Senior leaders did not ensure "balanced views of the world" were taught and that "contact with different cultures, faiths and traditions is too limited to promote tolerance and respect for the views, lifestyles and customs of other people". [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. ", It said that the council had been aware of the extremist activities as early as the end of 2012, and that discussions had taken place between officials as early as July 2013, half a year before the emergence of the Trojan Horse letter. [7][8] This document provided guidance about the religious needs and practices of Muslim parents and pupils that would facilitate their integration into schools. In May, Mark Rogers, Birmingham City Council's Chief Executive, had a meeting with head teachers of affected schools. A sixth school was labelled inadequate for its poor educational standards and twelve schools were found needing of improvements. [23], Former Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the Trojan Horse plot was driven by the same Islamic extremism as that of Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group. Following a forensic report by a handwriting expert for the tribunal that strongly suggested the signatures were fraudulent, Birmingham City Council advised Adderley's leadership not to fight the claims and withdrew the usual indemnity granted to council-run schools. ", Peter Clarke, former counterterrorism chief, conducted the investigation which gathered and examined 2,000 documents and generated 2,000 pages of interview transcripts from 50 witnesses, including former headteachers, teachers, council staff and school governors. [2] They described the Trojan Horse affair as a "false narrative" spread by a hostile British press which led to "a serious miscarriage of justice" against the teachers, drawing comparisons to the Hillsborough affair. [9] The introduction of the document states that the "purpose is to promote greater understanding of the faith, religious and cultural needs of Muslim pupils and how they can be accommodated within schools. However, she admitted that senior staff had warned her not to let pupils dance to pop or Bollywood music. [85] The governors of the school were sacked in April because of inappropriate interference in the running of the school. An alleged Trojan Horse plotter claims the Nazis could have killed as few as 100,000 Jews. The rush to set up the hearings in July and August 2015 (prior to the Conservative Party conference in September) provided little time for the preparation of the case for the defence prior to the start of the hearings in contrast to the long-drawn-out nature of the proceedings once they had started. 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". First Published 2019. Arrangements for the hearings were deeply unsatisfactory, with four separate cases brought against different groups of teachers associated with PVET and one other school, Oldknow Academy (which it transpired had a Memorandum of Understanding with PVET, signed at the behest of the Department for Education). [4], The investigation obtained 3,000 messages, spanning 130 pages of transcripts, of a private WhatsApp discussion between a group of teachers at Park View School called the Park View Brotherhood. [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. [2], Golden Hillock School, Nansen Primary School, Park View Academy all run by the Park View Educational Trust Oldknow Academy and Saltley School were placed in special measures after inspectors found systemic failings including the schools having failed to take adequate steps to safeguard pupils against extremism. Creationism was taught as fact in school assemblies and science lessons at both Park View and Golden Hillock. [29] It encouraged parents to complain about the school's leadership with false accusations of sex education, forced Christian prayer and mixed physical education, with the aim of obtaining a new leadership of Islamists. It tries to deceive the user to load and execute the files on the device. The art curriculum was altered to "remove full faces or immodest images, such as paintings by Gustav Klimt". [4], Student ambassadors, known as "religious police" by some staff, are appointed at Park View to report "the names of staff or students who exhibit behaviours deemed unacceptable by conservative Muslims". The letter was leaked to the press in March 2014. [90] Nasim Awan, a governor at Springfield, said that the "first agenda item" should be to apply for Islamic assemblies at the secular school. [24], Members of Parliament of all three major parties in Birmingham wrote a joint letter for an inquiry. This was after the government had cited the Trojan Horse affair as justification for its new plans to counter extremism.