[7][8] This document provided guidance about the religious needs and practices of Muslim parents and pupils that would facilitate their integration into schools. External speakers were improperly vetted. In 2012, head teacher Chris Robinson resigned, having felt that her reputation, integrity and leadership were being questioned by governors. Agent: Mark Walters - (772)-201-5650. He announced proposals to send Ofsted to any s Opera News describes veteran baritone Mark Walters as a force to be reckoned with as Don Carlo in La forza del destino. Once inside the network, attackers are able to carry out any action that a legitimate user could perform, such as exporting files, modifying data, deleting files or otherwise altering the contents of the device. [78] The EFA team concluded: "We saw evidence that Oldknow academy is acting as a faith school and is not making active efforts to make the academy attractive to all faith denominations including pupils of no faith. Although the school describes itself as "multi-faith", there are claims that the Islamic call to prayer is broadcast to the entire school. [43], Two anonymous members of staff at Park View School told BBC Radio 4 that school assemblies had praised Anwar al-Awlaki. The first opportunity for teachers to challenge the claims came when hearings against them for professional misconduct brought by the NCTL were begun in September 2015 over a year after the story about the affair first broke. "[57], At Park View School, Ofsted reported that "students are not taught citizenship well enough or prepared properly for life in a multi-cultural and diverse society". [47], Reverend John Ray, OBE, and ex-head teacher of a school in Pakistan, resigned as a governor of Golden Hillock School after 25 years. The malicious code can be injected on benign applications, masqueraded in e-mail links, or sometimes hidden in JavaScript pages to make furtive attacks against vulnerable internet Browsers. In addition, Park View had been designated a National Healthy School for its approach to Personal, Social and Health Education. [91] Another participant in the discussion said that "JEWS" (emphasis in original) were making websites with false information on the Quran, while Abdul Malik, Deputy Head of Golden Hillock in Bradford wrote "Al-Islam will prevail over all other ways of life. It appears that this wording troubled the Head of the Department for Education's Due Diligence and Counter Extremism Group, Hardip Begol. The school had spent 50,000 on three subsidised trips to Saudi Arabia so that pupils could visit the cities of Mecca and Medina in what the EFA described as "an extravagant use of public funds". [93], The investigation, however, did not find evidence of a "conspiracy" to promote "violent extremism or radicalisation" values.[19]. There are several things that a trojan can do, and one of its important features is, it remains in the users system secretly and does not let them find it. He said the government would be terminating its funding arrangement with three of the schools. Community cohesion and PREVENT: how have schools responded? "[4] [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. We have taken action to remove and continue to take action to remove people from being in schools who don't follow British values."[129]. [75] The school's curriculum was deemed inadequate because it did not promote tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions. [33], The letter also encouraged getting academy status for successfully infiltrated schools, so as to have a curriculum independent of the local education authority. Skilled Account Development Executive in areas of Insurances and Financial [34] The Guardian and The Independent both stated that the letter is "widely regarded as a fake". Other details can be found in Man-in-the-browser attack. [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. 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". Responsibility for determinations for academy schools passed to the Department for Education, but they put in place no measures for renewing determinations. [68][69] Two other senior teachers were also suspended. [7] Mahmood told Channel 4 that he did not believe that the investigation was Islamophobic, stating "Over 200 people complaining to the local authority about what's gone on and you can't really claim that it's a witch-hunt". The school had a determination from the local SACRE to provide Islamic collective worship since 1996. The reporter recorded a series of meetings with him which the Mirror alleged exposed Akmal as a "sexist, racist bigot". [51], Ofsted investigated in 21 schools in Birmingham in March 2014. [30] In it, responsibility was claimed for installing a new headteacher at four schools in Birmingham, and it highlighted 12 others in the city which would be easy targets due to large Muslim attendance and poor inspection reports. In addition, Park View had been designated a National Healthy School for its approach to Personal, Social and Health Education. The Trojan Horse scandal, also known as "Operation Trojan Horse" or the Trojan Horse affair, involves claims of an alleged conspiracy[1][2] that there was an organised attempt to introduce an "Islamist" or "Salafist" ethos into several schools in Birmingham, England. [126], Akmal said that jailing gay people and adulterers was a "moral position to hold" and that they should be exiled from the community. Across eight episodes, journalists Brian Reed and Hamza Syed sought to discover the author of the anonymous letter that triggered the scandal. Students were also told that it is un-Islamic to have a pet dog. Mark Panton and Geoff Walters (2019) Tottenhams Trojan Horse? WebThe Trojan Horse is one of historys most famous tricks. 