So-called "Trojan Horse" and Scared Whistle-Blowers

Much has being made this week of the letters that have been sent to the whistle-blowers from the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham that warn them that their names are likely to be released as a result of the ongoing disciplinary hearings of the accused headteachers. The problems that stem from the breaking of a promise to these people who spoke out after being promised anonymity are multiple; they must be fearful that they will be exposed to public scrutiny and judgement of their peers and colleagues, future whistle-blowers will almost certainly be dissuaded from speaking out for fear that they face a similar risk and the management of schools might similarly be encouraged to become more secretive than it often is already. To those who have not followed the development of the Trojan Horse affair, this level of damage for such an apparently small scale local affair might be a surprise but a closer look suggests that the damage might run even deeper.

I took an interest in this area when the Muslim students in my classes withdrew from political discussion at the same time as the Trojan Horse affair was first debated in Parliament and in the press. As a teacher serving a community in the East London Borough of Tower Hamlets where over 90% of my students were Muslim, this had a profound impact on my relationship with my classes. Research that I have since carried out for local government scrutiny committees, national and international NGO reports and as academic research at UCL Institute of Education has led me to interview many Muslim students from schools across the country and I have been repeatedly told by these students that they have disengaged from political debate because they fear that they will be reported to the security services under the PREVENT counter-terrorism strategy that was forced into schools by the Trojan Horse affair. Schools in the predominantly Muslim areas of Birmingham and of Tower Hamlets were warned by the schools inspector, OfSTED, that they faced damning reports if they continued to ignore the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) led strategy that has since become a legal duty for all schools. As local authorities and schools responded to the Trojan Horse affair in September 2014 by writing their own PREVENT implementation plans and strategies, headteachers who I spoke to remarked that they were only implementing this strategy under the threat of OfSTED as it flew in the face of their schools' inclusion agendas. At the same time, civil servants who I spoke to and who had worked on earlier versions of the strategy, as far back as 2007, expressed their relief that it was finally being implemented. This indicates that the Trojan Horse affair resulted in the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy being implemented after it had been ignored by schools for 8 years since its first publication. 

This begs the question of whether this Trojan Horse affair was the result of legitimate grievance about the infiltration of schools by so-called "Islamic extremists" or was an overt political act by The Department for Education to force an undesired strategy into schools? This week's continued political fallout of this apparently local affair suggests the latter but that is not to say that there were not legitimate grievances, though these are seen as relatively small by the Select Committee report on the matter. The provenance of the Trojan Horse allegations might offer us some insight into the intentions behind the affair. The allegations stemmed from a letter that was found in the pigeonhole of a journalist at the Times, someone who had incidentally worked with the Secretary for State for Education (Michael Gove) at the time when he was working as a reporter at the same newspaper. This letter is the first record of the allegation of a 'Trojan Horse' in schools but has since been denounced as a fake. In spite of this revelation, the letter that described a ‘Trojan Horse’ plot by so-called Islamic extremists to take over the management of the schools in Birmingham resulted in the extraordinary inspection of 21 of the city’s schools by the UK schools inspectorate (OfSTED). This notion of Islam as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to take over schools has a curious provenance in the then Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove) who, while a journalist at the Times, had written a book in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London. The book, Celsius 7/7: how the West’s policy of appeasement has provoked yet more fundamentalist terror - and what has to be done now (2006), presents the relationship between Islam and the West as inherently problematic and one aspect of the problem he describes is ‘The Trojan Horse’. A chapter in the book titled ‘The Trojan Horse’ describes the existence of Islamic ideology in the UK as a symbolic fight and Gove questions if the UK would be ‘strong enough to defend the idea of secular space’ (page 101), he implies that the UK needs to do more to defend itself in this ‘symbolic fight’ and this might provide a motive for the intervention in Birmingham. Sources at Birmingham City Council have since told me that they did not think that the Trojan Horse was a problem to be addressed, telling me that they saw any efforts to impose a religious or cultural ideology on the criticised schools as a well-meaning attempt to make the schools representative of the communities that they served rather than as a cynical attempt to reign control of the schools by religious fanatics.

It seems that we are unlikely to learn the provenance of the actual letter that has since been accepted as a fraud, nor will we know if the letter was sent out of a genuine concern or as a result of a warped worldview that sees the existence of Muslims in the UK as a threat. What we can know is that the fallout of the letter has the potential for widespread harm. It has shut down classroom debate that previously helped to moderate and mediate diverse political views and this week has made it less likely that whistle-blowers will speak out against issues of genuine concern. The Trojan Horse affair highlights attempts to impose a liberal agenda in schools that the Department for Education and OfSTED's data tells us were getting excellent results and were previously rated 'outstanding' by the schools inspectorate. These efforts have catastrophically damaged the mechanisms which protect schools and students from divisive political agendas and this suggests that efforts to prevent terrorism through the challenging of diverse political opinions may result in the inadvertent promotion of a more divided society.
The shutting down of classroom debate and the fear that whistle-blowers might be revealed are harmful issues that urgently need to be addressed. The repeal of the duties that the Trojan Horse affair forced into schools will soon be debated in Parliament when MP Lucy Allen's motion to repeal the duties of teachers 'to report signs of extremism or radicalisation amongst children' has its second reading on 27th January. The healing process to allow schools to continue to mediate debate and to promote a harmonious society will be a long one but hopefully this debate is the start.