As we said at the start of the book, there is an equivocation in secondary accounts of the Trojan Horse affair. Does it show evidence of ‘extremism’, or is it simply a case of poor practices on the part of religious conservatives that run counter to ‘British values’ and social cohesion and which were allowed to happen because of the poor governance of the schools? We quoted Tim Boyes, CEO of Birmingham Education Partnership (appointed by Birmingham City Council to oversee schools after the Trojan Horse affair), who wrote that, ‘the problem that sits behind Trojan Horse is not about Islamic extremism, it’s about schools unhelpfully locked into the closest parameters of their neighbourhoods’. The ‘parameters’ of those neighbourhoods are understood to be those of conservative values, self-segregation and deprivation.

That characterisation of the problems of the schools does not however account for why the schools at the heart of these problems were otherwise succeeding. For instance, by January 2012 Park View Academy was in the top 14% of schools nationally in terms of its examination results. According to data presented in the Clarke Report, as we have seen, Park View Academy had a pupil intake that was 98.8% Muslim, with 72.7% on free school meals (an indicator of social deprivation) and just 7.5% of pupils had English as a first language. There are no separate data on the proportion of Muslim pupils in Birmingham schools, but the BME school population in Birmingham is 66.6%, compared to 28.9% nationally, while the proportion with English as a first language in Birmingham is 64.2% and 82.7% nationally, while the figure for free school meals is 28.9% in Birmingham and 15.2% nationally. Moreover, its ‘feeder’ primary, Nansen, was judged to be a failing school such that the pupils that arrived at Park View had attainments well below the national average. The achievement of its pupils would seem to indicate a school that had transcended the parameters of its neighbourhood, and, in fact, had encouraged its local community to embrace the value of education and the opportunities it afforded their children. Indeed, that was presumably why Sir Michael Wilshaw, newly appointed as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools and head of Ofsted, stated on a visit to the school in 2012 that ‘all schools should be like it’.