The Trojan Horse Scandal: Infilitration or Integration?

Introduction

The Trojan Horse Scandal was a letter sent to Birmingham City Council in 2013, highlighting five stages for an alleged plot to take over schools in Birmingham, to ‘Islamise’ them. Scribbled and sporadic, it was apparently found amongst some papers that an employee saw within her boss’s boxes. The Council didn’t seem to take it seriously at first, believing it to be without substance. Until it was leaked to the media, that is...

In the early months of 2014, this letter was broadcast regionally. Then nationally. ‘They were taking over our schools’. A firm hand needed to be dealt. A fatal blow against the internal threat. Extremism couldn’t be tolerated, except as a response to the Islamists, of course.

Identity Politics

A sleeper agent. A traitor in our midst. A wolf in sheepskin.

In fact, all of the above would be deemed less incendiary than the ‘Trojan Horse’. It was not a euphemism. Far from it. The etymology of the phrase stems from a Greek myth. The story is set in the Trojan War as recollected in Homer’s Iliad. After a devastating decade of bloodshed, the Greeks devised a plan to infiltrate the infamous city of Troy. They would plant a wooden horse as a decoy, place it within the city at the obliviousness of the Trojans and hit them where they least expect it; within the ‘Serpent’s Nest’. They conquered the city.

It was perhaps this conquest that was feared by Ex Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015, when he stated that a ‘robust response’ must be given after ‘the issue of alleged Islamist extremism in Birmingham schools’. Other headlines described what emerged as ‘an Islamist plot to take over schools.’ This was reiterated by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, years later, where he eerily refers to ‘enemies from within’. A Trojan Horse. Quite literally.

These statements from influential figureheads of the State led to an alienation, an isolation, of an entire strata of British society. Citizens who were ‘born and bred’ in the UK were made to feel that they did not belong.

How does education affect us?

The pedagogical system that we go through transforms us. For better or for worse. It has the potential to mould the greatest of intellectuals as well as the leeches of society. That’s why we need to know the processes that our children go through in State schools. 'A cultural Muslim will get cremated to the marketplace of ideas', after all...

The Trojan Horse letter was leaked to the media in March 2014, just prior to the initation of my studies in secondary state school pedagogy. The Prevent Strategy was to attack with all its might in the upcoming five years and beyond in many different fashions.

Like this, the War on Terror did not only take place in foreign makeshift battlefields. It happened here. In the Maths classes of ordinary schools. A sly comment here and there. Power plays. An environment of animosity, subconsciously alienating an entire strata of society. Not all of them, of course. Just those who didn’t belong.

Fighting Fire With Fire: ‘Terrorism’ and Orwellian Responses

The Prevent programme is the most controversial of the four strands of CONTEST, the acronym used for the government’s domestic counter terrorism policy, with the other three being Pursue, Prepare and Protect. It was to sink its fangs rapidly after the contention that arose when the Trojan Horse letter was publicised. It was to send a clear message: the Government had the situation under control. Apparently.

Beyond all the media scapegoats and false dichotomies, there lay a deeper issue. The Government swore to make the schools safe from all forms of radicalism and extremism, particularly targeting this new strand of ‘Islamism’ using an ‘objective strategy’, which Prevent was designed to be.

This was not the case. First, the definition of 'Islamism' was not established. Secondly, its illegality was not analysed. Thirdly, its blurred distinctions with the holistic religion of Islam implied a discreetly sinister ideological attack.

Was praying in schools ‘Islamism’? Was the offering of greetings in the Arabic language ‘Islamism’? Was a conservative stance towards teaching young students Sex

Ed ‘Islamism’? And by natural extension, was it illegal?

Extensive research shows that the answer to all of the above is a simple No. Yet such actions seemed dangerously similar to what was being hunted. Too similar.

The institutional repression that was conceived affected real-life people, native citizens

of Britain. It is beyond just numbers, or that which Leibniz described as the identity of the ‘formless mass’ of the Indiscernibles.

The Prevent scheme, on the other hand, attempted to shift this real group of people into the unidentifiable Indiscernibles. It conflated normative religious practice and what it sought to destroy: Islamism. As the blurred distinctions led to more innocent people getting visibly distressed, calls were being made for the Prevent Scheme to be removed. Those calls are still being made. The fire is still being fought against this abstract entity known as Islam ‘Ism’.

