Operation Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse scandal, also known as "Operation Trojan Horse" or the Trojan Horse affair, involves claims of an alleged conspiracy that there was an organised attempt to introduce an " Islamist" or "Salafist" ethos into several schools in Birmingham, England. The name, based on the Greek legend, comes from an anonymous letter sent to Birmingham City Council in late 2013, alleged to be from Birmingham "Islamists" detailing how to wrest control of a school, and speculating about expanding the scheme to other cities. The letter was leaked to the press in March 2014. Around a month later, Birmingham City Council revealed that following the letter release it had received hundreds of allegations of plots similar to those described in the letter, some claims dating back over 20 years.

Tahir Alam, former chairman of the Park View Educational Trust which ran three schools in Birmingham, was alleged to have written a 72-page document for the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007 detailing a blueprint for the "Islamisation" of secular state schools, a claim that has been widely debunked. This document provided guidance about the religious needs and practices of Muslim parents and pupils that would facilitate their integration into schools. It was entitled ''Towards Greater Understanding: Meeting the Needs of Muslim Pupils in State Schools. Information and Guidance for Schools'' and is available as an appendix to the Kershaw Report. 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. It also provides useful information and guidance and features of good practice in meeting those needs."

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. Alam remains banned from any involvement with schools, while the bans against 14 other teachers were eventually overturned, dropped and/or dismissed in courts between 2016 and 2017. The allegations against the teachers were set out in the press and in the Kershaw and Clarke Reports. 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. 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.

In January 2022, ''The New York Times'' released an investigative podcast about the Trojan Horse scandal which characterized it as an "Islamophobic hoax" and compared it to ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'', a historical antisemitic hoax. In the podcast, the link between the Trojan Horse letter and the Headteacher of Adderley Primary School in Birmingham, Rizwana Darr, is explored and it is alleged that Darr is the real author of the Trojan Horse letter.

In December 2022 a report from right-leaning Policy Exchange challenged the findings of the New York Times podcast and suggested that various reports into the matter had uncovered real causes for concern. 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’.

Background

Ofsted inspections were undertaken into 21 schools in Birmingham, with the Education Funding Agency (responsible for academy schools) also investigating Park View Education Trust and Oldknow Academy. Ofsted said it had found evidence of an organised campaign to target certain schools by Islamists and that head teachers had been "marginalised or forced out of their jobs". 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. Another school investigated, Alston Primary, was already in special measures. A sixth school was labelled inadequate for its poor educational standards and twelve schools were found needing of improvements. Three schools were commended. Ofsted subsequently expanded their investigation into schools in East London, Bradford and Luton over concerns regarding a limited curriculum and pupils' detachment from the wider community.

Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw accused Birmingham City Council of a "serious failure" in supporting schools in protecting children from extremism. Its leader, Sir Albert Bore, said that the Council accepted the Ofsted findings that schools in the city were failing pupils. Birmingham City Council commissioned Ian Kershaw of Northern Education Trust in Newcastle to review the evidence. 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. The two inquiries shared evidence, with the Kershaw inquiry deferring matters of extremism to the Clarke inquiry. 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". The report found that senior council officials and elected members were apparently aware of these issues, but dealt with them on a case-by-case basis rather than making "any serious attempt to see if there was a pattern", though it is not clear whether this was due to "community cohesion",
an "issue of education management", or appeasement. Birmingham City Council imposed a temporary freeze on the appointment of school governors after probes into Operation Trojan Horse were announced. After the Trojan Horse affair, this was replaced by a new duty to promote "fundamental British values".

The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that "protecting our children asone of the first duties of government" and convened an emergency meeting of the Extremism Taskforce and a ministerial meeting to discuss the affair. He announced proposals to send Ofsted to any school without warning, saying that the schools in question had been able to stage a "cover-up" previously. The government terminated its funding arrangement with three of the schools. In the wake of the findings, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, announced that all schools in the country will have to promote British values of tolerance and fairness and said that teachers will be banned from the profession if they allow extremists into schools.

A number of governors and the Muslim Council of Britain dubbed the reaction of authorities to the plot a "witch-hunt". In protest of the investigations, Tahir Alam and several governors of affected schools resigned. 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. 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. 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. Indeed, neither the Kershaw Report, nor the Clarke Report asked the question of how a school could be taken over by governors and teachers. Under the academy schools programme, it could only be done with the active involvement of officials in the local authority (including over the transfer of assets to the new trust) and at the Department for Education and it would require an academically successful school to be the sponsor of 'failing' schools. Neither report addressed this, nor did they report any interviews with those officials and the minutes of the meetings that took place among senior leaders at the various schools.

Letter

The leaked letter on the alleged plot was reported by media including the BBC
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