Gove’s Trojan Horse: or how a neocon has infiltrated our schools
Stuart King from Lambeth Left Unity examines the media storm around supposed Islamic extremism in Birmingham schools
When the so-called Trojan Horse document surfaced in March revealing a “Jihadist Plot” to take over schools in Birmingham, the media went into overdrive. Apparently Islamic extremists were taking over governing bodies, driving out head teachers and turning our schools into hotbeds of terrorism and worse.
Despite the fact that most people in the know believed this document to be a fake, no less than five different inquiries were launched. The Education Minister Michael Gove led the charge by appointing an “anti-terrorism expert” to lead one, just in case anyone was in any doubt about the seriousness of the threat to our way of life.
Ofsted, pliant tool of the state that it is, was told to revisit the schools that 11 months previously it had rated as “outstanding” and find evidence of extremism (and apparently, if leaks to the Guardian are to be believed, sent back when their first drafts weren’t damning enough).
Sure enough last week Ofsted came up with the required reports having inspected 21 Birmingham schools. Five schools that were rated “good” or “outstanding” were now rated as “inadequate”; they and one other were put into “special measures”. Four of these run by Academy Trusts had their funding withdrawn within 24 hours by Gove’s department and will be transferred to other trusts.
Ofsted’s findings
What were the charges levelled against these Birmingham Schools? Did Ofsted find Jihadist training camps, Madrassa style education, girls consigned to Burkas and Niqabs in separate buildings? Not quite. They found Governors seeking “inappropriate influence on policy and the day to day running of schools”, they found the curriculum was “too narrow” and pupils were “not prepared well enough for life in modern Britain”. Also schools had not done enough to “safeguard” pupils against extremism – on the internet for example, and teaching about relationships and sex education “was poor”.
Anecdotes were seized on by the media, an “Islamic extremist” was allowed into one school to speak on … time management, Tombola was objected to at a school fete as gambling, music was objected to in one class during Ramadan (although singing went ahead), girls sat separately during a picnic, an expensive trip was organised to Saudi Arabia – not one to sell arms that no doubt would have been the subject of congratulation!
Whether any or all these things should or should not have happened in state schools, what is clear is that in terms of a “Jihadi plot to take over Birmingham schools” they actually amount to a hill of beans.
Gove the neocon
What we in fact have here is a sustained anti-Islamic witch-hunt launched by a neoconservative Education Secretary supported by his friends in the right wing media. Gove’s extremist neocon views even led to a clash with Teresa May. He demanded that the Home Office combat conservative Islamic views even if they posed no threat of lawbreaking or Jihadi violence. It was a case of “draining the swamp” as he typically put it, of making clear that Islamic views in general were dangerous and needed to be dealt with.
It is instructive to compare Gove’s open Islamophobia with his attitude to the Christian sects within the faith school sector. In 2011 he declared that “by becoming an academy, a Catholic school can place itself permanently out of range of any unsympathetic meddling and so ensure that it can remain true to its Catholic traditions.” On being challenged by the TUC in 2012 that literature being used in Catholic schools was homophobic, he ruled that the Equality Act “did not apply to the curriculum” and that therefore these schools could go on discriminating in their sex and relationship lessons.
This Islamophobia is familiar to anyone who has read that US bible of neoconservatism, “A Clash of Civilisations” which sees the next great struggle after the defeat of the Soviet Union as the struggle between Christian enlightened democracy and a fanatical Islam. It is therefore no surprise that Gove has turned the whole Trojan Horse affair into a campaign for “British values” in schools, a new version, for those with long memories, of Norman Tebbit’s infamous “cricket test” for Asians, who could only prove they were really worthy of being British by supporting “our cricket team”.
Religion and schools
Clearly there were problems in some schools in Birmingham in relation to religion, and some governors and teachers desired to impart their particular religious views and practices into the daily life of their schools. Tory politicians and Ofsted have said that the problem is that they overstepped the line because these were not “faith schools”, suggesting that had they been, this sort of pressure would have been “acceptable”.
Indeed what they are recognising is that this is exactly what happens in faith schools where for example the Catholic Church exercises these practices on a daily basis without anyone ever raising an eyebrow. The position of religion in schools is at the heart of these problems yet no party in Parliament dare deal with it.
Labour’s response has been to avoid the issue, choosing to highlight Cabinet infighting, delays in taking action and Gove’s expansion of Academies and Free Schools resulting in atomisation and lack of local control of schools. Labour’s alternative is not to abolish Academies and Free Schools and bring back these schools under democratic local council control but to construct yet another layer of bureaucracy via “Local School Commissioners”.
