Why all religions should be kept out of schools

[mongers]

And for that matter all cultural sensitivities. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/faith-and-unreason-the-headteacher-hounded-from-her-job-1663187.html

Faith and unreason: The headteacher hounded from her job

Erica Connor took a failing school and turned it into a beacon of academic achievement and racial harmony. So why was she driven from her job by religious extremists and misguided officials? Tim Walker hears her story

Monday, 6 April 2009

SUSANNAH IRELAND / THE INDEPENDENT

On a Friday afternoon in September 2005, just two weeks into the new school year, Erica Connor walked away from the job she loved. The head of the once-thriving New Monument school in Woking, Surrey, Connor had borne the brunt of an unpleasant and unrelenting three-year campaign, conducted by a handful of local activists, to turn her non-denominational state primary into an Islamic faith school.

She had been attacked in the small print of a widely circulated petition demanding her removal; insulted in a rare graffiti scrawl across the front of the school; verbally abused by two of the school governors; and advised, for her own safety, to carry a personal police alarm at all times. Connor, who had always regarded herself as an optimist, was suffering from loss of sleep, loss of memory, loss of weight, loss of confidence. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed anti-depressants.

Yet her repeated attempts to enlist the aid of her local education authority were in vain; it had decided instead to take up her opponents' cause. Despite support from her staff, parents and the community, Connor and her school were investigated – twice – by the LEA following accusations of racism and Islamophobia. Last month, at the High Court, she finally won £407,781 damages for negligence from Surrey County Council.

But this isn't really a story of racial or religious strife. Throughout her ordeal, Connor remains convinced that the vast majority of the local community stood firmly in her corner, regardless of religious affiliations. Instead, it's the story of how a tiny minority used the fear of such conflict, and the terror inspired by phrases like "institutional racism" or "Commission for Racial Equality", to paralyse local government – and persuade the education system to abandon a gifted headteacher and her dedicated staff in their hour of need.

"It's changed me for good," says Connor, who is 57. "I hung on in, trusting the natural justice of the system – and that trust was totally knocked out of me. I can still hardly believe it could happen, that nobody at the LEA would stand by me. The court case has brought back some of my confidence, but I'll never be quite the same again."

New Monument's neighbourhood is not your average Surrey suburb. In a county full of white, middle-class commuters, more than a third of Maybury and Sheerwater's population is black and ethnic minority. Around 90 per cent of New Monument's pupils, including children of Pakistani, Saudi and Omani descent, speak English as a second language. Around 80 per cent are Muslim. "We were never full," says Connor, "because in Surrey it's not an attractive proposition for many white, middle-class parents. The size of the school fluctuated around 300, including the nursery."

When Connor became head in 1998, she inherited a faltering school, whose SAT scores for maths were as low as 4 per cent. "We had the TV and press camped outside," she recalls. "I said to them then that I hoped they'd come back when the results improved." Sure enough, two years later New Monument was named the second most improved school in the country, and in 2001 Connor and her pupils were invited to 10 Downing St in recognition of its success. The school won Government achievement awards two years in a row, and eventually averaged more than 90 per cent in all three core SAT subjects.

"The whole ethos of the school changed," says Connor. "Parents and children really began to feel they could achieve more. It was lovely to take the children to meet Tony Blair, but the moments we really celebrated were within the school. It was an incredible thing that the staff had done as a team – you can never do that as just one person."

Connor had even greater ambitions for New Monument, and began to work towards creating a three-school federation with two other Woking primaries. She took proposals to the LEA for a family learning centre and an internet café, in the hope of encouraging yet further participation, she says, from parents and the local community. "My philosophy was always that the child was a child in the community, not just an isolated unit in the school. Anything that could contribute to that was positive."

****

New Monument sits almost in the shadow of the Shah Jahan Mosque, Britain's first purpose-built mosque, constructed in 1889. Though the splendid Shah Jahan is the best known, there are several mosques in the immediate area, and not even the local Muslim community could be described as a single, cohesive whole.

Connor and her staff embraced this diversity and celebrated it. "We had very good relationships with the faith communities," she says. "We applied for a determination so that we didn't have to have mainly Christian-based worship at assemblies, as most state schools do. That allowed us to celebrate the faiths within the school proportionately. There was no formal Islamic worship, but the local imam would come in to take assemblies. We had links with the local church as well. I had no sense of growing tension between communities. Quite the opposite. We really built bridges."

