schools and their supporters, have been much less hesitant about going on camera. They have attempted to shape the story as a debate between the “wishes” of parents in an overwhelmingly Pakistani-heritage area for their children to receive a conservative, faith-based education, and the “racist” or “Islamophobic” desire of the “neo-conservative” Education Secretary, Michael Gove, to do down successful schools because the pupils are Muslim.
Doug Morgan, president of the Birmingham National Union of Teachers, last week called the reports a “racist attack in our schools”. Pauline Geoghegan, of the “Hands Off Birmingham Schools” campaign, told the BBC that “Michael Gove and David Cameron, with their political ideology, do not want to see schools in Birmingham flourish”.
Why on earth would the Government not want schools to flourish? And if ministers and officials are racists now, why were they not so in 2012, when Ofsted and Mr Cameron praised several of the schools concerned?
The awkward truth for the schools is that they have indeed, as Sir Michael said, changed substantially since 2012. Mrs Kondal is not the only head to leave: the headteachers of the five other schools put into special measures have moved on, too, as well as senior staff (four out of six at Oldknow, for instance).
At Park View, the OBE-appointed executive head, Lindsey Clark, has been replaced by Mozz Hussain, who, according to former teacher Nigel Sloan, preached “mind-blowing” anti-US assemblies. Mr Hussain and his chairman of governors, Tahir Alam, the alleged ringleader of the plot, were conspicuously absent from the defence of their school last week.
As for claims that this “rapid turnover in governors and staff”, as Ofsted put it, was about raising the quality of education, many of those removed or forced out were those who brought the schools their high Ofsted ratings. And many of the people who replaced them, as this newspaper has reported, turned out to be close relatives of the plotters.
Nor does there seem to be clear evidence that Muslim parents in Birmingham were consulted about the transformation of their local secular comprehensives into highly conservative faith schools.
Alum Rock, where most of the schools are located, is almost entirely Muslim – but only about half of the people there go to the mosque every week and even those who are observant often follow a more liberal, inclusive version of the faith than that pushed in the schools.
People in Alum Rock, including many of The Sunday Telegraph’s sources, told us that they resented hardliners’ attempts to pigeonhole them by their faith. “Islam is part of my identity, but it’s only part,” said one father. “I want schools that don’t try to put my son in a box that says he’s a Muslim first and above everything else.”
The almost mono-racial nature of Alum Rock and its schools made it easier for the plot to remain under the radar. Many council officers and journalists mistakenly saw Alum Rock as monolithically conservative and religious, and wrongly took self-appointed representatives such as Mr Alam as a true reflection of his community.
For all the schools’ attempts to define the allegations as political extremism, there are, as our reporting has made clear, three separate strands of wrongdoing. There is clearly extremism in some of these schools, as Ofsted and the DfE found, but it is not the most important strand. The employment of relatives, the bullying and other dubious practices show another strand is simple, old-fashioned power-grabbing and nepotism.
But the most significant and worrying aspect is the promotion of an isolationist ideology. The problem highlighted by Trojan Horse is not really a security one, but a deep concern for community cohesion. As poll after poll tells us, the majority of British Muslims reject separatist views and support a mixed, plural society.
And if you live entirely among people of your own faith, it is even more important that you are exposed to other cultures at school, and that teachers from other backgrounds are not removed from your life. The children at these schools will not want to spend the rest of their lives in Alum Rock. They will want to go to university and into the wider world to mix with people of all races and faiths.
But the leading institutions of Muslim Britain are disproportionately dominated by people who take a much harder line. Sometimes publicly, sometimes only when they think no one’s looking, key mosques, charities, TV stations, university Islamic societies and private schools promote a separatist, grievance-led agenda, in which Islam is the only identity that matters, in which Muslims stand against corrupt Western values and are victimised for doing so.
And thanks to their work, the views of Muslims and non-Muslims are starting to diverge. As Britain’s non-Muslims become more secular and socially liberal, Muslims are gradually becoming more religious and socially conservative. Unless this trend can be reversed, it bodes badly for social cohesion.