[130]. [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. It effectively ended the war, demonstrating the ingenuity of the Greeks. [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. [114] He later said that the Council accepted the Ofsted findings that schools in the city were failing pupils. " 'Trojan Horse' schools: the leaked inspectors' report". Telegraph Blogs. Archived from the original on 23 April 2014. ^ Gilligan, Andrew (9 March 2014). "Extremists and the 'Trojan Horse' approach in state schools". The Telegraph. ^ "Trojan Horse leaked report says pupils 'not protected from extremism' ". In addition, Park View had been designated a National Healthy School for its approach to Personal, Social and Health Education. He said that its conclusions did not reflect the full reality in schools, and that discrepancies between this and the governmental report were "regrettable and unhelpful". [citation needed], An investigation ordered by the government found a "sustained, co-ordinated agenda to impose segregationist attitudes and practices of a hardline, politicised strain of Sunni Islam" in several Birmingham schools. is for sale online, in a number of independent bookshops, including one in Seattle, and in a major bookshop chain in London. The study of French was replaced by Arabic. Media reporting expressed alarm that the transcripts were those of 'whistleblowers' who had provided statements under terms of confidentiality.[132]. He noted that in Tower Hamlets, a borough in which 32 per cent of the population is Bangladeshi, the Tower Hamlets First Party, of which the Mayor was a member, had 18 councillors who were all Bangladeshi, and 17 of them were men. This had been initiated by Sir Tim Brighouse, who had been Chief Education Officer in Birmingham between 1993 and 2002, and was highly critical of the 2014 Ofsted reports and the subsequent inquiries. Book Sport Policy and Politics in an Era of Austerity. [64] The Ofsted report stated that "students' understanding of other religions is scant as the religious education curriculum focuses primarily on the study of Islam"[65] and said there was a "perceived unfairness and lack of transparency" over appointments to the school and that female members of staff had felt intimidated. A member of staff at Park View also alleged that the school had handed out worksheets stating that wives can not refuse to have sex with their husbands, a claim that the school denied. However, it transpired that, just before the Panel was due to rule on 3 May 2017 on an application by the defence lawyers to discontinue, the NCTL presented a note from their solicitors. Akmal criticised female politicians, saying: "She has to sacrifice her family, she has to sacrifice her children, she has to sacrifice her husband, all in the name of equality." [5][15][16] Golden Hillock School, Nansen Primary School, Park View School all run by the Park View Educational Trust Oldknow Academy and Saltley School were placed in special measures after inspectors found systemic failings including the schools having failed to take adequate steps to safeguard pupils against extremism. Children were banned from playing musical instruments and drama lessons were dropped from the schedule. [13] The report was prefaced with a foreword from Policy Exchange founder Michael Gove, a former Secretary of State for Education, who called The New York Times journalists useful idiots. Other details can be found in Man-in-the-browser attack. Three schools were commended. A detailed discussion of the evidence presented in the NCTL case is provided in chapter 9 of John Holmwood and Therese O'Toole's book on the Trojan Horse affair. [56][bettersourceneeded], Park View academy had been identified as outstanding in a 2012 Ofsted report, the first school to be inspected under a tougher new inspection regime introduced by then Secretary of State. Government officials and policy advisers, as well as journalists previously involved in the case, rushed to announce that the cases had collapsed on a 'technicality'. [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. The inspection said that "too little is done to keep students safe from the risks associated with extremist views". 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. 25/05/2022; Posted by [18] The council's Chief Executive, Mark Rogers, said that there was no plot, but that "new communities" had raised "legitimate questions and challenges" to the "liberal education system". However, what was at issue also included other documents outside the Clarke Report that had potentially been relevant to the case. [58] Ofsted found that "the governing body has removed some subjects, such as music, from the timetable". It found that non-Muslim staff were banned from assemblies in which the children were preached at and told that white women were "prostitutes". It also provides useful information and guidance and features of good practice in meeting those needs. Staff wishing to discuss LGBT matters were lambasted by governors. [113] Pieces in The Guardian included criticism of the academy system,[121] and demands that all state schools be made secular. [58] Governors at the school banned any discussions regarding sexual orientation and intimacy. The Trojans believed the horse was a peace offering and dragged it inside their city. [19] It found evidence that the "five steps" to destabilise a school's leadership, as outlined in the original Trojan Horse letter, were "present in a large number of the schools considered part of the investigation". They built a wooden horse, which they left outside the city. 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".
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