25/05/2022; Posted by [105], The Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, Jim Fitzpatrick, warned of a 'Trojan Horse'-style Islamist plot to infiltrate councils in London. It also did not report any interviews with members of Birmingham Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) responsible for the agreed curriculum on religious education taught in local authority schools in Birmingham, and also responsible for approving deterninations of daily acts of collective worship for other than Christian worship. The way the letter is written it is like an outsider's perspective on how Muslims would communicate or talk. [4] Governors also restricted teaching topics which were part of the Department for Education's Prevent strategy, such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation. [54] Kerslake deferred issues of education to the Clarke and Kershaw Reports, but an appendix to his Report provided contextual data on poverty, adult education attainment, unemployment and school performance across comparator cities and for England as a whole. Responsibility for determinations for academy schools passed to the Department for Education, but they put in place no measures for renewing determinations. The Education Funding Authority conducted a parallel investigation. The report stated the messages evidenced that the group had "either promoted, or failed to challenge, views that are grossly intolerant of beliefs and practices other than their own". The school was one of those identified in the Kershaw and Clarke Reports, but no information about it was provided. A new podcast produced by Serial Productions and co-hosted by Hamza Syed and Brian Reed has shone a light on the sordid Trojan Horse Affair. In August 2014, the Principal Hardeep Saini was replaced by an interim principal. Unlike the teachers, the lawyers involved in serious impropriety were not subject to professional misconduct charges despite the cost of the hearings. mark walters trojan horse. Book Sport Policy and Politics in an Era of Austerity. [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. [58] Ofsted stated that the school had failed to protect students from "the risks of radicalisation and extremism". He said that Birmingham City Council had limited its process and terms of reference "in a way which excludes critical evidence", that it had employed "too narrow a definition of extremism" and that the governmental report had reached a very different set of conclusions by accessing a different evidence base. He has performed over 60 operatic roles in the standard ", The government's Department for Education initially responded to the scandal by banning Alam and 14 other teachers from the teaching profession for life in 2015. Responding to those claims, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said that there was no place for extremism in education, and there was still more work to be done to eradicate it. Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector at Ofsted, had commented at a national conference that "All schools should be like this and there's no reason why they shouldn't be. 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. [99], Governors resigned from Saltley School in protest after the Ofsted findings were released, stating that they doubted the inspectors' impartiality. The findings were quashed on grounds of serious procedural irregularities. Others were challenged in court before the case against the senior teachers was discontinued. The teachers were barred from responding to the allegations due to confidentiality orders as part of their employment contracts that were binding also after the suspension. [35][36] However, both the Kershaw Report and the Clarke Report organised their inquiries in terms of the 5-step plan described in the letter and following the publication of their reports, Birmingham City's education commissioner Sir Mike Tomlinson stated his belief that what the letter described was happening "without a shadow of doubt". [58] Governors at the school banned any discussions regarding sexual orientation and intimacy. [62] The deputy head of Nansen Primary School, Razwan Faraz, leads a group called the "Educational Activists" which he says introduces an "Islamising agenda" in Birmingham state schools. Four teacher assistants were suing the school for unfair dismissal after being forced out of the school with fake resignation letters signed in their names. He said that "the Trojan Horse in east London was a political one rather than an educational one" and spoke of racial politics taking hold. The New York Times podcast "The Trojan Horse Affair" uncovered this secret document that disproves one of the central allegations of the Trojan Horse letter, that there was a conspiracy against the headteacher of Adderley primary school. 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. [88] This showed that most schools conflated the two and did not have teachers trained in the Prevent duty. However, because some of the schools were academies under the responsibility of the Department for Education, the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove, commissioned a separate report by Peter Clarke, the former head of the Metropolitan police's counterterrorism command. 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. There were posters in schools warning the children that if they did not pray, they would "go to hell". The latter piece concluded that in the present system, the schools investigated could have registered themselves as faith schools and been allowed to teach Islamic values with permission from the state. Additionally, students were expected to fast during the month of Ramadan. [50], The Educational Funding Authority, Ofsted, and Birmingham City Council agreed to investigate the letter, although West Midlands Police decided that it was not a matter for them. [20] After the Trojan Horse affair, this[clarification needed] was replaced by a new duty to promote "fundamental British values". Adderley primary school is at the centre of the podcast's investigations. The Panel had been ready to announce its decision in the case on 23 December 2016, but an urgent application for disclosure, relating, in part, to transcripts associated with the Clarke Report, was made by defence lawyers on 24 November 2016. Information and Guidance for Schools and is available as an appendix to the Kershaw Report. [25], A number of governors and the Muslim Council of Britain dubbed the reaction of authorities to the plot a "witch-hunt". Click here to navigate to parent product. One EFA inspector went on to become educational adviser to Peter Clarke. He denied all allegations against him.[27]. 