Connor's small staff included two Muslim teachers. "It was an uphill struggle, but I endeavoured at all times to increase the numbers of Muslim staff," she says. It was a struggle, too, to attract governors. "It's a nightmare that's common to all schools. Who would want to be a governor? It's unpaid, it's pretty thankless, it's hard work, and nowadays it involves a great amount of legal accountability."

Many of New Monument's mothers were ill-educated, even illiterate, and few parents had the confidence, says Connor, to nominate themselves as governors, or to take part in the formal meetings the role entailed. So it was that in February 2003, Paul Martin, a wealthy, fiftysomething local businessman and Muslim convert, joined the board as a parent-governor, despite having no children of his own at New Monument. "It was unusual for a non-parent to become a parent-governor," Connor explains, "and it shows some desperation on our part, but it wasn't a situation unique to New Monument."

By that October, three more Muslim governors had been recruited, including 41-year-old Mumtaz Saleem, who was nominated by the LEA. "Paul Martin came to my office for a meeting just after he'd been elected," remembers Connor, "and we chatted for about two hours. He was charming and sympathetic. I really liked him, and I was delighted that four Muslim governors were joining the board. That's just what I'd been trying to achieve."

Soon, though, Martin and Saleem voiced concerns over perceived "tensions" between the school and the community. When Martin continued to reiterate these suggestions without any apparent evidence, says Connor, she began to feel uneasy. "The staff were more wary than I was. I believed that once they saw how the school really worked, they'd change their minds and we'd be able to build a constructive relationship."

It wasn't to be. In February 2004, Martin produced the evidence to substantiate his "concerns": two troubling conversations that he claimed to have had with staff members at an event the previous year. Muslim teacher Rosie Mir had, claimed Martin, told him that she advised children to "throw the Koran away". Another staff member had supposedly said of her students, "Why do they have to go to the mosque? They can't even read English. It's so pointless."

Connor, who was "flabbergasted" by the claims, wrote to Martin telling him not only that the staff members denied them, but that the local imam was "astonished" by the notion that there were tensions between the school and the faith community. Connor and Martin both contacted the LEA about the situation, she to warn of her difficulties, and he to complain of being "bullied" by his fellow governors.

While the tensions in the community may have been imagined, those in the boardroom were very real. At a governors' meeting in July 2004, Connor fled the room after aggressive questioning from Martin and Saleem. Martin, meanwhile, emailed the board's chairman, Mark Tackley-Goodman, asserting that in his 25 years as a Muslim, he had "never had any personal experience of Islamophobia. I am sorry to say that has changed since I have become a governor."

Tackley-Goodman contacted the LEA to demand an investigation into Martin and Saleem's behaviour. The authority demurred until Sofia Syed, another of the new governors, conducted a training session in "cultural awareness" for staff members, in which she contrasted Islamic values with the "English pastimes" of drinking, drug-taking and adultery. Finally, in autumn 2004, Surrey County Council was persuaded to conduct a review.

The results, published in November, "came down completely in our favour," says Connor. "They said they found wonderful practices [at the school] in terms of inclusion, no evidence of racism or Islamophobia, and good links with the community. Fifty-eight people were interviewed, including the imam, other head teachers and doctors. They did class observations, everything. But afterwards Paul Martin complained, saying the remit wasn't what he wanted, that I had picked the interviewees, that the whole thing was flawed. He challenged the entire process."

Throughout 2004, Connor says she felt increasingly "distressed and upset." By the start of the following year, she and many of her fellow governors were convinced that Martin and Saleem had a "hidden agenda": to turn New Monument into a single faith Islamic school.

"To me, the non-denominational state school is the ideal model," says Connor. "I'd never teach in a faith school, because my belief is that you should celebrate all faiths. New Monument was a non-denominational state school, and so the requests [Martin and Saleem] made in that context – for an adapted national curriculum, separate washing facilities and so on – were completely unreasonable."

Though it was denied throughout, it now seems obvious that Martin and Saleem's aim was indeed to create a faith school at New Monument. "During the court case this year," says Connor, "it became clear that Paul Martin and members of the LEA had discussed the idea. Back in the early days, before I cottoned on to the extent of their aims, the governors were having an amiable discussion about the school, when Saleem suddenly asked, 'If this was a Muslim school would you be happy to lead it?' It was out of the blue, and I simply said, 'Well, it isn't.' If I thought that's what the community wanted, and that's what they believed was best for their children, then I'd have supported them."

