Trojan Horse scandal

"Operation Trojan Horse" redirects here. For the ufology book, see Operation Trojan Horse (book).

The Trojan Horse scandal, also known as "Operation Trojan Horse" or the Trojan Horse affair, was a conspiracy theory that posited a plot to introduce an "Islamist" or "Salafist" ethos into several schools in Birmingham, England. The name, based on the Greek legend, comes from an anonymous letter sent to Birmingham City Council in late 2013, alleged to be from Birmingham "Islamists" detailing how to wrest control of a school, and speculating about expanding the scheme to other cities. The letter was leaked to the press in March 2014; a month later the Birmingham City Council said it had received hundreds of allegations of similar plots, some dating back over 20 years. The letter has been characterised as "incomplete, unsigned and unaddressed", but led to two investigations commissioned by the Department for Education and Birmingham City Council, the Clarke and Kershaw Reports, respectively. The reports found no "plot", but alleged "behaviour indicative of a concerted attempt to change schools."

Tahir Alam, former chairman of the Park View Educational Trust, which ran three schools in Birmingham, was alleged to have written a 72-page document for the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007 detailing a blueprint for the "Islamisation" of secular state schools, a claim that has been widely debunked. The government's Department for Education initially responded to the scandal in 2015 by banning Alam and 14 other teachers from the teaching profession for life. Bans against 14 other teachers were eventually overturned, dropped and/or dismissed in courts between 2016 and 2017. The teachers had been barred from responding to the allegations due to confidentiality orders as part of their employment contracts that were binding also after the suspension.

In January 2022, The New York Times released The Trojan Horse Affair, an investigative podcast about the Trojan Horse scandal which characterized it as an "Islamophobic hoax" and compared it to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a historical antisemitic hoax. The podcast alleged that the Headteacher of Adderley Primary School in Birmingham, Rizvana Darr, was the real author of the Trojan Horse letter, sparking controversy. In December 2022 the conservative pressure group Policy Exchange challenged the findings of The New York Times; its founder Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education during the scandal, complained that the New York Times portrayed Britain as "an insular backwater whose inhabitants are drowning in a tide of nostalgia, racism and bad food."

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