The lesson of Birmingham? State education is in chaos
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Version 0 of 1. On the face of it the Birmingham schools controversy is deeply complicated. Ofsted issue their damning verdicts, and the schools concerned fiercely dispute their findings; the row divides not just government and opposition, but the cabinet. What may or may not have happened is the subject of wildly different accounts; among its other confounding details, the story was partly triggered by a letter believed to be a hoax. If you want some indication of how messy it has all become, consider the fact that five separate investigations are now at various stages of completion, with no clear end in sight. Today there was a shift in what is supposed to be the nub of the story, from state schools supposedly threatened by a jihadist plot to the different failings chronicled in the Ofsted reports: inadequate work "to raise students' awareness of the risks of extremism", a claim that "pupils have limited knowledge of religious beliefs other than Islam", gender segregation and staff who discourage girls "from speaking to boys and from actively participating in extracurricular activities"; and small groups of governors "making significant changes" to schools' ethos and culture "without full consultation". Whether or not there is any "plot", those issues look serious enough – but inflammatory language and alarmism have done their work, and there may now be no way this extremely difficult story can be satisfactorily told. Unfortunately the reporting of issues bound up with Islam has become like that. Culture wars resume; people take their usual sides. One camp might allege Islamophobia while the other makes reference to extremism and radicalisation, and claims that the great shibboleths of diversity and multiculturalism excuse no end of sins. Such was a lot of the noise yesterday: two crowds shouting at each other across a mess of prejudice and misinformation, while the real issues got rather lost. This much – I think – is clear. In February this year, former staff members at Park View academy made allegations of gender discrimination and pronouncements in school assemblies that were sympathetic to figures associated with al-Qaida. The following month came the now infamous letter supposedly written by Islamists who had hatched a plot to oust the heads of four primary schools, and wanted to foment trouble at other places, to achieve similar aims. There then followed the inevitable headlines, from the Birmingham Mail's "'Jihadist plot to take over Birmingham schools'" to the Daily Mail's "Revealed: Islamist plot dubbed 'Trojan Horse' to replace teachers in Birmingham schools with radicals". Michael Gove then appointed a former head of the Met's counter-terrorism unit to investigate the allegations and, with his characteristic emollience, talked of the need to "drain the swamp" – whereupon tensions flared between his department and the Home Office and there were credible suggestions that the DfE had known about what was afoot in Birmingham since 2010. At that pointas evidenced by yesterday's exchanges in the Commons, everything became inflated into grand Westminster theatre, and the impact on hundreds of families was all but forgotten: when I spoke to people in Birmingham today, they said that politics was being played with children's education and bemoaned the cruel timing, just as no end of students are sitting their GCSEs. That does not mean there aren't very important issues at stake. For all that Ofsted is an unquestionably flawed organisation, too open to accusations it takes decisions that are sometimes linked to politics, there was plenty of evidence of questionable practices and serious failings at the schools before today's reports. Inquiries by the Education Funding Agency, leaked to the BBC and the Daily Telegraph and officially published this week, have already suggested that all three academies run by the Park View Educational Trust – which are meant to be non-faith institutions – have serious failings, from the restriction of some subjects "to comply with conservative Islamic teaching", through a "madrasa curriculum in personal development" to a complete absence of the arts, humanities and music in primary year 6. Much as it may not have amounted to an exercise in so-called radicalisation, there are certainly questions to be asked about "an extended Islamic assembly" held at Park View in November 2013. Publicised in the school's official literature, it was addressed by Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman, a Muslim cleric who has views running from adultery to geopolitics that a lot of people would find offensive, let alone if he was speaking at a school funded from general taxation – something politely summed up in Ofsted's finding that "external speakers have not been vetted properly". And at Oldknow Primary School – another academy run by a charitable trust, the EFA found that classrooms had been segregated, with girls sitting behind boys, that there was "no evidence that governors have been chosen based on their skills", and that "staff told us that during Friday assembly occasionally words have been used such as 'white prostitute' which they felt were inappropriate for young children". At the risk of reopening old wounds on the liberal left, for all the noise from those on the right of culture and politics, it is no good crying "witch hunt" and averting your eyes from this stuff. It should have no place in any state school, and most of it is an offence to any halfway liberal principles. It's right to point out that there are other state-funded schools which engage in comparable philosophies and practices most of them clustered in the so-called faith sector, but that should not absolve the state schools currently under the spotlight. To quote from the American movie The Contender, principles only mean something if you stick by them when they're inconvenient – a truth seemingly unsettling to many liberals, but surely as true of their credo as anyone else's. And then there is the question of education policy. It may be the most flagrant case to date, but the Birmingham story is just one of many signs of what happens when the education system is open to a huge array of so-called providers: high academic performance takes precedence over all other considerations, and local authorities are condemned to being yesterday's news while the DfE is somehow meant to oversee the resulting chaos. Even if many of the 21 institutions at the centre of the story remain maintained schools, that is actually part of the same story: of local authorities' education departments being hacked down and pushed back until meaningful oversight becomes all but impossible. In that context, note the surreal absurdity of one of Gove's apparent answers to Birmingham's problems: forcing all its schools to become academies, a move indicative of the madness that has seized him and his department. Ultimately religion is a second order issue here. What's most important may be one of the most toxic legacies of this awful government: the fact that from plummeting morale among teachers, through a mounting shortage of primary school places, to the glaring failings of the free schools programme, and now this latest controversy – we have a state education system in a complete disarray. In a story replete with smokescreens and diversions, no one should forget that. |