A few (isolated?) incidents:

The student did not know what to do after the teacher kicked his prayer mat and yelled, ‘there’s no space for that here’. Stunned, he got up from the floor and walked away. One student in a secondary school completed a piece of homework where he stated that he lived in a ‘terrorist’ house; what he meant was terraced. He was dragged to a police station and questioned without a lawyer or adult present.

An 11-year-old boy was asked in a classroom, 'what he would do to help people in need’. The student replied by stating that he would ‘give alms’ for the needy. Or giving heavy arms? One can imagine what the teacher and the police after them, presumed.

Another incident involved a mother gifting her two sons, aged 5 and 7, toy guns. It resulted in the children being ‘detained in isolation after school for nearly two hours and questioned by police officers’. ‘Prevent has gone too far’, the distraught mother warned.

These incidents can be seen as sporadic and completely out of the norm. Surely they could not have been seen as a form of institutionalised discrimination. Could they? However, the bitter reality is much harder to come to terms with. These incidents were not isolated. Far from it.

Attending one of the 4 schools whose Ofsted Inspection ratings suddenly stooped from ‘Outstanding’ (the highest possible accolade) to ‘inadequate requiring improvement’ (the lowest) in the beginning of my school years (as a direct result of Trojan Horse), and later moving to an apprehensive school in the local proximity which felt the walls closing in from Prevent, I had the opportunity to observe eerie and sporadic policy changes from a first hand basis. One such change was an incremental shift away from the ‘multicultural’ ethos to a primary focus on ‘core British values’.

As individual incidents, they did not serve as an innate proof of a massive systematic escalation. But when accumulated, in a matter of years, the school was portraying to its students very different connotations of what it means to be ‘truly British’. The second school formed a greater autocracy, though. Whilst it was not under investigation directly under the Trojan Horse Scandal, it still suffered from the same symptoms; with a majority of pupils coming from ethnic minorities, as well as an escalation of teachers from that denomination.

No handshakes. No language could be spoken other than ‘English and French’. No facilities were provided for prayer. It felt autocratic. It felt like true draconian measures were being imposed on us.

I remember as a child feeling that school was a form of prison. Panopticism, of sorts. We used to joke about it with each other as kids, finding solace in making fun at the seemingly absurd restrictions that were placed on us, restricting a key part of our identity: religious belonging. The ‘spectre of Big Brother’ loomed over us in our daily lives. Even from the conversations we had with our teachers and amongst ourselves, we had to be careful. ‘They were watching’.

Not complying with the restrictions meant detentions, losing break times, and perhaps even reaching a stage where parents had to be called to the office. I remember going to

my teacher and asking for a place to pray. ‘No’, she simply replied.

Eventually, after consulting the Head of Year, I was given a pass to go home for half an hour during lunch to go and pray. It was a 15 minute walk to reach my house from the school.

Now I look back at those times I sometimes feel that I was perhaps overthinking the situation and that it couldn’t have truly been that bad. But I was not alone. Students. Teachers. Parents. Up and down the country; the South Asian Muslim diaspora was collectively labelled with suspicion, with the ‘Mccarthyist undertones of the Prevent Strategy’. There was a very real and disturbing pattern being displayed across the State.

A merely subjective encounter?

So how could the notion that these incidents are not isolated and are indicative of an

institutional issue be qualified?

Firstly, we can take into consideration the independent report of the UN special rapporteur, who, whilst investigating the Prevent mechanism, reached the conclusion that it has ‘had a negative and discriminatory effect on Muslim communities’ and that its implementation was deemed ‘inconsistent’ with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Moreover, the groundbreaking ‘Science of Pre-Crime’ Report has prompted more than 140 experts and academics to sign an open letter 'protesting against the lack of transparency and scrutiny of the science that underpins key aspects of the government’s domestic counter-terrorism strategy’.

In fact, all of the subjective, isolated incidents mentioned above actually share remnants of illegality, not only because they contradict the Spirit of the Rule of Law, with their impositionist methodology, but also because of their violation of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act; the right to respect for private life. The irony could not be clearer: a system hellbent on diminishing the value of religion in the social sphere to remain in the paradigm of the Private, was now attempting to impinge upon that.

In 2016, it was reported that more than 400 children under the age of 10 were referred to Prevent for ‘deradicalisation’ . In 2020, over 6000 people were referred to Prevent due to ‘concerns they were at risk of radicalisation’. Perhaps there would be an argument of defence to be made in favour of the Strategy if it were effective and truly worked in providing a better future for most of those going through the process. This is not the case.

