Fears of radicalisation through home schooling in Trojan Horse scandal city

Council concerned ruling which ended boys only classes could expose pupils to extremist ideologies

THE end of segregation in schools could increase the risk of radicalisation, the council leader parachuted into Birmingham in the wake of the “Trojan Horse” scandal has warned.

Colin Diamond, corporate director for children and young people at Birmingham city council, said a growing number of parents in the city were home schooling children, and this was set to rise even further following a court ruling on segregation.

He said home-educated children were far more likely to be exposed to extremist ideologies.

Court of Appeal judges ruled last month that an Islamic school’s policy of teaching boys separately from girls on religious grounds amounted to unlawful discrimination. Mr Diamond said the decision over Al-hijrah school in Birmingham will be unpopular with many local parents, who feel the city was “singled out” for criticism by the schools regulator, Ofsted.

He fears the ruling could drive more parents to home school their children to keep girls separate from boys. “It could possibly lead to a little more elective home education,” he told Times Education Supplement.

Mr Diamond said more than 1,000 Birmingham children were now being home schooled, the numbers were rising, and the council was working more closely with “elective home education communities” than it was a year ago.

He said that the “biggest risk” of exposing children to “any form of nonmainstream societal values” came when they were educated in unregulated settings.

This included children educated “at home, because you are not part of the social group”, pupils in “an independent school at the margins of things”, and children “in the unregulated space which includes Sunday schools, madrasas, all these places where there is no regulation whatsoever”.

Mr Diamond, a senior civil servant at the Department for Education, was sent to Birmingham in 2015 to help schools recover after the “Trojan Horse” plot, when a group of hardline Muslims were accused of orchestrating a plan to promote Islamist teaching in a number of schools.

He said that three years on from the scandal, tensions remained in the city, and schools were still coming under pressure to adopt more “socially conservative” practices.

Yesterday, schools minister Lord Agnew announced plans to strengthen guidance for local authorities and parents on home education.

He said the guidance was intended to clarify the action local authorities could take if children were not getting a “safe and suitable” education.