Going by the book

MANY parents who picked up their children from Park View School on June 9th took home something else too: an official report excoriating the school. Ofsted, England’s schools inspector, had downgraded the largely Muslim institution to “inadequate”, saying it had failed to protect children from extremism. But parents outside the gates were less alarmed at this than cross about the report and the disruption it was causing. “If he messes up his GCSEs, I’ll hold David Cameron personally responsible,” said an angry father, pointing at his son.

A few months ago Birmingham City Council received a letter purporting to advise Muslim militants how to take over a state school. The letter might be a hoax, but it struck some as painfully accurate. Stories appeared of staff pushed out by hard-line governors (elected amateurs who appoint head teachers and set schools’ strategic direction). As the row grew, the government ordered snap inspections of 21 schools. Some of their findings are damning. But British Muslims—many of whom are Pakistani—have damned the government.

Ofsted and the Education Funding Agency, which oversees quasi-independent state “academies” like Park View, found much that was objectionable. Inspectors turned up examples of schools refusing to teach about sex, teaching only Islam in religion classes while telling the few pupils studying Christianity to do their own research, and inviting an extremist preacher to address an assembly. Loudspeakers are said to have broadcast the call to prayer across Park View’s playground. One of the schools banned raffles and tombolas at a fete on the ground that they are un-Islamic. None of the schools inspected is supposed to be a religious school.

A teacher who recently left one of the condemned schools confirms some of this. Anti-gay comments were excused on the basis that homosexuality is forbidden by Islam, he says. Some members of staff failed to call on girls in class: “If you weren’t male and you weren’t Muslim, you were unhappy at that school.”

The government, after some internal wrangling about who had overlooked extremism (see Bagehot), has responded forcefully. Academies found inadequate will lose their funding. Ofsted may be allowed to inspect schools without giving notice: at present it normally warns them a day or two in advance. From September all schools will be required to promote British values such as freedom, tolerance and the rule of law (at present they must merely respect them). Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, has called for mandatory training for governors. More schools are hurriedly being inspected.

The trouble is that many Muslims, in Birmingham and beyond, trust neither the inspectors’ reports nor the government. When last inspected, some of the schools in Birmingham were judged outstanding, which suggests to some that inspectors went back into them with an agenda. The Park View academy chain has staged a vigorous defence, in which non-Muslims are prominent. Conspiracy theories abound. “People can’t take a school in Alum Rock with Asian kids doing better than grammar schools,” suggests a young man who left Park View two years ago.

The Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella group for Islamic outfits, is only a little more delicate. Muslim schools have been tarred by allegations of extremism on scant evidence, it says. It adds that some of the criteria on which Birmingham’s schools are judged to have failed, such as how well they prepare pupils for life in modern Britain, seem to be applied only to Muslim-dominated schools.

Ofsted is certainly muddling the distinction between religious conservatism and the kind of extremism that feeds violence. Inspectors criticise schools for failing to raise pupils’ awareness of extremism and for engaging insufficiently with the “Prevent” programme, which is part of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. Such criticisms call forth the spectre of terrorism to condemn behaviour that is no such thing. That is both misplaced and strategically unwise. The more things the state describes as extremist, the more it risks angering many ordinary Muslims and turning them against it.

Sweden, which inspired Britain’s free schools, separates the two issues more cleanly. School inspectors are not specifically tasked with rooting out violent extremism; the government has a separate process to deal with that. Some of the problems thrown up by religious conservatism, such as Muslim parents removing their daughters from gym classes, are dealt with by means of sex-equality rules. Still, even the much-lauded Swedes struggle at times. In 2011 inspectors found a Muslim free school that insisted on prayers and barred menstruating girls from joining in some activities.

And Britain faces a bigger problem than does Sweden. English cities like Birmingham contain numerous conservative Muslims, many of them Pakistani and more-or-less shaped by that country’s growing fundamentalism. Nudging them towards the British mainstream will be both hard and perilous. The state has tried permitting a few formally Muslim state schools; it has apparently tried overlooking the takeover of supposedly normal schools. Now it is trying a different option: dramatically raising the noise level about Muslim extremism in education. Whether this works or not, it will echo for a long time.

_{Correction: In the original version of this article we mistakenly referred to one of the schools in question as Park View Academy. It is in fact Park View School, an academy of mathematics and science. This was corrected on June 26th 2014. Sorry.}