The ‘most damning evaluation’ that establishes this is a report by the Behavioural Insights Team, which applies the principles of behavioural science to public policy; after investigating 33 deradicalisation programmes across the UK, only 2 were found to be ‘effective’.

Rishi Sunak’s provocative statement that ‘we are fighting enemies from within’ further bolstered this insecurity of the Muslim diaspora. Perhaps then it is no surprise that the ‘inflammatory language’ of politicians was part of the problem, as a recent independent report found, urging a ‘radical rethink’ of our domestic counter terrorism approach.

Looking beyond the Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse issue, whilst stemming from the government’s counter terrorism strategy through the mechanism of Prevent, is far more extensive. In fact, it highlights how the government can drive their political goals and interventions ‘home’ by using the schools. Schools have devolved from hubs of education and truly developmental nurturing to echo chambers of political activity and careful surveillance. This must change.

All strata of professional bodies with any degree of proximity to the field of education have strongly advocated for this motion. During their annual conference in 2016, the National Union of Teachers called for a motion for the ‘prevent duty to be withdrawn and replaced with new guidance’.

The solution, then, is to implement what the professionals have already called for. To leave politics with the politicians and leave the teaching to the teachers. Post Trojan Horse; the blurred distinctions are hard to reverse. The first step towards the light of a society truly enshrined with the core British Values is consistency. The Prevent Strategy was ‘Islamism’; it was the very imposing, intolerant ideology that it sought to purge.

Truly Reclaiming British Values

Amongst the ‘British Values’ is ‘individual liberty’; which allows people to speak their minds. Alongside this is ‘mutual respect’; to create channels to learn from one another and thrive in true multiculturalism. Moreover, ‘equality’ is essential; we must be freed from the baggage of discrimination and scepticism. Finally, we must embrace and hold ourselves to account before the core British value of truly having ‘tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’. Whilst these were the charges held against the South Asian Muslim diaspora after the flimsy letter was leaked, it seems that the disproportionate and ineffective response of the government was, rather ironically, contrary to core British values

The Liberation of Troy?

In short, my aim in this article was to personalise the ‘bigger picture’, to provide an insight into real stories behind the multi-faceted layers of facts and stats, but most importantly, to embolden an understanding of this false dichotomy of ‘Us V Them’ and how our schools have been exploited to nurture such troubling ideas.

A solution is required. A Leviathan in the face of this Trojan Horse. We require collective transformation to nurture a society that truly upholds ‘British Values’, including ‘mutual respect and tolerance’. How do we do this? Through a Counter Terrorism Strategy? Through upholding draconian measures in schools, thus alienating minorities from wider society at a pertinent stage of their development? Arguably not.

The Solution is to wake up to our reality. We cannot afford to fall susceptible to conspiracy theories of a ‘hidden enemy’ in plain sight. Instead, we have millions of British-born Muslims who are attempting to integrate into the Home in which they were born. Will they be granted the opportunity?

An impending problem

Recently, a good friend of mine from the community approached me. He knew of my background in Law, and he had some concerns. He was a teacher in a secondary school. He recently had some issues at work. For praying in a quiet room. ‘You don’t see me prostrating with Hail Mary’s, do you?!’, the Deputy Head exclaimed, flustered. He didn’t know what to say. Safeguarding meetings and protocols were in place to further investigate the situation. Against him, of course.

An Alternative

In 2025, over a decade after this scandal, far from returning to a place of learning and development, state schools remain the battleground for a deeply embedded intellectual mechanism of warfare, resting little until holistic conformity is found amongst its unfortunate subjects. It is a risky endeavour to wait for a system on the brink of collapse to cure itself from the rabid plague of ignorance and nihilism which it has infested itself in. Foolishness, perhaps.

Muslims in Britain must look to alternatives. A great option to ensure that the baseline morality instilled by the normative tradition is maintained is through homeschooling platforms.

One standout recommendation from this writer is Beaconline Learning — a visionary grassroots institute founded on the belief that education should ignite innovation rather than conformity. Under the principled and inspired leadership of a team that shares decades of experience teaching, the Institute has positioned itself as a beacon for intellectual renewal, nurturing a new generation of pioneering minds in an era too often marked by cultural and cognitive decline.