They also fail to tackle the issue that is at the heart of what is going on in Birmingham and across the country, which is the place of religion in state funded education. A British education system that allowed the Christian sects – C of E, Catholic, Non-Conformist – a large degree of control over our schools is now being extended to many other religions and communities. One unintended consequence of New Labour’s and now the Tory/Lib Dem drive to dismantle municipal control of education as a precursor to privatisation of the school system has been growing religious/community control of schools.
The disastrous segregated and sectarian religious education system that exists in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland, one that has resulted in so much division and sectarian violence, is in danger of being extended across multiple communities across Britain, as Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs demand “equality” with the Christians.
For socialists who seek to unite and integrate all religious and cultural communities within the working class, secular education that removes religious faith teaching from our schools is an absolute must. Religion is and must remain a private matter for individuals.
This does not mean that we ban religion from schools but that we ensure that where religion is taught it is done in a historical and comparative context. Of course religious belief and practices must be respected, with prayer rooms provided in schools, dietary provision made available, and religious dress allowed, but religion as faith must be removed from the curriculum and from normal school hours. Instead all religions should be allowed to use school premises outside school hours on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays to teach and pursue voluntary religious education at their own expense, not at the expense of the tax-payer.
This way schools can be used for what they are supposed to be for, to educate pupils in the broadest possible sense without becoming a battleground for religious sectarianism or for those politicians like Michael Gove to use to stoke up prejudice against minority religions and communities.
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7 responses to “Gove’s Trojan Horse: or how a neocon has infiltrated our schools”
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The absolutely vital point of principle for socialists arising from the welter of confusion and misrepresentation in the mass media about the claimed “Trojan Horse schools conspiracy” in Birmingham, is the point you make very well in two sentences, Stuart, namely:
“For socialists who seek to unite and integrate all religious and cultural communities within the working class, secular education that removes religious faith teaching from our schools is an absolute must. Religion is and must remain a private matter for individuals.”
It is too easy, and many socialists have fallen right into this trap, to confuse general support for a Muslim community subjected to witch hunting, with support for the completely indefensible, ie religion-based schools – whether run by Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc. It is quite true that specifically C of E, Catholic, and Jewish schools have operated for generations – though at least previously under the nominal oversight of local authority education departments . Nevertheless, this was fundamentally wrong then , for the unbiased, non-sectarian, education of young minds – and its still wrong now. We must have a LU policy commitment for a completely secular education system.
Not that supposedly “non denominational” state education was ever unproblematic. I well remember the deeply Christian headmaster of my provincial state grammar school way back in the 1960’s assuring us (100% white, 100% C of E) all male pupils at school (religious) assembly at the time of the disastrous Bangladeshi storms and flooding of circa 1968, that the way to help the (Muslim) Bangladeshi victims wasn’t to drop food aid ,” but what was needed was mass airdrops of BIBLES”. A true story. Even as a young naïve grammar school boy I remember at the time thinking this just a tad dodgy.
“We must have a LU policy commitment for a completely secular education system.”
Absolutely.
Hear hear. I will raise this in the education working group.
PS If we get this agreed as policy let’s build links with the British Humanist Association (BHA) which is the main body promoting secular schooling in the UK.
500 at the Putting Birmingham School Kids First campaign launch rally
The Putting Birmingham School Kids First campaign was launched last night with a huge public rally of at least 500 people (according to ITN News). In the two and a half hour meeting the main speakers included NUT deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney, Birmingham Labour MP Shabana Mahmood, Shabina Bano of the Oldknow parents campaign, Tim Brighouse, former Chief Education Officer for Birmingham (on video), and Salma Yaqoob, ex-Respect leader and former Birmingham councillor. It is Salma who has played the leading role in creating this broad and inclusive campaign. There followed a series of short speeches from the platform including from community activists, Labour councillors (and one LibDem), and Birmingham NUT.
Speakers were united in rejecting the Trojan Horse allegations of a Muslim extremist plot and Gove’s exploitation of them to attack the Muslim community in Birmingham with biased Ofsted inspections. There was a strong sense of Birmingham’s identity as a multicultural city built by successive waves of immigration and determined to resist racist divisions. The campaign recognises that there are some governance problems in some schools, but those should be dealt with by the community in Birmingham, not by a politically-motivated assault by government.
In my short contribution I made two points. The first was about the policy tools which Gove has used to put his Islamophobic attack into practice. There are three. First, his unprecedented dictatorial powers as secretary of state. Second, his use of Ofsted as an arm of government policy, not an independent and supportive evaluator of schools. Third, creating a situation in which governors are unaccountable to the local community through a combination of the academies policy and the disempowering of local authorities. These are policies which the Labour leadership should commit itself to reversing – but so far has given no sign of doing so.
