Inspecting Ofsted: Islamification of schools row

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/15/inspecting-ofsted-islamification-schools-row

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Michael Gove has been heard to refer to Tony Blair as "the master", and reviewing the Gove education programme the influence is only too plain. Through academisation, schools are proclaimed islands of educational autonomy, and encouraged to develop their own ethos; this will not always involve a religious dimension, but where it does, the feeling is so much the better. To deal with fears that all this diversity could descend into chaos, the second half of the Blair/Gove theory is ruthlessly independent inspection, with a hard-as-nails readiness to dictate change where need be.

The great irony of Park View, the Birmingham academy at the heart of the "Trojan horse" row about claimed Islamification of schools, is that it ought to be a poster boy for Mr Gove. Like or loathe his agenda, its vindication is supposed to come in the unarguable currency of exam results – and it is here that Park View has excelled against all odds. Catering for deprived Alum Rock, Park View's story starts with appalling failure, which inspectors picked up on in the mid-90s, when the GCSE percentage pass rate was measured in single figures. Nine in 10 children may not speak English at home, three-quarters may be entitled to free school meals, and yet none of this has prevented a reformed school from achieving results exceeding the average, and being singled out for praise from Ofsted boss Sir Michael Wilshaw along the way. Flush with success, in keeping with the best post-Blair practice, it was federated with neighbouring schools, to help pull them up too.

Park View is not technically speaking a faith school, although one would not know this from excitable coverage which has hyped up permitted tweaks to assemblies to reflect the requirements of a 98% Muslim intake as if they amounted to Park View declaring itself an independent Islamic republic. The federation with neighbouring schools has come to be viewed as a plot for Islamist expansion, which would surely be news to the large number of staff who follow other faiths or none. There might yet turn out to be something to unproven allegations of undue segregation by gender or reluctance to grapple with aspects of sex education, although on a visit this week the Guardian found few signs of that. And of course, although the original Trojan horse letter, purporting to detail a five-point plan by which Muslim parents can capture community schools, is of uncertain provenance, it could turn out to indicate genuine sectarian scheming which needs to be gripped.

Even so, four inquiries seems rather a lot, with the education secretary's appointment of former counter-terror chief, Peter Clarke, being particularly heavy-handed, hinting at a link to violence that nobody has suggested. But this is a less surprising gesture than it might be, since the urbane Mr Gove, who wants a thousand educational flowers to bloom, has always co-existed with another Mr Gove – the hopeless nostalgic who writes polemical books accusing the west of appeasing jihadis. Less expected, and more troubling, is the sense that the panic has infected Ofsted, which could downgrade Park View from "outstanding" to "inadequate" in a single – and extremely rare – move. Some staff felt inspectors asked leading questions designed to expose them as homophobic, and today we report that young pupils at another largely Muslim school, this one a primary, were having their knowledge and views on homosexuality tested. The fact that it is barely a decade since a nationwide bar on discussing gay relations as "a pretended family relationship" was struck from the statute book makes this degree of pursuit of Muslim-heavy schools all the more extraordinary.

Sir Michael has recently fought hard against what he feared was big P politicisation, as Labour peer Sally Morgan was shuffled out of Ofsted's chair. The inspectorate must now resist any temptation to notch up small p political credit with Mr Gove: instead it should refuse to collude in a populist campaign against Islamification, which it should regard as both beyond – and beneath – its remit.