Trojan Horse has been a significant defeat for the hardliners, pushing them back from expanding into the state education system and making it easier to block such attempts in future. It is likely also to lead to more assertive government action against the private Islamic schools that promote separatism and sometimes hatred.
It might, however, yet feed in to the radicals’ grievance and alienation agenda, if enough ordinary Muslims in Birmingham can be persuaded that the Government’s action is indeed an attack on them.
The early signs, for the radicals, have not been promising. A demonstration yesterday to “defend” the schools against “Islamophobic attacks” drew fewer than 100 people.
Genuine community leaders in Birmingham, such as the people running the main mosques, have mostly stayed out of the issue, despite concerted attempts by the plotters to drag them into it. Muslim politicians in the city have backed the Government.
“There is an acceptance that the governing bodies of Park View, Saltley and Nansen schools are not fit for purpose and their situation is untenable,” said Cllr Ansar Ali Khan, chairman of the city’s Hodge Hill district, which includes the three schools. “The local communities want the governing bodies replaced. We believe in locally led community schools where the focus should always be on the education, rather than the faith, of our children.”
Perhaps because it has been too brazenly deployed on this occasion, the race card, which has got Islamist radicals out of trouble so often in the past, appears at least for now to have lost its former power.
How We Watched the Plotters
Most of the key individuals in the Trojan Horse plot were part of a private discussion group called “Educational Activists” on the WhatsApp instant messaging site. Members included Mozz Hussain, head of Park View; Razwan Faraz, deputy head of Nansen; Shahid Akmal, chairman of governors at Nansen; Achmad da Costa, chairman of governors at Oldknow; other heads and governors; and the owner of an agency, Transform Training and Recruitment, which recruits hundreds of teachers to Birmingham schools.
Their leaked messages – which include anti-Semitic and Islamic supremacist statements by some members – have been a key source for this paper. In them, the “activists” pursue what Mr Faraz calls an “Islamising agenda” in Birmingham schools. In the words of another member, “the schooling babysitters, the Department of Education and Ofsted [should] be factors of [merely] incidental importance in the Prophetic endeavour to raise and educate our young people”.
Here are extracts of a sample conversation, from February 5 2014, in which members discuss how to “Islamise” Small Heath, a secular school that had rated “outstanding” and given a clean bill of health in the recent Ofsted inspections.
Samir Rauf, Teacher at Oldknow and governor at Small Heath: “Great news; at Small Heath school we have appointed Shanaz Khan as new head teacher from September. Was a hard battle but in the end decision was unanimous. Excellent for the children, and community… “
Nasim Awan, Governor at Springfield: “Great news. First agenda item is to apply for a determination [official permission to hold Islamic assemblies] which previous headteacher [the current secular head, Peter Slough, who is leaving] didn’t bother with for 25 years…"
Razwan Faraz, Deputy head at Nansen, leader of the group: “Collective worship shouldn’t be first on agenda. All middle and senior leaders are not Muslim. She has to establish herself with minimum controversy for first six months and lead the people [school staff] to believe in her before they believe in her policies…"
Samir Rauf: “My exact words to her Rizwan [sic]. However at macro governor level, ball needs to start rolling.”
Razwan Faraz: Not every conflict has to be a battle. Not every battle must be fought, sometime we got to lose the battle to win the war. She [Mrs Khan] is a very astute lady. She knows her game mashAllah [‘God has willed it’]. Please don’t pressurise her to start the Islamising agenda first, that will be a lot easier when she is respected as a leader… At the same time, she can’t be a coconut [ie a white person on the inside].”
Samir Rauf: “Since I’ve been there we’ve had no conflicts or battles at governor level as ALL were yes men [to the school leadership] going for their samosas and pakora [free snacks.] Until tonight. Dynamics have finally changed…"
Huda Aslam, new headteacher of Ladypool, criticised by Ofsted in recent inspections and accused by staff of Islamising her school: “Small Heath School is a true achievement. By the way, did you discuss my appointment [on this group] in this manner a bit too open[ly]?”