The mess left by the Trojan Horse

The Peter Clarke report into the Trojan Horse allegations in Birmingham schools is an impressive piece of investigative work marred by some wishy-washy recommendations. But it deserved more than it got from the new Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan in the Commons.

The overall impression everyone is left with is that something nasty happened in only a handful of schools, and that Birmingham City Council could have done something about it earlier. The City Council has, broadly speaking, taken that on the chin, on the grounds that it could have been worse. Peter Clarke has pulled his punches in terms of putting things right, so that the Academies programme and the Department for Education (DfE) have got off lightly, and no one has lit any fires for UKIP to fan the flames of.

The government has succeeded in pushing the report down the news agenda so that, today, it is overtaken by the end of the school term. But the underlying problems won’t go away.

The first big issue is the chain of accountability in schools – especially in academies. There is no doubt at all from the report that governing bodies were infiltrated and they then put unacceptable pressure on some headteachers. There was a strategy, whether articulated or not, to replace headteachers with ‘good’ Muslims, to introduce Islamic religious education, to foster gender separation and to impose a model of Islamic culture which might well be considered extreme in terms of what we consider to be accepted social values. What is shocking is how easily this was done.

Governing bodies have a considerable amount of power over headteachers, curriculum and finance but their responsibilities are not well understood. The notion of representation is woolly and local authorities have minimal influence on their direction of travel. In academies, local authorities realistically have no influence at all but neither does anyone else. At the heart of this affair was a multi-academy trust without any political or community oversight, which veered towards religious extremism without any external control and took many schools along with it through encouraging activism and not allowing dissent.

It is no use blaming the City Council that has been overwhelmed by a political rhetoric that stated that schools were in control. Meanwhile, academies have been cut free from any oversight that bites on them and their activities. When this allowed the catholic academies to overlook sex education and the fundamentalist academies to teach creationism in science there was a bit of minor tut-tutting but no-one did anything – that’s a shame in hindsight.

The second big issue is to do with the nature of faith schools and the historical accidents that explain why we have them. There is a difficult line to be drawn between schools that are exclusively religious, and typically independent, and those that are maintained by taxpayers while still being affiliated to religions. People are used to them and parents like them (largely because they are better equipped to exclude antisocial pupils) but the French do very well without them and in many other countries the idea that you teach religious belief as if it is true in schools would be seen as bizarre. The faith school sector is inescapably part of the problem.

And, the third issue is to do with collective worship and compulsory religious education. Compulsory religious assembly and the teaching of religious education is tolerated by many parents with no religious belief as being essentially harmless but there is plenty of evidence that in some faith schools and in other faith-linked maintained schools it goes further than many would like. The argument some Muslims propose, that if it is okay for the Church of England kids to get their own form of RE, then it is okay for them, is a hard one to counter in any principled way.

As the icing on the cake, GCSE examinations in this area have leaned over backwards to be pluralist – not as a recognition of multicultural Britain but more to do with income – but the choices provided have allowed Jewish schools and Catholic schools to limit the study of other faiths. The Muslim schools in Birmingham which sent the handful of students studying anything but Islam to work in another room on their own was following an established path.

Where do we go from here? The DfE is now creating regional commissioners who will have some view of academies but that will not address the questions of where and how these schools are accountable and where local community and taxpayer oversight is located. In the Commons, Nicky Morgan talked about more training for governors and reporting requirements for local authorities but such steps do not address the structural issues involved and they would not have slowed this Trojan Horse.

As for addressing the bigger questions around faith schools and academies, no one wants to take those on board the moment. The original Trojan Horse document was not just a manifesto for schools in Birmingham but an invitation to sections of the Bradford Islamic community to go in the same direction. If politicians don’t do anything about it, they just might.