Post-Trojan Horse: changes to policy and practice since the Trojan Horse affair

Introduction This book set out to examine how political and cultural changes have affected the governance of English schools and how one particular episode, the Trojan Horse affair, brought to light the many issues created largely due to intense and rapid changes within the structure of English education. Chapter Six focused on some of the challenges that governors are facing in making sense of their complex working environment. In this final chapter, I examine how the Trojan Horse affair became a catalyst for even greater and more sweeping changes to governing policy and practices, and discuss the implications of these for school governing. Political fallout The Trojan Horse affair began in March 2014 and the investigations into it by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), the Department for Education (DfE), the Education Funding Agency and Birmingham City Council (BCC) were concluded by July the same year. As Chapter Two described, the outcomes of the reports indicated that while there was little evidence to support allegations of an extremist plot, there was evidence that there had been considerable failures in governance and that local oversight of schools in the current system had been considerably compromised by cuts to funding within BCC, along with sweeping changes to education. As also explained earlier, the Kershaw report (undertaken on behalf of the BCC) indicated that cuts imposed on BCC over the course of the previous five years seriously impacted on school support and overview, with staff numbers in this area being reduced from 170 to just 20. This led the report to conclude that ‘BCC does not possess the capacity to robustly undertake investigations into complaints about governance or leadership in schools’ (Kershaw, 2014, p 5). The political fallout from the affair was spectacular. Education Secretary Michael Gove’s involvement came to a head in early June 2014, when a row between him and Home Secretary Theresa May hit the headlines. The row was apparently provoked by public statements from the Education Secretary to the effect that the Home Office had ‘failed to drain the swamp of radicalised Islam in the UK’ and that it was this that had led to the debacle.