The Hunt for Classroom Extremists

This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today.

We'll smoke them out of thehr holes and get them running.

Muslims here say they are bding branded as extremists.

Often, we're under attack.

We're feeling marginalised.

Looks like an explosion.

A callous attack on purely hnnocent members of the public.

The EDL says its members ard simply voicing their opposition

to Muslim extremism.

I was born here and I am as much British as any other white person

that lives in this country.

The process behind Trojan Horses is simple.

Step one, identify schools that are based in Muslim areas.

Step two, select a group of parents.

Step three, put your own Governor in.

Step four, identify key staff to disrupt the school from within.

And step five, anonymous letter and PR campaign.

Those were the steps that were followed at my school.

There is the agenda.

The problem of Islamist extremism in our schools is serious.

The Trojan Horse... Everyone now knows it was a hoax.

This was done as part of a witchhunt.

My reaction was that they did not uncover a lot.

Got about 20 minutes, 25 minutes to think about all

the successes that have happened this week in school

and who we want to say well done to.

We have 739 children on roll currently.

And, at the moment, about 92% of those children are Muslil.

Most of those children have Pakistani heritage,

some Bangladeshi, a few Somalian and a few Yemeni.

I think any head teacher is concerned about any kind

of extremism, because you c`n have extremism, extreme views,

extreme behaviour in any school in this country.

It is not confined to certahn areas of the country at all.

I joined Park View in 1983 and my role was head of mathematics.

The culture of the children was important.

But you should not allow ond culture to dominate over another culture.

Things started to change in '97

We had a meeting of the full governing body, and the chahr

was challenged by a governor with the words of,

what are you doing sitting there?

You have no right to be Chair of Governors.

And immediately following that, Tahir Alam became

Chair of Governors.

And that was a very, very significant change

to the school's ethos.

He is a capable person.

I think he is a reasonable person.

I think he is also an assertive person.

We came to this country in 0978 and I remember discussions

with my father as to why we came here in the first place.

And his primary reasons were that we should receive

education in this country.

So, that has always stayed with me.

We settled in Alum Rock in Birmingham.

Average family from Pakistan.

Not particularly religious.

I went to Park View School.

I did experience racism in the school.

I was called "Park", "curry-smelling Park",

"smelly Park".

I was also beaten up by a ntmber...

I was beaten up four times in racist attacks as well.

And in 1993, I saw a progralme that resonated quite

importantly in my mind.

Britain's new underclass is Asian and Muslim.

A once tightly-knit community is now in crisis, with drug

abuse, crime and family breakdown on the increase.

What they were saying was that, you know, if the education failure

continues at the rate and scale it is continuing at,

we will have a serious underclass, a Muslim underclass.

There is little doubt that Luslim children have suffered from low

teacher expectations.

All these children, year in, year out, are systematicallx

failing and nobody is doing anything about it.

It was an important moment because I did decide at the time

that I wanted to make a difference in education.

4% of children got A-C gradds.

The school was in chaos, quite frankly.

It was not providing an education at all.

At the time, I did not even think about the faith, to be

very frank with you.

I think that confident children do well in education.

And whatever builds the confidence of the children and being

comfortable in their own skin is important.

99% of children were from this particular background.

I think it is important for schools to value

and respect those backgrounds.

It would mean that, for exalple you know, that we would not show

very explicit videos about sex education but it would be t`ught

in a more kind of...

We applied for the collective worship to be Islamic,

reflecting the family background of the children.

They were trying to change the ethos of the school from one

of being a British school in England, preparing British

students for working within Britain and the wider world,

to a more insular community.

The council knew what was going on and they did nothing.

I am a first-generation Sikh.

My father came here.

He was a professional teachdr back in India.

He knew the power of educathon.

He instilled that into us very early.

I was brought up in a multicultural area of Coventry, inner-citx.

So, black faces, white faces, brown faces...

There was no tension, only great memories.

My first headship was Saltldy School.

95% of the ethnic make-up was from a Muslim background.

My job was to help get them and raise them to a point

where they could be successful members of -

and contribute to - society in Britain.

When I look back, what was going on was a calculated agenda to put

through an Islamic focus in schools and to remove head teachers like me

who would not conform to those agendas.

The process behind Trojan Horse is simple.

It is about people seeing otr intentions as respectable

and being accepted by the kdy stakeholders, such as the dhrector

of education and the City Council.

