mark walters trojan horse

[4], These claims by witnesses were unsubstantiated. This was after the government had cited the Trojan Horse affair as justification for its new plans to counter extremism.[130]. [78][80] Christmas events were cancelled and raffles and tombolas were banned at a recent school fete because they were considered un-Islamic. The Greeks were laying siege to the city of Troy, and the war had dragged on for ten years. "[92], The report concluded that based on the examination of emails and correspondence: "There is incontrovertible evidence that both senior officials and elected members of Birmingham council were aware of activities that bear a striking resemblance to those described in the Trojan horse letter many months before it surfaced. No charges of extremism were put forward, only charges associated with 'undue religious influence'. [115], David Hughes, a trustee at Park View School, claimed that Ofsted's investigation of the school was biased, and dubbed the inspection a "witch hunt". [3][4] This reflects the views of the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society and included the description of a document intended to provide guidance about the needs of Muslim pupils in state schools as a "blueprint for Islamisation". ", 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. The contracts for the taxpayer-funded school trips never underwent a formal tender process, and instead a travel firm was used with close links to a current teacher and former director of the school. 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 school has a largely Muslim governing body. Ofsted subsequently expanded their investigation into schools in the north and south-east of England. This led the Panel to conclude that the matter had not been a misunderstanding, but that the transcripts were "deliberately withheld from disclosure". Case hearings in July and August 2015 took place to establish the nature of the charges to be put and evidence to be submitted (in the case of the senior teachers at PVET, the evidence file expanded from around 1,000 pages to 6,000 pages between the two meetings). The report found that attempts were made to introduce Sharia law in schools. Another teacher told the children that were "lucky to be Muslims and not ignorant like Christians and Jews". 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". banned from any involvement with schools,[10] while the bans against 14 other teachers were eventually overturned, dropped and/or dismissed in courts between 2016 and 2017. [27] As Holmwood and O'Toole show, neither the Kershaw Report nor the Clarke Report gave any attention to the schools improvement policies of Birmingham City Council or the Department for Education. The drawn out nature of the cases meant that there were no journalists present to report the detailed rebuttal of claims indicated above, for example of banning Christmas celebrations, or teacher handouts promoting the obligations on wives to consent to sex with their husbands. [28] This included a special concern with the achievement of pupils of Asian heritage, as set out in its "Asian heritage achievement action plan" of 19 December 2003. The decision to discontinue disciplinary proceedings was based on procedural grounds not on a shortage of evidence". [119], Tahir Alam, chair of governors at Park View and labelled by some newspapers as the "ringleader" of Operation Trojan Horse, resigned alongside all of his board of trustees on 15 July. She also said, "It is not just an academy problem, this was happening before we became an academy. 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." The pupils were told at an assembly not to send Christmas cards and that Mary was not the mother of Jesus. [12] West Midlands Police and the city council investigated whether the letter was a hoax and the plot had been concocted to support Adderley's school case at the employment tribunal. [102] Mahmood, said that he felt that it was certain that "Salafists" were attempting to change the school's secular nature and "split young people away from their parents". He has performed over 60 operatic roles in the standard There were posters in schools warning the children that if they did not pray, they would "go to hell". "[4] He conducted no interviews with governors or teachers who were accused of misconduct, with the exception of Tahir Alam. 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]. The study of French was replaced by Arabic. Teachers reported unfair treatment because of their gender or religious beliefs. [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. [124], In January 2022, a new podcast by The New York Times, The Trojan Horse Affair, cast many doubts on the multiple investigations and the version of events that emerged. The art curriculum was altered to "remove full faces or immodest images, such as paintings by Gustav Klimt". [60] Girls claimed to have been discriminated against and said some were sent home from a tennis tournament because their dress was too "revealing". The few pupils that elected to study a Christianity unit as part of the Religious Studies GCSE course had to "teach themselves", because the teacher focused on Islamic studies which the majority were studying. Her credibility was called into question by the NCTL Panel when discontinuing the case. Girls were taught they could not refuse sex with their husbands, and would be "punished" by angels "from dusk to dawn" if they did. 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. Children were urged to join in anti-Christian chants. Book Sport Policy and Politics in an Era of Austerity. [103], A play about the Trojan Horse affair and the injustices at its heart by LUNG Theatre (Helen Monks, co-writer; Matt Woodhead, co-writer and director) won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2018 and began a national tour in October 2019. [81], Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg also backed the investigation, stating that schools should not become "silos of segregation". [58] Governors at the school banned any discussions regarding sexual orientation and intimacy. 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. [20] Ian Kershaw, Head of Northern Education Trust in Newcastle, was named as its full-time special adviser.[52]. [94] In fact, this film was a BBC Panorama programme, a copy of which had been made at the request of West Midlands Police, to show at a session they were providing for the school on the dangers of radicalisation. WebThe Trojan Horse Affair raises a serious question that requires an answer. Book Sport Policy and Politics in an Era of Austerity. He claims he was pressured to ban sex education and the teaching of non-Muslim religions, and was dismissed in 2003 after he told prospective teachers to question the governors. [58], The EFA inspection found a classroom culture which was not welcoming to non-Muslim pupils. Michael Gove. He said that the efforts to instil fundamentalist practices into Birmingham classrooms were based on a "warped and abusive view of the religion". After the Trojans got within four, the Long Beach Poly product rattled off his own mini 7-0 run. Hamza Syed There was a fact checker on our team who said when he heard that scene, it brought a context that has largely been missing from what it actually means to be Muslim. In a discussion on 5 February 2014, a teacher at Oldknow and governor at Small Heath School, revealed that the group's favoured candidate had become the head teacher at Small Heath. The Kershaw and Clarke Reports provided no data on school performance in Birmingham or of the schools improvement programme which had shaken up schools following Sir Tim Brighouse's appointment. WebTottenhams Trojan Horse? 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". mark walters trojan horse. He said some of the witnesses had been very nervous and anxious. However, the report interviewed none of the teachers or governors against whom allegations were made with the single exception of Tahir Alam. [3] It found that a number of governors and senior teachers had been promoting a form of Islamism or Salafism. [83], An Ofsted inspection found that the Islamic school, which shares its premises with a mosque, had books in its library with content that had "no place in British 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. There was evidence from officials at the Department for Education responsible for managing the incorporation of schools into PVET, as well as initiating a memorandum of agreement between PVET and Oldknow (paragraph 123). Share. Nor did he report the evidence of the secretary to Birmingham Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) that the scheme of Islamic collective worship at Park View had been in place since 1996 and had been regularly reviewed since then, and that the school was teaching the agreed local curriculum on religious education, despite not being required to do so as academies. [72][73][74], Ofsted found that a small group of governors were "endeavouring to promote a particular and narrow faith-based ideology in what is a maintained and non-faith academy". [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". Alam remains[when?] 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 first opportunity to put their case came when professional misconduct cases were brought against them by the National College of Teaching and Learning (an independent agency of the Department for Education, now replaced by the Teaching Regulation Agency) in October 2015 and May 2017 when the case against the senior teachers collapsed because of "serious improprieties" by the legal team acting for the NCTL. [68][69] Two other senior teachers were also suspended. [26] Waseem Yaqub, former Head of Governors at Al-Hijrah school, called it "a McCarthy-style witch-hunt" and that the letter was used by councillors "to turn on [Muslims] and use Muslims as scapegoats". [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. 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