The Trojan Horse scandal, also known as "Operation Trojan Horse" or the Trojan Horse affair, was a conspiracy theory that posited a plot to introduce an "Islamist" or "Salafist" ethos into several schools in Birmingham, in the UK. The name, based on the Greek legend, comes from an anonymous letter sent to Birmingham City Council in late 2013, alleged to be from Birmingham "Islamists" detailing how to wrest control of a school, and speculating about expanding the scheme to other cities. The letter was leaked to the press in March 2014; a month later the Birmingham City Council said it had received hundreds of allegations of similar plots, some dating back over 20 years. The letter has been characterised as "incomplete, unsigned and unaddressed", (Review) but led to two investigations commissioned by the Department for Education and Birmingham City Council, the Clarke and Kershaw Reports, respectively. The reports found no "plot", but alleged "behaviour indicative of a concerted attempt to change schools."
Tahir Alam, former chairman of the Park View Educational Trust, which ran three schools in Birmingham, was alleged to have written a 72-page document for the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007 detailing a blueprint for the "Islamisation" of secular state schools, a claim that has been widely debunked. The government's Department for Education initially responded to the scandal in 2015 by banning Alam and 14 other teachers from the teaching profession for life. Bans against 14 other teachers were eventually overturned, dropped and/or dismissed in courts between 2016 and 2017. The teachers had been barred from responding to the allegations due to confidentiality orders as part of their employment contracts that were binding also after the suspension.
In January 2022, The New York Times released The Trojan Horse Affair, an investigative podcast about the scandal, which it characterized as an Islamophobic hoax and compared it to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a historical antisemitic hoax. The podcast alleged that the Headteacher of Adderley Primary School in Birmingham, Rizvana Darr, was the real author of the Trojan Horse letter, sparking controversy. In December 2022 the conservative pressure group Policy Exchange challenged the findings of The New York Times; the group's founder Michael Gove, who had served as the UK's Secretary of State for Education during the scandal, complained that the Times portrayed Britain as "an insular backwater whose inhabitants are drowning in a tide of nostalgia, racism and bad food."
Background Ofsted inspections were undertaken into 21 schools in Birmingham, with the Education Funding Agency (responsible for academy schools) also investigating Park View Education Trust and Oldknow Academy. Ofsted said it had found evidence of an organised campaign to target certain schools by Islamists and that head teachers had been "marginalised or forced out of their jobs". Golden Hillock School, Nansen Primary School, Park View School – all run by the Park View Educational Trust – Oldknow Academy and Saltley School were placed in special measures after inspectors found systemic failings including the schools having failed to take adequate steps to safeguard pupils against extremism. Another school investigated, Alston Primary, was already in special measures. A sixth school was labelled inadequate for its poor educational standards and twelve schools were found needing of improvements. Three schools were commended. Ofsted subsequently expanded their investigation into schools in East London, Bradford and Luton over concerns regarding a limited curriculum and pupils' detachment from the wider community.
Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw accused Birmingham City Council of a "serious failure" in supporting schools in protecting children from extremism. Its leader, Sir Albert Bore, said that the Council accepted the Ofsted findings that schools in the city were failing pupils. Birmingham City Council commissioned Ian Kershaw of Northern Education Trust in Newcastle to review the evidence. However, because some of the schools were academies under the responsibility of the Department for Education, the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove, commissioned a separate report by Peter Clarke, the former head of the Metropolitan police's counterterrorism command. The two inquiries shared evidence, with the Kershaw inquiry deferring matters of extremism to the Clarke inquiry. The latter found that there is "no evidence to suggest that there is a problem with governance generally" nor any "evidence of terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism in the schools of concern in Birmingham", but said that there was "evidence that there are a number of people, associated with each other and in positions of influence in schools and governing bodies, who espouse, sympathise with or fail to challenge extremist views", and that there had been "co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained" attempts "by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos" into "a few schools in Birmingham". The report found that senior council officials and elected members were apparently aware of these issues, but dealt with them on a case-by-case basis rather than making "any serious attempt to see if there was a pattern", though it is not clear whether this was due to "community cohesion", an "issue of education management", or appeasement. Birmingham City Council imposed a temporary freeze on the appointment of school governors after probes into Operation Trojan Horse were announced; after the Trojan Horse affair, this was replaced by a new duty to promote "fundamental British values".
