The Trojan Horse Affair - Part 5

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So, Birmingham City Council told Michael Gove that the Trojan horse letter wasn't credible.

The counter-terrorism police had decided it was a hoax.

And yet, Michael Gove used the letter to sanction numerous high-level investigations into potential extremism in Birmingham schools anyway.

Which raises the question, Why did he do that?

Well, little do we know.

We've been staring at the answer for a long time without realizing.

About a year before we got the minutes of the Borgo meeting, Brian and I were in HQ.

It was the end of a long day of reporting.

It was so early in the process that we're still precious about our idea of a murder war.

We were reading counter-terror chief Peter Clark's report about his Trojan horse investigation and picking out names and leads from there.

And I threw this one out.

Do we have the Birmingham Humanists Society?

No, sorry, but British Humanist Association up there.

We didn't.

What is the British Humanist Society?

What the hell is this?

I don't know.

You never heard of this before?

I've never heard of this before.

I have no idea.

I just can't believe the British humanists have been brought into this.

And yet there they were.

mentioned a few times in the Clark report, the British Humanist Association.

According to the report, weeks before the Trojan horse that I went public, and Michael Gove sent investigators into Parkview, a group called the British Humanists have been working with whistleblowers from inside the school.

Former members of staff have, for whatever reason, in the middle of all of this, gone to the British Humanist Association to complain to them about what's happening in Parkview.

Now, why would teachers go to them?

I don't know.

I have no idea.

Why would they have a say in any of this?

Why are they in the Clark report?

That is, I don't know, but I don't think...

Do you really think they're...

I don't think they're worthy of putting on the wall?

Alright, should we put like a okay, fine.

Just hey, I'm just throwing it out there that they mentioned.

We can do an out wall over here, like on the other side, if you want to just put them on a card and I'll put it up there.

Brian humored me.

He wrote British humanists on a note card and banished it to a spot just above the light switch over by the door.

And the humanists stayed all lonely over there in the corner.

The only time they got any attention was when my brother Osama made a visit home.

I showed him and my sister-in-law what I'd done with mom and dad's room.

And I want your immediate reactions.

What the hell?

This is HQ.

It looks like something from a beautiful mind.

Let me paint a picture of what I'm seeing here.

Just a random series of strings that have been very poorly taped together.

Most of the string action was in the center of the wall.

But Osama went straight through the door and started pounding his finger on the card above the light switch.

These guys.

What do you point to?

The British Humanists Association.

What do you know about them?

I've just had very bad things.

Osama knew about the British humanists from his university days.

They're a group that supports secularism in the UK.

They sound innocuous.

Their website talks about promoting reason and evidence and the scientific method.

And everyone knows that they're peddling just rhetoric of Islamophobia and doing it in this kind of intellectualized way so that it's not the kind of Islamophobia that you associate with bigoted people, but they do it through like studies that they've done to show how backwards the community is and things like that.

So it's the most pervasive type.

Around the time my brother was in school,

the humanist honorary vice president, who'd been named humanist of the year in the UK and the United States, Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, was issuing such takes as, quote, I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world, and Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Quran.

You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.

That neglected card in the corner, it would prove important to Bryan's and my investigation.

Because when we finally did get those minutes of the February 12th meeting between Albert Bohr and Michael Gove,

sure they made clear that Birmingham City Council had told Michael Gove police thought the Trojan horse ladder was bogus.

But the minutes also made clear that the meeting it wasn't just about the Trojan horse ladder.

Michael Gove and his aides showed up that day with another letter they wanted to talk about.

A quote, letter received by the British Humanist Society relating to Parkview Academy.

Unlike the Trojan horse ladder, this letter wasn't murky or fake looking.

It's from identifiable people who'd worked at Parkview.

and who were vouched for by the British humanists who said there really was a nefarious Islamization going on at the schools.

These whistleblowers seem legit and they're coming forward.

