This book is a detailed examination of what came to be known as the ‘Trojan Horse affair’ involving a claimed plot to ‘Islamicise’ schools in Birmingham, UK. The affair first hit the headlines in March 2014 and was subject to intense media reporting, as well as government action through a number of different agencies and inquiries. School governors and teachers lost their positions and disciplinary proceedings were later brought against teachers with the possibility that they could be banned from teaching for life. The hearings were conducted through the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), an executive agency of the Department for Education (DfE), and they dragged on until July 2017, with sporadic media reporting unfavourable to the teachers.

Early on a narrative was established that the affair represented a failure of multiculturalism, where conservative and religiously motivated individuals took advantage of a situation in which local politicians and other authorities were unwilling to challenge ethnic minority representatives, even where those individuals were acting in direct contradiction of dominant values of democracy, pluralism and tolerance. The affair, it was argued, represented the failure of some Muslims to integrate and instead to pursue a hardline agenda of separation.

From the outset, it seemed to us that there was no basis at all to this narrative and, indeed, that the school at the centre of the affair, Park View (and its multi-academy trust, Park View Educational Trust), was the opposite of how it was described. It was a highly successful school, expanding the opportunities for its pupils and preparing them very well for life in modern Britain. The puzzle is how it came to be understood otherwise. This book is an answer to that puzzle. Equally importantly, it also seeks to redress a serious injustice, that of the arbitrary and severe consequences that followed for the governors and teachers who were caught up in it and were widely vilified in the press. A significant number of teachers and school governors have had their careers and reputations ruined. And children at the schools have had their life chances seriously diminished as examination results have declined.

Matters took a dramatic turn when the NCTL case against senior teachers at Park View Educational Trust (PVET) was discontinued at the end of May 2017.