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. "[49], In Bradford, teachers reported instances of governors imposing an Islamic ethos. Altogether the documents that were deemed to be relevant amounted to about 1600 pages. [62], Forced segregation of the genders was observed in some classes at Golden Hillock and was mandated in some departmental policy documents. [93] The report said that the extremism went unchallenged as the council prioritised community cohesion over "doing what is right". Instead, the report concluded, the council was focused on community cohesion. Share. [104], In May, David Blunkett announced that if in government again, the Labour Party would appoint an 'Independent Director of School Standards' with the power to monitor academies: "In April 2014, the alleged Operation Trojan Horse in Birmingham demonstrated the difficulties that have arisen from this 'absence of transparency'". [19], In an incident that was referred to counter-terrorism police, a teacher told the pupils at the Golden Hillock school "not to listen to Christians as they were all liars". The charge of failure to disclose documents from the main hearing against senior teachers in other hearings, however, indicated a possibility of a similar failure on the part of NCTL to fulfil its obligations of disclosure in the hearing against senior leaders. [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. [26] In protest of the investigations, Tahir Alam and several governors of affected schools resigned. It said evidence pointed to a group of "British male governors and teachers, predominantly of Pakistani heritage". WebThe Trojan Horse Affair raises a serious question that requires an answer. [5] Its leader, Sir Albert Bore, said that the Council accepted the Ofsted findings that schools in the city were failing pupils. Assistant principal Lee Donaghy, a self-declared agnostic, said that the school was achieving more by "accommodating" Muslim practices, but called it "pernicious" the idea "that people running the school are trying to force more religion on these kids than the parents want". [48] Reverend Ray claimed that in the 1990s, when John Major was Prime Minister, he made the government aware of Islamists from Hizb ut-Tahrir becoming involved at his school. [2], The report commissioned by Birmingham City Council and compiled by former head teacher, Ian Kershaw, concluded that school governors and teachers had tried to promote and enforce radical Islamic values and found evidence of extremism in 13 schools. [58], The EFA inspection found a classroom culture which was not welcoming to non-Muslim 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' ". [29] The letter described pressure being put on the head teacher at Regents Park school, a school judged to be outstanding and "planting the seed of her cheating". The Trojan Horse was a clever idea that turned the tide of the war in favor of the Greeks. [114] He later said that the Council accepted the Ofsted findings that schools in the city were failing pupils. As noted above, governors and teachers accused in the various investigations were given no opportunity to respond to the allegations and the claims made in the various reports were not subject to independent scrutiny until misconduct charges were brought by the NCTL against teachers associated with Park View Education Trust. Mr Kershaw stated that the council had been "slow to respond" to allegations in the letter and said there was "culture within of not wanting to address difficult issues and problems with school governance" for risk of incurring accusations of racism or Islamophobia. He found "very clear evidence" that young people were encouraged to "accept unquestionably a particular hardline strand of Sunni Islam that raises concerns about their vulnerability to radicalisation in the future". It interviewed Mohammed Zabar, a Muslim parent who wrote to the Prime Minister in December 2013 about the lack of cultural balance in the curriculum at his daughter's school, Oldknow. The latter found that there is "no evidence to suggest that there is a problem with governance generally" nor any "evidence of terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism in the schools of concern in Birmingham", but said that there was "evidence that there are a number of people, associated with each other and in positions of influence in schools and governing bodies, who espouse, sympathise with or fail to challenge extremist views", and that there had been "co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained" attempts "by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos" into "a few schools in Birmingham". [44] He accused Tahir Alam, chairman of the Park View Educational Trust, of "planning this for 15 years" and honing in Birmingham tactics that he had drafted in his 72-page document, published by the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007, on how to subvert schools to fundamentalist Islam. [4], These claims by witnesses were unsubstantiated. Imprint Routledge. [58], The government ordered an inspection of the Olive Tree school following comments by its head, Abdul Qadeer Baksh, that in an ideal Islamic state, homosexuality would be punishable by death. The investigation found that "terms such as condom, the pill and so forth have been banned" and that governors had insisted on an Islamic approach to subjects, such as Personal, Social and Health Education, science, religious education, and sex and relationships education. The choice of modern language teaching had been restricted to the study of Arabic or Urdu at several schools. Indeed, in presenting his charges, Clarke commented that "it is only fair to point out that the Trust disputed most, if not all, of the allegations". [126], Akmal was recorded saying that "white women have the least amount of morals" and since women were "emotionally weaker" than men, their role was to look after children and the home. Three cases against junior teachers were heard separately from that against the senior leadership team at PVET. [86], The investigation found there to be "no evidence to suggest that there is a problem with governance generally" nor any "evidence of terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism in the schools of concern in Birmingham", but said there was "evidence that there are a number of people, associated with each other and in positions of influence in schools and governing bodies, who espouse, sympathise with or fail to challenge 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. He said that the "colonial blood" within white people was "very difficult to get rid of that very quickly", as British people "still think they rule half the world". 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