That might have been the true starting gun for the Trojan horse affair.

As important,

maybe more important, than the Trojan horse letter itself.

Over the years, these whistleblowers have mostly stayed in the background, out of public view.

But when we got in touch with them, we learned that they were eager to step out of the shadows and tell us what they saw happening at Parkview School.

Those of us who tell the truth,

you know, we tell the truth.

The people who lie tell lies, don't they?

And the truth is difficult to establish.

From Cereal Productions and the New York Times, I'm Hamza Saeb.

I'm Brian Reed.

This is a Trojan horse affair.

Do you want some water or anything?

Come to me.

I'm okay.

You guys might have to watch it.

I think I might just have a bit of water as well.

Yeah.

All right, thank you.

Sorry, yeah, we got caught in the book.

Sue Packer is bustling around in jeans and a jumper, getting Hamza and me settled in her cottage out in the country, where we're setting up to interview her and her husband, Steve.

Can I ask you how you got our emails and how you knew about us?

Sue and Steve Packer both used to work at Parkview School.

Steve had taught there his entire career, 35 years, primarily computer science.

Sue was the educational visits coordinator.

She oversaw field trips.

To answer Steve's question, we learned about him and Sue because they testified in disciplinary hearings against a bunch of Parkview teachers, cases that grew out of the Trojan Horse investigations.

We'd gotten our hands on a transcript of the proceedings, which took place in what was known as the National College for Teaching and Leadership.

In the years since, Sue and Steve have been enjoying a quiet retirement from education out here in the countryside, far from Alam Rock.

All right, so first of all, you guys haven't done this then.

I guess you haven't done like a long-form interview about this.

This will be your first?

I did some

anonymous ones

when it was all going on because obviously I'd gone anonymously to the British Humanist Association, Humanists UK,

because Steve was at the school.

Sue and Steve say speaking out about Parkview was not something they did lightly.

The school was important to them.

We absolutely loved our jobs.

We really did.

If you asked me that, I would have said I had the best job in the world.

Oh, we used to be a little bit of a job.

And the children were absolutely wonderful.

You You know, I wouldn't swap the children up part of you.

Steve was part of the Renaissance at Parkview.

He was there when the school was abysmal.

He was there in the 90s when Ofsted put the school on notice that if it didn't improve, it might have to close.

And he was there when Tahir Alam took charge as chair of the governing body, hoping to set Parkview school on a new path.

Listen, I actually taught him my first year in the school.

I was his computer studies teacher.

Ahirs, really?

Tahir Alam, yeah.

Wow.

This was in 1983.

Look good, Steve.

Thank you.

People are always shocked by that.

Steve remembers Tahir being a nice kid.

And he remembers when he turned back up as an adult, volunteering to run the governing body.

What did you make of his motivations for being there and what he was doing?

I mean,

he didn't necessarily talk about the Islamic Muslim side of things.

His was about the fact that children were underachieving and that we could...

could get them to do better.

He talked about that often?

Yeah, yeah, that would always be his main focus.

I mean, I totally agreed with that because the one year we were the worst performing school in the whole of Birmingham.

And something had to be done about it.

Steve was one of the old guard teachers who could see the new vision for the school, and he threw himself into achieving it.

When some teachers formed a Ramadan committee to help integrate the holiday into the school, he was a founding member.

He used to play the call to prayer from speakers in his office.

He held computer trainings for moms in Alam Rock.

When Parkview became what's known as a business enterprise school, where kids learn entrepreneurial skills as part of the curriculum, Steve was in charge of that.

He became a vice principal.

And he got close with a group of guys at the school, a mix of old-timers and newer teachers, Muslims and non.

We've talked to many of them, most whose lives were turned upside down, careers were derailed, in part because of Steve's testimony at their disciplinary hearing.

But they all spoke fondly of Steve.

They shared memories of traveling to China together, of going running on the weekend, of hiking together out in Wales.

