Following critical Ofsted reports exposing an alleged attempt to make the ethos of some state schools in Birmingham more Islamic, education secretary Michael Gove has said that starting from September, all schools will be required to ‘actively promote British values’… but what, precisely, are ‘British values’?
Twenty one schools were recently investigated by Ofsted following claims of an attempt to make the ethos of schools in Birmingham more conservative and Islamic. Five failed to meet official safeguarding guidelines and six were placed in special measures.
Park View School – at the centre of the political storm – is not a faith school. Nevertheless, the claims are that boys and girls were being taught separately, assemblies put forward extremist Islamist views and a culture was created in which other religions were seen as inferior. The school hotly disputes all these claims.
The widely reported problem at Park View was that the school was allowed to become separated from British society and failed to instil a sense of belonging in a national community increasingly defined by multi-faith, multicultural values. By so doing, the school essentially betrayed the spirit of the national curriculum, where all children, regardless of faith, gender or colour, are given an equal opportunity to education.