six - Introducing the case

Summary

This has been a rather lengthy build-up to the direct discussion of the school(s) at the centre of the Trojan Horse affair, in particular Park View Academy and its Educational Trust (PVET). It has been necessary for two reasons. First, to set out the wider debates around ‘British values’ and the role of religion in schools, and second to set out the complexity of governance arrangements and the regulation of schools, including the major changes which have taken a significant proportion of schools out of LEA control. Of course, another part of the wider context has been concerns about violent extremism, concerns that have been focused on Muslim communities in particular. This has been especially significant in Birmingham, where the misconceived ‘Project Champion’, as we have seen, was directed at the very places where the schools were located.

Achieving integration

Notwithstanding the public anxieties that were fuelled by media reports and government claims about failures to integrate, we have also seen that the social scientific evidence is that British Muslims have a high degree of commitment to values of democracy, the rule of law and religious tolerance. They also have a greater commitment to religious values than the wider population, which is much more secular in its orientation. But the two are not mutually exclusive precisely because religious tolerance purports to protect expressions of religious faith, including in schools. The presence of a specific religious ethos in a school does not, on its own, indicate a hostility to people of other religious faiths or no faith. The significant role of faith schools within the English school system, of course, testifies to that truth and, as we have seen, legislation requires all schools to provide religious education and collective worship. While this might have little significance in schools where the parents of pupils are predominantly secular in their orientation, we should not expect a similar indifference to the legal requirement where parents do have significant religious commitments. Nor should we expect those parents to be required to meet their needs only within a designated faith school. Indeed, all schools are legally required to provide religious education and collective worship. Moreover, specific guidance on how to meet the religious needs of children in non-faith schools is provided by many bodies, from government, to local authorities, SACREs and organisations representing faith groups.