They miss him.

And we could tell talking to Steve that these relationships have been meaningful to him too.

But when Sue joined the Parkview staff in the early 2000s after marrying Steve, she questioned how his friends were running the school.

And that pushed Steve to see things differently.

You know, he'd worked with these people for a long, long time.

I went there with a new set of eyes and I could see things I felt weren't quite right.

I mean originally it was back way back in 2011 I think it was when the first concerns happened when there was these worksheets that were being given to the boys that had just been printed.

One day, Sue says, she and Steve got in the car to head home from work.

And Steve told her about something unsettling that happened that day while he was covering for a science teacher's sex ed class.

The teacher was away.

I was down to cover the lesson.

There's no work left or anything, so I went in there.

So the first thing I did is what did you you do last lesson?

And then one boy said, oh, we were told that if we want our wives to have sex with us, then they have to.

They can't refuse us.

One boy said, if we were taught that if a husband wants to have sex with a wife, they have to say yes.

Yeah.

They can't say no.

Oh, first of all, I thought he was having a laugh.

I thought it was a bit of a joke.

And I said, you're joking, you weren't told that.

And the kids were going, yes, we were.

Yes, we were.

Because this is just a boys group.

Yes, we were.

I said, well, let me tell you now, that is wrong.

Any woman has the right to say no, and if she says no and it goes to her, then it's rape.

And it was, you know, it was an uncomfortable thing to talk about because it was a bit of a shock, really.

And they seemed to accept it?

They appeared to accept it from me.

I mean, I was, at that point, I was assistant head.

So I was strong enough in the school, had enough clout to sort of say, you know, this is wrong.

I'm right.

And the discussion doesn't go any further.

Sue was appalled by what Steve was telling her in the car.

The fact that one of their colleagues would say something like this was bad enough, but to teach it to students, Sue heard that some boys in school went out taunting girls about it.

And then, she says, a work sheet surfaced from the lesson, which she said had religious quotes on it, about the roles and obligations of men and women in marriage and how women had to obey.

Yeah, and the shock of reading it and knowing that that had been given out to the boys, I was, you know, just horrified.

I was just so enraged by it.

I was just.

Like you were saying, it's such a serious thing.

So obviously I spoke to you about it.

Sue's turning to Steve.

She says they went to the person who was in charge of the sex ed curriculum, but she felt the school wasn't acting fast enough.

She mentioned it to her son Tom one day on the phone.

Tom had worked at biography for a year as a teaching assistant when he's fresh out of university.

He's a science professor now.

I was mostly upset this was happening in a science lesson.

Like

sex education falls under science, and the content of that worksheet was religious.

Tom remembers how distressed his mum was, explaining what happened.

She wondered if there's anything else she could do.

And I know I told her, don't go to the press.

I don't think we should be doing that.

Tom was wary of how the British media covers Muslims, but he agreed they should do something.

He said to his mum.

We need to have some kind of third-party intermediary who can help us

do this in a responsible way that is not going to have prejudice on on any particular community.

We didn't want a Daily Mail front page.

We didn't want right-wing newspapers putting their own spin on this and I was scared that that might happen and I decided like the most sensible thing to do is to go through a third party.

In the end

I suggested the British humanists.

This is how the humanists enter the story.

The humanists aren't an immediately obvious place to take this matter.

But Tom told us he'd become interested in humanism in grad school.

He thought of the British humanists as proponents of tolerance, equality, science and human rights.

One of the group's long-standing missions is to eradicate religious practices from British state schools.

The regulations that require a daily act of collective worship in all state schools, the reason Barkview School held Islamic assemblies, the humanists want those repealed.

So Tom told his mom.

Send me a copy of the worksheets and what I'll do is I'll put an email together.

Which he did.

Tom ended up on the phone with one of the humanists' top people.

They came up with a plan for how the humanists would help them take the story to the press.

They were all ready to go.

And then

they didn't do it.