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that "protecting our children [was] one of the first duties of government" and convened an emergency meeting of the Extremism Taskforce and a ministerial meeting to discuss the affair. He announced proposals to send Ofsted to any school without warning, saying that the schools in question had been able to stage a "cover-up" previously. The government terminated its funding arrangement with three of the schools. In the wake of the findings, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, announced that all schools in the country will have to promote British values of tolerance and fairness and said that teachers will be banned from the profession if they allow extremists into schools.
A number of governors and the Muslim Council of Britain dubbed the reaction of authorities to the plot a "witch-hunt". In protest of the investigations, Tahir Alam and several governors of affected schools resigned. As Holmwood and O'Toole show, neither the Kershaw Report nor the Clarke Report gave any attention to the schools improvement policies of Birmingham City Council or the Department for Education. This had been initiated by Sir Tim Brighouse, who had been Chief Education Officer in Birmingham between 1993 and 2002, and was highly critical of the 2014 Ofsted reports and the subsequent inquiries. This included a special concern with the achievement of pupils of Asian heritage, as set out in its "Asian heritage achievement action plan" of 19 December 2003.
Letter The leaked letter on the alleged plot was reported by media including the BBC on 7 March 2014. The letter was alleged to have been written from Birmingham and sent to a contact in Bradford to expand the operation into that city. Its author described the plan as "totally invisible to the naked eye and [allowing] us to operate under the radar". In it, responsibility was claimed for installing a new headteacher at four schools in Birmingham, and it highlighted 12 others in the city which would be easy targets due to large Muslim attendance and poor inspection reports. It encouraged parents to complain about the school's leadership with false accusations of sex education, forced Christian prayer and mixed physical education, with the aim of obtaining a new leadership of Islamists. The letter described pressure being put on the head teacher at Regents Park school, a school judged to be outstanding and "planting the seed of her cheating". The school was one of those identified in the Kershaw and Clarke Reports, but no information about it was provided. The headteacher and deputy headteacher were subsequently found guilty at an NCTL hearing of falsifying SATs tests.
Of the schools mentioned by the letter, the account of Adderley Primary School was the more detailed, alleging that an employment dispute at Adderley was part of the Islamic plot's attempt to unseat the head teacher and install a conspirator with the same radical Islamification goals as the letter writers. West Midlands Police and the city council investigated whether the letter was a hoax and the plot had been concocted to support Adderley's school case at the employment tribunal. Four teacher assistants were suing the school for unfair dismissal after being forced out of the school with fake resignation letters signed in their names. Following a forensic report by a handwriting expert for the tribunal that strongly suggested the signatures were fraudulent, Birmingham City Council advised Adderley's leadership not to fight the claims and withdrew the usual indemnity granted to council-run schools. This audit report was later reportedly retracted by the council following the Trojan Horse letter, and has never been published. The New York Times podcast "The Trojan Horse Affair" uncovered this secret document that disproves one of the central allegations of the Trojan Horse letter, that there was a conspiracy against the headteacher of Adderley primary school.
The letter also encouraged getting academy status for successfully infiltrated schools, so as to have a curriculum independent of the local education authority.
The Times described the letter as "a crude forgery", noting that "The document appears to show that the conspirators were working to remove a primary school headmistress who was actually dismissed 20 years ago". The Guardian and The Independent both stated that the letter is "widely regarded as a fake". However, both the Kershaw Report and the Clarke Report organised their inquiries in terms of the 5-step plan described in the letter and following the publication of their reports, Birmingham City's education commissioner Sir Mike Tomlinson stated his belief that what the letter described was happening "without a shadow of doubt".
The controversy started with a disclosure by a former teacher from Park View School, who was later named as Michael White. His complaints were published on 24 February 2014, whereas the 'trojan horse' letter was not sent to the press until 2 March 2014.
Authorship Based on interview and research in The New York Times podcast Serial, the producers argue that most levels of government did not prioritise the identification of the letter's author. They say that the letter had disproportionate emphasis on events at Adderley Primary School and the letter's timing proved a boon to Adderley's head teacher, Rizwana Darr, in Adderley's contemporaneous employment dispute immediately after an internal audit report had referred the dispute at Adderley to the police, specifically recommending Darr be investigated.
Original allegations