My second point concerned the next steps for the campaign. The huge attendance at the meeting makes clear that there is the desire and the opportunity to seize the initiative from Gove and create our own shared vision of what a high quality socially just education would be, through an ongoing dialogue between parents, teachers and the local community. Not stigmatised schools in a stigmatised community but a model which other schools and communities across the city and beyond (where problems of unaccountable governance can also occur) can learn from.
The local authority should be part of this new partnership, but they have to change. The city council has set up its own inquiry into the Trojan Horse allegation, due to report in a month, but the Review members don’t include any representatives of parents, or of the local community, or of teachers and other school workers and their unions. The council needs to follow up the Review by creating an open, inclusive and democratic forum within which the dialogue the community wants can take place over the coming months, generating plans for action. Will the council be prepared to do this? (I asked the councillor responsible for ‘social cohesion’ last night but he had no answer.) If the council won’t take a lead the Putting Birmingham School Kids First campaign will need to do it itself.
These are the sorts of practical and political issues that the campaign will need to discuss now that the initial launch has demonstrated that it has mass support.
There is one other step that needs to be taken: to turn Gove’s attack on Birmingham into an attack at the national level on Gove’s education policies which have enabled it: dictatorial central control, an inspection system that urgently needs reform, a system of school governance that, in Tim Brighouse’s words, is broken, the abuse of academy freedom, the disempowering and in some cases virtual incapacity of local authorities (taking up the call by the Local Government Association for their restoration), and the place of religion in schools. There is a proposal that the NUT could take the lead in organising a conference on that basis in the autumn.
Richard Hatcher
Birmingham LU
Here, FYI, is the launch statement of the Birmingham campaign.
PUTTING BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL KIDS FIRST
The central allegation, that there was an organized plot to radicalise school children in a handful of Birmingham schools, remains unproven. What the OFSTED reports show is some governance issues in some schools.
In order to fix these problems we need greater clarity about the issues these investigations have revealed. This needs to be done without the sensationalist references to extremism and national security that we have seen so far which have caused confusion and concern across the city and country. Many people now believe that their children’s educational potential, achievement and well-being is being threatened by politicians, who wish to be seen as ‘tough’ on Muslims.
This approach has been deeply unhelpful, hurtful and insulting, and most importantly could prevent us finding the solutions we need to help school children in Birmingham.
The Putting Birmingham School Kids First campaign aims to:
1. Make sure that any issues of governance within Birmingham schools are fixed and fixed fast.
2. Challenge the false and divisive allegation that this is a problem of systematic radicalization, extremism or terrorism.
We will work with anyone who is willing to put the interests of our children first. But the starting point has to be a true understanding of the problem. Many people have serious concerns about the impartiality of OFSTED and feel there was a climate of fear surrounding their investigations. But even their 21 investigations did not reveal a link to radicalisation. We share the view of West Midlands Chief Constable that the appointment of a counter-terrorism expert to investigate our schools was a provocative and unhelpful move.
The Muslim community is no different to any other faith community in having a spectrum of opinions, from liberal to conservative, on what is the correct balance between secular and religious values in the provision of education. Instead of debating these issues openly, the government has taken the completely inappropriate approach of linking this with the prevention of terrorism.
Workable solutions will not appear overnight. Trust has broken down between those who should be working together. Our role in the journey is to provide parents, staff, pupils and governors a strong forum within which to voice their opinions about the issues raised over the last few months and to give their views about whether proposed solutions will work – in a safe and transparent space.
We want solutions that ensure our school children receive a top quality education that prepares them to be engaged and active citizens. There are already many cases of outstanding practice in Birmingham, these need to be acknowledged and adopted more widely. We are proud that Birmingham is among the youngest and most multi-cultural cities in the world and stand by its people in all their diversity.
Signed: Tim Brighouse (Former Education Commissioner), Shabana Mahmood MP, Christine Blower (NUT General Secretary), Salma Yaqoob (Convenor), Dr Chris Allen (Birmingham University), Revd Ray Gaston, (Anglican Priest), Father Oliver Coss, and many others….
“Of course religious belief and practices must be respected, with prayer rooms provided in schools, dietary provision made available, and religious dress allowed (…) Instead all religions should be allowed to use school premises outside school hours on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays to teach and pursue voluntary religious education at their own expense”
This is totally against socialist values. Schools should only be used for secular educational purposes. “Prayer rooms”! The school building used for religious purposes outside school hours! Definitely not, and completely unnecessary.