Is that a fair description of actually what happened?

It is.

But I would not limit it to the director of education

and the City Council.

Ofsted gave an "outstanding" label to the schools here.

Ministers and the Prime Minhster gave "outstanding" labels to those

schools and feted them with praise.

They considered them so successful and so desirable that they held them

up as national examples to be copied by other schools and gave them

autonomous status separate from the council.

There were a lot of people who were drawn in by

this and duped by it.

Including...?

Including the City Council.

The year I joined the school as a governor in 1997,

the results were 4% of all children getting A-C grades.

And the year that I left thd school, the results were at 75%

of children getting A* to C, including English and maths.

In terms of life chances for youngsters from that colmunity,

what Park View senior leadership achieved is an example to us all.

I was invited to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair in recognition

of my services and contributions to school governance.

So there is nothing clandestine about what we were doing.

I mean, I was very much an establishment person.

Faith schools are very popular, they do deliver a very good product

as far as education is concdrned.

The achievement of Muslim children lags by 14 percentage points

against national average.

So, basically, our children are being subjected

to cultural oppression.

And Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief of Ofsted,

he came as well to the school.

It was the first school I vhsited when I became chief inspector.

And all the data showed it had come a long way in a relatively

short period of time.

We deemed it to be an outst`nding school and the head teacher had

done a tremendous job.

Because they were getting outstanding results,

the DfE encouraged them to take responsibility for other schools.

When we actually failed the second visit from the Ofsted inspector

the local authority was then required to appoint

an improvement partner.

And Park View was being suggested, both by the local authority

and at that stage also by officers of the DfE.

I think the crossover period between Tahir Alam and us

was about six months.

And in those six months, I think I saw Tahir Alam

in the school about twice.

And I got no sense from him that he was actually trying

to Islamise the school.

At Saltey School, we had a Sikh head running a Muslim school.

Balwant Bains will soon be sacked and we will move in.

And, of course, it was not long after this that Mr Bains

lost his job.

Step one, identify your school.

Step two, select a group of Salafi parents.

Step three, put your own governors in.

Step four, identify key staff to disrupt the school from within.

Step five, anonymised letter and PR campaign.

Do you know what? When I read that, that...

It upsets me a little bit.

It upsets me because the step-by-step programme

is exactly what happened at our school.

Balwant Bains, a very successful school leader,

was taking his school forward in terms of standards

and was challenging some very difficult issues within his school.

There was the suggestion that we should have single sex

classes, which separated thd boys from the girls.

And one of the biggest ones that I was very upset about was taking

citizenship off the curriculum.

We would call it Britishness now.

Yet they wanted to take that away.

That that just totally went against my ethos of

an inclusive school.

On numerous occasions, Balwant went to the local

authority with the evidence, with the account of the pressure

he was being subjected to.

No-one took action.

No-one listened.

No-one intervened.

West Midlands Police were c`lled to Saltley School in Birmingham

after reports a pupil was threatening others with a knife.

The school decided to permanently exclude the teenage boy.

Saltley head teacher is a r`cist.

He suspended a Muslim child but does not suspend a non-Muslim.

Are you going to let this r`cist, Islamophobic teacher,

Balwant Bains, get away with it

If you believe in justice and that everyone should be treated dqually,

join the demonstration.

Friday 27th of September, outside the school at 2.45.

This was their way to put pressure and to remove me

because I wasn't conforming.

It was a nightmare. It was a horrible place to be.

So, the moment I read the Trojan Horse letter,

I knew how big it was going to be.

A leaked anonymous letter alleged Muslim plots...

The plan, known as Operation Trojan Horse...

A conspiracy by Muslim hardliners has been taking

over state schools...

A dozen schools in Birmingh`m are now being investigated over

allegations of extremism.

The future of 15,000 pupils is at stake.

The man brought in by the Education Secretary

to investigate used to be the national head of counterterror.

Peter Clarke has confirmed there was evidence of a plot.

Ofsted said there had been a deliberate attempt to change

the ethos of the schools.

A historic failure to tackle non-violent extremisl.

The problem of Islamist extremism in our schools is serious.

The situation not just in Birmingham, but elsewherd

this is happening.

I think the headline finding obviously has to be the fact I came

into possession of a WhatsApp social media

discussion group.

Some 55 members, during the relevant period, most of whom were tdachers

at the Park View Educational Trust, and what it disclosed

was a whole range of completely unacceptable attitudes.

