The Trojan Horse affair has shaped subsequent debates on community cohesion and the counter-extremism agenda, but it was, in its turn, shaped by preceding events. These earlier events – urban disturbances, claims that communities are self-segregating, perceived threats of terrorism, and specific acts of terrorism themselves – have produced a variety of political interventions. These have included policies designed to mitigate what were understood to be problems of community cohesion, threatening the social fabric and security. The interventions helped to create the narratives that were drawn upon in interpretations of the Trojan Horse affair, just as the latter has been taken as evidence of the veracity of those concerns and as a motivation for further interventions.

The importance of promoting ‘British values’ is a recurrent theme, and is frequently reasserted as a new necessity, notwithstanding that policies reflecting this imperative have been in place for some considerable time. To some extent, this may appear to exemplify the claim of French social theorist Michel Foucault that modern neoliberalism ‘governs through failure’. That is, interventions produce unintended effects and problems – ‘failures’ – which in turn give rise to renewed exhortation and interventions. We will propose something a little different, arguing that policies and interventions – especially those associated with community cohesion and schooling – have actually been successful, but are, notwithstanding, represented as failing. This is particularly poignant with regard to the Trojan Horse affair. Park View school was an example of that success, yet it has come to represent failure and, in the process, its pupils (or, more precisely, those of its successor school, Rockwood Academy) have had their life chances severely diminished.

Securing the community

For our purposes, the emphasis on British values and community cohesion as an object of public policy can be traced to public debates after the summer 2001 urban unrest in Bradford, Oldham, Burnley and other northern towns. Of course, there had been similar disturbances in previous decades, as well as concerns over Irish republican terrorism, especially in Birmingham. Nonetheless, the unrest in 2001 gave rise to a wave of debate and subsequent policy interventions. There were two government reports, one interdepartmental, the other from the Home Office – the Denham Report and the Cantle Report, respectively – which focused on issues of ethnic difference and the ‘separate lives’ of ethnic minorities and local (similarly disadvantaged) white people.