Sue says the teacher who oversaw Sex Ed, Ashad Hussein, held an assembly for all the boys in year 10 where he disabused them of the notion that a wife is obligated to obey her husband.

They were told apparently that that wasn't the case,

that girls were, you know,

sex had to be consensual.

I did it, you know, I just accepted that, okay, that it won't happen again and we've got to move forward.

So things sort of settled down again then, really.

The school sort of had an outstanding Ofsted.

This was the watershed moment in 2012 when Ofsted, the school inspectors, awarded Parkview the highest designation a school can get.

People from around Europe were visiting Parkview for inspiration.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, praised it for closing the achievement gap.

And the Department for Education, under Michael Gove, asked Parkview's leadership to start running two other East Birmingham schools that needed help through an initiative they were pushing called the Academy Program, which gave the school leaders more power and autonomy.

But according to Sue and Steve, it was during this peak of recognition and success that some of their colleagues started taking advantage of the independence they'd been given.

They wanted to

give the children a good education,

but it was just that sort of

the religious element, wasn't it, that took over, really.

Everywhere Sue and Steve turned, they say, they saw changes being implemented that looked to them to be religiously motivated.

The holiday post box, where kids used to deposit Christmas cards for each other, was removed.

The call to prayer, which Steve had supported as a Ramadan thing, became a year-round fixture.

Pupils were leaned on, they they say, to choose Arabic or Urdu as their language elective over French.

Steve chaperoned an overnight school trip and had to enforce a rule to the kids' disappointment that they weren't allowed to go to a disco.

Sue and Steve say girls and boys were prevented from mingling and dating.

And they say certain teachers were telling children that if they didn't pray, they weren't good Muslims.

The Packers felt like the school was shifting.

Rather than merely celebrating the kids' Muslim identities, Parkview was pressuring kids to practice Islam, dictating to students how to be.

Most disturbing to Sue was the effect she felt the religious imperative was having on women and girls at the school, staff members and students.

There was a lot of unfairness going on.

Equality had gone out the door.

Everything was very strict sort of thing.

Our girls couldn't have their hair highlighted.

They were encouraged to wear their scarves.

Girls were being brought back from any sort of events where there was a male present.

For instance, Sue says, there was a tennis lesson organized for five Parkview girls and five boys at another school.

When the teacher accompanying the kids saw that the instructor was a man, he brought the girls back to Parkview because there was a school rule that sports were separated, boys and girls.

She says the girls were upset they didn't get to do the lesson that day.

Sue was furious.

Women weren't weren't being treated properly.

Girls were not being given choices.

Girls were being dictated to.

There was a blanket rule that girls were not allowed to do things.

Sue and Steve had an idea of who was behind all this.

I say that the person really pulling the strings was Tahir Alam.

To both Sue and Steve, all the official fawning over Parkview seemed to have emboldened Tahir.

They felt he was exerting more influence on the school than a governor was supposed to.

He was still focused on academics, but they felt there was something else driving him as well.

What do you think Tyr's ulterior motive was?

You're saying like there was something else going on that was driving him?

Control of the schools to have them run the way he wanted them run.

Successful.

But

not to the ends of achievement, to different ends.

Achievement as well,

but

the emphasis on

doing things in a certain way the way they wanted it done.

And not...

According to Islam.

Is that what you mean?

Well, that particular strain of Islam.

What strain of Islam does Tyr practice?

Well, it's certainly the one that says that girls can't take part in activities when there's a man present.

Who says that children can't give Christmas cards to each other?

Whatever that is.

When the longtime head teacher of Parkview, a non-Muslim white woman, was promoted in 2012, she'd now be overseeing all three schools that Parkview was trying to reform.

The person the governors chose to take her place while they filled the position was a Muslim teacher who some staffers didn't feel was the the best choice to run the school, but who was close with Tahir,

Maz Hussein.