****

The head's secretary had also been acting as the clerk to the governors, but quit her role in protest at Martin and Saleem's monopolisation of the meetings. The LEA stepped in to mediate and, in May 2005, Martin was voted off the board. Afterwards, says Connor, Saleem told her ominously that she was "going to be sorry".

Tackley-Goodman stood down as chairman and was replaced by a moderate Muslim governor who would later testify in court on Connor's behalf. He, like her, resisted the idea of a faith school on the basis that it was not the wish of the community. But by the time he took over, the board had long been utterly dysfunctional.

At a governors' meeting on 14 June, Saleem allegedly threatened Tackley-Goodman before openly accusing Connor of racism. The same day, unbeknown to Connor, Martin had complained to the LEA that the school – to which he no longer had any official connection – was "institutionally racist". His evidence? A single school document containing a photograph of seven children, only one of whom had brown skin.

"It was a draft policy document that had gone out only to the governors for their comments," Connor explains. "My secretary had put a clip-art image on top to pretty it up a bit. Not to abdicate responsibility, but I hadn't even seen it."

Connor started to hear whispers about meetings being held in the community to discuss her removal. Graffiti was daubed on the front of the school, including one offensive message directed at the head personally. She maintains that these activities were all conducted by a tiny handful of agitators, but on 15 June a three-page petition appeared, apparently signed by parents, which called for her sacking on the grounds that she was a racist and Islamophobe.

"The petition said that I didn't respect their language, their values, their culture, that I was out for myself and I just wanted to make money. It said I was Jewish, that I had missionaries coming into the school, that I was Catholic. It attacked the staff's dress and mine. It was just endless. It's so ludicrous it's almost laughable, although at the time it wasn't at all."

Many parents had been intimidated into signing the document, which was then distributed outside the gates of New Monument and other local schools. Few wanted to name those responsible on the record, for fear of reprisals. "Some parents had signed it because they couldn't read, so they didn't know what they were signing. They came to me once they found out and apologised. One mother told me she'd tried to get her name taken off it, but they refused."

At the school's annual prize-giving ceremony, Connor stood and read a short statement that, at the urging of her staff (and against the wishes of Surrey County Council), made brief reference to the petition. She told the assembled staff and parents how affectionate she truly felt for the school, its pupils and the community. She received a standing ovation.

Though the judge in Connor's case later called the petition "itself racist", the police were reluctant to investigate who was responsible for the document, because its contents failed to meet the statutory criteria for inciting racial hatred. Nevertheless, they handed out police alarms to staff and advised them all to go home immediately at the end of each school day.

But, says Connor, "I couldn't possibly do the job if I was only there from nine until half-past-three. So one evening I was there on my own until about six o'clock. We have a games area and, as I was leaving, there were some 17- or 18-year-olds mucking about on it. I stopped and told them to get off, and a gang of them surrounded me.

"It would never have happened before, but by then clearly there was unrest among the community, particularly the older teenage lads. It was my feeling that they'd been stirred up. Luckily, one of them was an ex-pupil and had been in my class; he told them to back off, and they did."

Surrey County Council had, by this time, agreed to hold a second investigation. Anna Wright, director of schools at Surrey County Council, was advised that the authority faced referral to the Commission of Racial Equality if it failed to investigate Martin's claims. Though New Monument had already been exonerated of any charge of racism or Islamophobia, a small minority of activists had managed – deliberately or not – to encourage the council to side against the school.

Mark Tackley-Goodman, still Connor's ally, wrote to the LEA, "The school has time and time again been held up as a model of racial and cultural integration and I would like to believe the LEA will now take positive action to reinforce these messages in the community... Unfortunately I fear that so-called political correctness will prevent a fair-minded and balanced approach."

"The LEA jumped at anything that came from [Martin and Saleem]," says Connor, "whereas they had all sorts of correspondence from my staff, to which we got almost no response."

The second investigation was conducted by two people, one with race relations experience from his work in the housing sector, the other an ex-head of an all-white infant school. Many of the 32 interviewees were unidentified, though their views were reprinted verbatim in the review. The investigators once again found no evidence of racism on the part of the school but, crucially, wrote that they "[believed] the headmistress, along with some other governors, indirectly displayed Islamophobia through ignorance and fear of losing control."

