Portrait of the week | 12 June 2014

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After an Ofsted inspection of 21 schools in Birmingham (none of them faith schools), against the background of allegations of attempts of a Muslim takeover in a so-called Operation Trojan Horse, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, joined Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, in seizing upon an observation by Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, that ‘all maintained schools and academies, including faith and non-faith schools, must promote the values of wider British society’. Five of the schools were put under ‘special measures’. In his advice note, Sir Michael said that ‘some head teachers reported that there has been an organised campaign to target certain schools in Birmingham in order to alter their character’ and that ‘a culture of fear and intimidation has developed’. Birmingham City Council had failed to support schools in their efforts to ‘keep pupils safe’ from ‘risks of radicalisation and extremism’. Public funding, he said, ‘was used in one school to hire private investigators to interrogate the emails of senior staff’; in one school, ‘some members of staff actively discourage girls from speaking to boys’; ‘in another, music has been removed from the curriculum’.