“There Is No Extremism”
The chief governor of one of the schools caught up in the Trojan Horse plot has denied any extremist teaching is taking place in the school.
Tahir Alam, Chairman of the governors at Park View Academy, has said that “there is no extremism” being promoted at his school.
“Park View Academy is run within a strict legal framework and taught the national curriculum.” He also insisted that “claims made about the school were false” and said that allegations of a terror group being praised during assemblies and females being forced to wear headscarves were untrue.
“What we are doing is well within the regulations and the legal parameters. No assemblies have been done which have praised al Qaida, nobody has called anybody kuffar in the assemblies, all these allegations have been made by anonymous individuals. There is no extremism being tolerated or promoted in any of our schools.”
“Park View is a community school so it doesn’t have a religious designation, so we don’t have a faith designation which means that we can’t prescribe any religious practice to any pupil.”
“No child has to wear a headscarf, nobody has to go to prayer in a compulsory manner. The whole thing has been blown out of all proportion. It’s based on an anonymous document, unsigned, undated.”
However, Khalid Mahmood, MP for Perry Barr said, “They have basically realised that they are now being focused on and from that point of view they have quite significantly changed the attitudes and the way that they were teaching, the way that they were holding assemblies, the way that they were having different lessons, the way the children were being segregated in class.”
“I have no objection to any of this, as long as this was open and transparent and this was a proper religious school applied for. These were state schools and these weren’t proper religious schools and turning that into a religious school is where the conflict became more and more difficult to manage.”