Maz taking over meant that all the top managers within Parkview School were now men.

Sue also mentioned to us a focus group she took part in with the local police about combating violence against women in East Birmingham, where she learned that East Birmingham has one of the highest rates of domestic abuse in the country.

It all made her worry.

My main concern is that the girls were just able to access as much opportunities as possible and to come out of school, you know, as equipped as possible to deal with whatever they come across

in life.

You know, my feelings were that, you know, girls needed to be strong, they needed to be sort of, you know, feel in control.

Sue had tried to get the school to address these problems.

She raised them with the headteacher Moz, but it wasn't getting better.

She was in the middle of making plans to go to speak to the governing body about these issues when a former Parkview student named Amina told Sue about something that happened on a field trip she had helped chaperone to a local museum, an interaction with another teacher that bothered her.

As Sue tells it, Amina was volunteering at Parkview.

She was just out of university.

Her mom was in the governing body and her dad also worked there.

And Amina told Sue, on the way back from the museum, she'd been sitting on one of the buses with the kids when a teacher got on, a man, and said to her that she was on the wrong bus.

He sort of came onto the coach and said,

you need to be on the coach with me,

something like that.

So she sort of felt that he'd spoken to her very rudely in front of the children and it was unnecessary.

So I just sort of said, well, look, you know, you need to really go and speak to Moz about.

Did it seem that serious or did it seem kind of...

Because that seems like not that big of a thing to register, I guess.

Because it was becoming commonplace, this sort of attitude to women.

As far as Sunu, Amina did mention it to a supervisor, but Sue didn't hear if there'd been any follow-up from management.

She sent an email to the head teacher Moz and others asking what had been done about the colleague who'd been rude to Amina.

And then the following day, after I'd done that, I was called to Moz's office.

He was there standing over his desk with these sort of things on his papers on his desk.

And he just sort of exploded at me and just said, you know, you've been vindictive.

malicious writing these emails about a member of staff.

I'm really disappointed in you.

There's going to be a full investigation.

And then I was accused of bringing the school into disrepute,

attempting to discredit a member of staff.

Yeah.

And slander, I think, wasn't it?

I know that you were used

the word slander came up because I was thinking they've used the wrong word because it should be liable because it's written.

I was just absolutely speechless.

I just didn't know what to say.

I was devastated.

And I just thought, what have I done?

I was just so shocked.

Because

I knew I hadn't done anything wrong.

Okay, I was questioning the male, but I was only doing it because there'd been complaints about him.

And I felt as in my position as Educational Visit Coordinator, that was my job to do that because I had to make sure the people going on the trips were qualified, competent.

It felt like you were being seen as a troublemaker, as if the leaders of the school were retaliating against her for calling out their discrimination.

I had a letter from the HR manager manager to say that the investigation was going to start and I just

I was just in a mess wasn't I really yeah.

You've been a mess ever since it happened since.

Yeah I just

you know struggling with anxiety and just I just couldn't handle it.

So I just wrote my notice

and left.

Sue had quit the school, but her husband was still there.

Friends, colleagues, students, people she cared about were still there.

So Sue started contacting the authorities, imploring them to look into the creeping Islamization inside Parkview.

She wrote to Ofsted, the school inspectors.

She wrote to Burma City Council.

She wrote these places anonymously because she was scared Steve might lose his job if their colleagues at Parkview found out what she was doing.

But as far as she and Steve could tell, the agencies didn't do anything.

She made several calls to Ofsted.

Steve also wrote them anonymously.

Still nothing.

Months went by.

And then came January 2014.

And the moment that Sue accidentally helped ignite the Trojan horse affair.

Unbeknownst to Sue, the Trojan horse letter, which hadn't yet gone public, was making the rounds in Birmingham and London.

And it was at this same time that Sue sent an email to the British humanists about Parkview and Teher Alam.

And her son Tom also wrote the humanists saying he wanted to resurface his complaint about the sex ed lesson from three years before.