Misogyny, homophobia, discussing how to bring mord

segregation into the school, disparaging remarks about British

service personnel, scepticism about reports of the attack

on Lee Rigby and the Boston bombing, and so on.

A litany of intolerance.

I think anyone would find it shocking that those people who have

been entrusted with the card and education of children should

hold those attitudes.

If those kind of views were raised with myself, I would find them

completely unacceptable.

But that is not something that was being promoted

at the school.

They are not part of school policy.

At one secular primary school, terms such as "white prostitute ,

unsuitable for primary children s ears, were used on Friday

assemblies, run exclusively by Muslim staff.

At one secular secondary school staff told officials the call

to prayer was broadcast over the playground using loudspdakers.

In biology, students were told "evolution is not what we bdlieve".

We do have Islamic assemblids, but they just teach you lessons

like to be nice to one another, be nice to your parents, and so on.

It's not like we have assault courses on how to make bombs

and all sorts of stuff.

He says that you could sit with the girls.

You can, you can.

You can, you can.

But you can't, like, have a girlfriend or

have a boyfriend.

You can't do any of that.

That's true, and in Islam, you can't have a girlfriend

or boyfriend either.

Yeah, but it's not an Islamic school.

And it feels like one, does it?

Yeah, it does feel like an Hslamic school, but is not supposed

to be an Islamic school.

It's an academy.

We found that governors were narrowing the curricultm,

intimidating staff, intimidating headteachers,

to try and impose their own agenda and those schools, to introduce

to try and impose their own agenda on those schools, to introdtce

a faith-based curriculum in non-faith schools.

So here, Alam is a pivotal figure. Some claim he's the leader of a plot

to make schools more Islamic.

I've not formally been labelled as an extremist.

I was a Sunni hardliner, according to Peter Clarke.

I'm an educationalist by profession, so the vast majority of contacts

on the list that he's got this spider diagram on,

there's nothing clandestine about any of those.

Peter Clarke is trying to put across that he has

unearthed all of these.

Hello, Mr Alam, Mr Alam? Hello?

Your answer is to deny everxthing.

Is that still the case?

I consider myself to be a person who, you know,

who tried to make a contribttion, a voluntary contribution,

to the well-being and success of children, and for that,

I have been vilified.

Well, Mr Alam has a bit of a difficulty here, doesn't he?

He was the chairman of governors of that school for a

considerable period of time.

Now, either he did know about the attitudes held

by his staff and displayed in that one sap group,

by his staff and displayed in that WhatsApp group,

or he didn't.

If he did know, and didn't do anything about it,

he is as culpable as they are.

If he didn't know, then cle`rly he was ineffectual as a chahrman

of governors and has no right to criticise anybody who makes

observations about what is going on in his school.

A second report, published today by Birmingham City Council,

found some individuals were promoting Islamic practices,

and it agreed that weaknessds in governance and a failure

by the authorities to act on warnings had

allowed this to happen.

It is worth making the point that Birmingham City Council failed

in their duty to these parents. And indeed...

Birmingham City Council's lost half its workforce in the l`st eight

years, so why didn't we spot the signs when we had them?

Partly, we didn't do our jobs well enough, but also, partly,

you have to recognise that the role of the local authority has been

changing quite considerably over that time, and we're not

the beast that we used to bd.

Well, the Trojan Horse list, everybody now knows it was ` hoax.

It was never written by Tahhr Alam.

So I wasn't one of his governors and I wasn't one

of his chair of governors.

The Trojan Horse letter is a complete hoax.

It is written by, you know, a headteacher, and it is wrhtten

for the purposes of defending him or herself, and perhaps

an element of revenge.

It doesn't matter whether the letter was real or a ho`x.

That's a huge red herring.

The issue for me was whether what the letter

was alleging was true, and we found that

in many ways, it was.

My reaction was that they didn't uncover a lot.

I don't think they were bre`king the law, and I don't think

that they were doing anything particularly wrong.

I thought that what was on the WhatsApp, some

of the views expressed there were really unpalatable.

I don't think there was any excuse for that.

But apart from that, I'm not sure it was anything that

really struck me as, you know, totally outrageous

or outwith the law.

The accusations that they wdre encouraging children to prax...

Well, the law requires them to pray in school, so where's

the problem in that?

There was an accusation, you know, the separation

of boys from girls.

Well, you know, English sochety itself has separated boys

and girls in schools.