Connor was horrified. Her challenges to the findings fell on deaf ears. "It was nonsensical," she says. "The investigation was so flawed; I thought someone would fight for me against the findings." Twenty-eight of her staff signed a letter of complaint to the local authority, but to no avail.

"When the findings were reported back to Anna Wright, she didn't challenge anything. She said 'excellent investigation' and accepted the findings. I was reassured that the results would sit in a drawer and no one would really see it, but I didn't care. That wasn't the point. This was my career, my life, and it was unjust.

"I staggered on for about two-and-a-half weeks at the beginning of the new term, had another meeting with the LEA, and again felt that I wasn't getting any support. I was on my own. It was a Friday, and I just walked out."

...."

[grumbler]

Boards of Directors (aka "Governors") are the curse of schools that have them.

A sad story, but not one I find in the least surprising.

[DontSayBanana]

Ouch. The ironic thing is that now that that's publicized, that's bound to spike fears of hidden agendas among Islamic school officials.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Ouch. The ironic thing is that now that that's publicized, that's bound to spike fears of hidden agendas among Islamic school officials.

good, islam shouldn't be allowed to just do as it wishes in the civilised world.

edit: damnnabbit, I can't write today It's just not working.

[Martinus]

Boards of Directors (aka "Governors") are the curse of schools that have them.

A sad story, but not one I find in the least surprising.

OMG I agree with grumbler.

And yeah, they pretty much act like crazy Christian fundie parents - it's just that Britain probably hasn't had that kind for decades.

I guess there is some principle according to which the percentage rate of crazies in the society remains constant - if we don't have enough, we begin to import them.

[The Brain]

Converts are almost always weirdos. It's a bit like the half-black Swedish prominent Nazi.

[DontSayBanana]

good, islam shouldn't be allowed to just do as it wishes in the civilised world.

edit: damnnabbit, I can't write today It's just not working.

Fair enough, but the two morons in question really screwed things up for future Muslim employees down the road.

I agree that it's stupid that they insist that we defend their most violent, racist, and xenophobic traits for reasons of "equality" and then turn around and call us racist for not throwing away our own cultural identities.

[Valmy]

And yeah, they pretty much act like crazy Christian fundie parents - it's just that Britain probably hasn't had that kind for decades.

Yeah?  You know of an instance Christian Fundie parents accuse a school head who works to put Christian fundies on the school board as being anti-Christian Fundie?  Christian Fundies would love such a school head.  'I have been working so hard to get more fundamentalist evangelicals on the school board and I finally succeeded and then they turned me in for being anti-Christian' yeah that will be the day.  That strikes me as more of this dude being insane than anything having to do with fundies.

Probably you didn't even read the article and just took the opportunity to say 'LOL whatever this dude did Christians would totally do it also!'

Hell that isn't typical of any group, that dude just dragged his own ally through the mud for no reason.

[DontSayBanana]

Hell that isn't typical of any group, that dude just dragged his own ally through the mud for no reason.

Women. Never trust 'em if you can see their hair.

[Valmy]

I think the ultimate goal here is to intimidate and remove any non-Muslim from teaching Muslim children so nutters think they can have complete control over the schools.  That is the only reason I can see for such a bizarre conspiracy.

[Ed Anger]

Marty makes me want to run for board of education on an anti-gay platform.

[Sheilbh]

I didn't think this article was really about Muslims.  She got standing ovations from the community and they voted the shitstirrer off the board of Governors as soon as they could.  The problem is LEAs and local government

[Valmy]

I didn't think this article was really about Muslims.  She got standing ovations from the community and they voted the shitstirrer off the board of Governors as soon as they could.  The problem is LEAs and local government

[Valmy]

This actually increases Islamophobia.  If you make the most extreme and insane Muslims famous by constantly caving to their will, you strengthen their power in their own community while at the same time enraging the general population and increasing resentment and xenophobic views.

[DontSayBanana]

I didn't think this article was really about Muslims.  She got standing ovations from the community and they voted the shitstirrer off the board of Governors as soon as they could.  The problem is LEAs and local government

That was my read as well. While they intended to create a faith-based school, the article's main contention seems to be the foot-dragging and pandering that the LEA and Surrey County Council exhibited. Nice to see that a judgment was placed against them, but don't the Brits have something stronger they could have charged? This wasn't negligence, this was a gross abuse of the system to further an agenda, and the local government was definitely complicit.