More and more males with extreme religious views are being recruited, Sue wrote to the humanists.

The children are not allowed to choose how to live their lives.

The humanists moved quickly.

They had connections at the Department for Education.

So they assembled Sue and Tom's allegations and sent them along.

Within days, Sue was finally on the phone with the Department for Education official, the deputy head of its counter-extremism division.

This division was set up by the DFE in 2010, the year Michael Gove to control the department.

Do you remember what you talked about on that phone call?

I think they were just sort of clarifying,

because obviously there was the

sort of anti-terrorism stuff, wasn't there really?

And I sort of made it clear, it's nothing to do with that.

You know, this is just about

human rights girls being stopped doing things.

But obviously,

I think my concern was, you know, when children are sort of marginalised and not feeling part of a community,

I know that that can lead into the other roads, can't it?

And I think that's what

they were looking at, really.

Did they seem concerned?

What did he say?

They sort of said that they had got concerns.

So, you know, I felt it was taken seriously.

The next day, Michael Gove's people in London wrote Sir Albert Bohr's people in Birmingham to arrange that critical meeting on February 12th.

The DFE'd had the Trojan horse letter for months at this point.

It was only after hearing from Sue that they kicked into gear.

When Albert Bohr and the Birmingham City Council arrived at the February 12th meeting, Everybody was talking about the Trojan horse letter and Sue's complaints in the same breath as two pieces of evidence that appeared to be corroborating the same threat.

The council told Michael Gove that the Trojan horse letter was bogus, according to the analysis of counterterror police.

And it's interesting, the minutes note that Gove actually said in the meeting, we should try to figure out who the author is.

But according to the minutes, at least, nobody responded to that.

And they kept talking about the apparent troubles at Parkview until Michael Gove sent Counselor Bohr away with an order to report back by the end of the week.

with a plan for how the council was going to deal with that school.

Just to say here, we did consider whether Sue Packer could have been behind the Trojan horse letter.

She was writing a lot of letters, a number anonymously, about Muslims in East Birmingham schools.

There's one letter of Sue's, actually.

So, what are you asking though?

Is that my letter?

Yeah, did you write that?

Yeah.

Which bears a curious resemblance to the cover sheet that came with the Trojan horse letter.

The tone, the sign-off, some of the language.

That one even got Steve going.

I haven't seen that letter before.

You didn't know.

She wrote this?

No.

I have to say, this is quite interesting now.

Sue reassured us, and her husband.

I just want to make it clear that I'm not the author of the Trojan Horse Letter, because I feel as if that is the way this is possibly going.

No, actually, we don't think you wrote the Trojan Horse Letter, Sue.

Not least because in all of Sue's writings that we've read, we've never seen her mention Adderly Primary School or the resignation case there.

She says she doesn't even know anyone at that school.

Adderly is the school the Trojan horse author is most focused on and knowledgeable about, whereas Sue, in her letters, is concerned primarily with Parkview.

And so we're left to marvel at the, I don't even know what to call it, unhappy confluence, supernatural forces, tragic coincidence that led two letters from completely different people, both about Parkview school, to land on Michael Gove's desk within weeks of each other.

containing the same types of claims and naming the same individual, Tahir Alam, as a ringleader.

Sue said, when she and Steve first heard about the Georgia Hornstadt,

they were glad for it.

Another source blowing the whistle on Parkview, they figured that could only help back them up.

But then they watched as journalists and politicians took the issues they had raised and conflated them with this wild allegation of an Islamist conspiracy spreading through the schools.

And that frustrated them.

So over the next several months, the humanists started arranging interviews for Sue.

They say to try and refocus attention onto what she saw as the real issues in East Birmingham,

equality for girls and women, and the improper inclusion of religion in schools.

Parkview Academy, at the centre of this row since it began.

Three former Parkview teachers took their concerns to the British Humanist Association.