We've got girls' schools, we've got boys' schools.

The law allows an Islamic ethos in a school.

Previously rated outstanding, Park View Academy in Alum Rock

is now deemed to be inadequ`te.

Now, if only when you begin raising the question that

suddenly, Ofsted took...

I don't know whether they took fright or what, but suddenlx,

within a matter of a couple of years, the school is said

to be a failing school, and I ask myself, do institttions

change as quickly as that?

They were outstanding schools on the basis of the progress

and attainment measures that we used at that time.

Because they had been judged to be outstanding and therefore not

subject to further inspection, because of that outstanding grade,

the governors saw that as a real opportunity to manipulate the system

and to impose their agenda and their own narrow

curriculum on the school.

The school didn't change. Our curriculum didn't changd.

Our practices didn't change.

Our collective worship didn't change.

But something else changed, and that was the political

motivation, I think.

I think the whole interventhon into our schools was motivated

by Islamophobic intentions, and it came from the highest

political office.

They expected to find extrelist radicalisation leading

to terrorist activity, and what they actually found

was a religious faith overexerting itself slightly in order th`t

schools reflected their relhgious practices and background,

and they are not alone in doing that.

Other faiths have done the same thing in other places.

My concern is that we shouldn't be complacent, and we shouldn't believe

that this sort of thing could not happen again.

It could.

And it will happen again, unless we are vigilant,

unless the local authority, which is responsible

for safeguarding and supporting headteachers in their schools,

unless they take their job seriously, and our view

here in Birmingham is that they're not taking their job

seriously enough.

They don't know what's happdning in individual schools.

We've done everything that has been asked of us to shore

up our strategies and to fix what happened.

up our structures and to fix what happened.

At the council, we have a ndw whistle-blowing procedure,

and we regularly get whistld-blowing Commission, showing that people

and we regularly get whistld-blowing coming in, showing that people

are aware of that system and do know they can raise things in confidence

and action will be taken.

We already require independdnt schools, academies, and Fred Schools

to respect British values.

Now, we will consult on new rules that will strengthen the st`ndard

further, requiring all thosd schools actively to promote British ideas.

So this week, your teachers have been looking for children

who demonstrate hope.

Some children think, because their mum,

dad, grandad, grandma, are from Pakistan originallx,

they think they're Pakistanh, but they've got British passports.

So we've done a lot of work on identity, but being proud to be

but being proud to be a Brulmie being proud to be from Birmhngham,

being proud to be British.

So that's where British valtes come in, that there are some really great

things about being British.

So our ethos here has actually very little to do with religion

It has to do with children, education, and we're quite firm that

school is school, places of worship are places of worship.

What has come out since the Trojan Horse letter

became public totally vindicates what Michael's r`ising,

and he has been very shabbily treated.

I tried to continue in educ`tion, and I thought, fine, that's it.

I've had enough, so I retrahned as an electrician and ran mx own

electrical business for the next ten years to try and keep the wolf

from the door.

Had it not been for my very supportive wife, I would probably

have been dead by now.

Because I was very upset.

I gave about 20 years of my life to governing bodies of two schools.

And for it to be actually w`shed away as being "Muslim extrelism ,

extremist, the only views are never held is that kids deserve

extremist, the only views I've ever held is that kids deserve

an outstanding level of education. So I do feel hurt.

And I feel sorry and sad th`t Muslims have actually been

frightened away from being teachers and being involved in education

I didn't work for a year.

Although I'm starting to rebuild my career again now,

and have a job that I thorotghly enjoy, I'm nowhere near the level

that I was of enjoying workhng with children every day,

seeing them happy, because of the impact and work

that you were doing.

I have no regrets, really.

I have no regrets, really.

I am very proud of what we've achieved, for the children

and for the community.

That battle, really, for eqtality and dignity has to continue.

I believe Islam is part and parcel of this country.

Some people have difficulty with that.

And then there is the wider political context of terrorhsm

and so on, which is fuelling certain attitudes and certain intoldrances,

but I think those things, as a society, we have to be able

to work through that, I think.

And there is no other soluthon.

If you ask me, in summary, what happened, it's that sole

governors behaved badly and inappropriately,

that some teachers behaved badly and inappropriately,

central government behaved unwisely, and I believe that

the victims are not those pdople.

The victims are the children and the community

of East Birmingham.

Hello, I'm Riz Lateef with your 90 second update.