One former member of its staff spoke anonymously to IT.

A former member of staff claimed their claims included.

It's not like Sue and Steve and Tom were the only ones raising concerns about Parkview and other East Birmingham schools.

They, along with the Trojan horse ladder, were the trigger, but once the story became public, all sorts of people who've been involved in schools in Birmingham started bringing issues to authorities and reporters.

But the Packer family's concerns are emblematic of the kinds of complaints others were making.

And Sue and Steve stayed active in the affair for years, playing an influential role in the authorities' response.

They cooperated with the official inquiries, they spoke to Peter Clark's team, to Ofsted, the school inspectors, to the member of parliament representing Adam Rock who Sue met with.

They traveled to London to tell their story to a parliamentary humanist group in what one lord called stunning testimony.

And finally, when the government started bringing disciplinary cases against Parkview teachers, Sue and Steve took to the stand along with some others to testify against their former colleagues.

They were essential to the government's case, providing some of the most important first-hand testimony.

So this is how Britain ended up with multiple investigations into the Trojan horse letter that weren't really about the Trojan horse letter.

The Packers and and the Trojan Horse Letter fused into an indomitable crossbreed.

The Trojan Horse Letter made sensational claims about a sweeping Islamic plot, a jihad, and now here were all these specific complaints from the Packers and others like them, which read like evidence that something larger and diabolical could be afoot.

People took the Trojan horse moniker, the code name of that supposed operation from the letter, and grafted that onto the Packers' concerns, which made allegations that might have otherwise been dealt with as employment issues or matters of school management seem like a national security threat.

Now, the Trojan horse letter had already been found to be fiction.

But what about the Packers?

Had they been writing any fiction of their own?

That's after the break.

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In the beginning, it was friendly at Sue and Steve's cottage.

They were excited to talk to us about their experience.

In fact, right after we walked in, we learned that Steve had recently finished writing a book about it,

self-published on Amazon, which he had lying out for us, a green paperback

titled Moonrise at Daybreak,

with silhouettes of a chicken and a rooster and a rabbit on the cover.

This is my telling of the story of what happened to us at school.

I've written it as

an animal farm type story.

Really?

Yeah.

The book's protagonists are two chickens, Scarlett and Croaker, clearly Sue and Steve, who with the help of the hares, the humanists, fight an elite group of goats, Muslim men, who are controlling the sheep, Muslim women, while scheming to operate the farm, to quote the blurb, according to their own doctrine by manipulating the other animals and grooming the youngsters.

I mean, we're obviously going to get you to sign a copy for us.

No, I've signed one.

I'll give you two.

Okay.

So is this fiction?

Is it non-fiction?

Like, how would you describe it?

It's a difficult one.

It's fiction, but it tells the story.

Before we met with Sue and Steve, we'd not only read their testimony in the disciplinary hearing against Parkview teachers, but also a bunch of other stuff from their involvement with the Trojan horse affair.

Emails they'd written, letters, transcripts of interviews.

And we'd noticed in the way they spoke and wrote about Parkview, that their worries about what was going on at the school seemed to be shot through with this kind of discomfort about the way that certain teachers and governors were expressing their Muslimness.

And we wanted to interrogate how much that was coloring what they saw happening around them and the way they represented it to authorities.

As we questioned Sue and Steve, we fell into a precarious pattern.

We'd push them on the particulars of their account, like say Steve's suggestion that there was something shifty about the fact that he saw Muslim men members of staff spending a lot of time in the head teacher, Maz Hussein's office.

What's threatening about men speaking to each other?

And

Can we have a cup of tea?

We'd say yes, please.

Then we'd never get the cup of tea because things would get uncomfortable again.

It went on like this for seven hours.

There are some things you can't describe in solid facts.

You know, there's, you know, when you talk about the atmosphere in a place, when we talk about the, you know, how oppressive it was, there's not necessarily anything tangible about that.

I thought you coming here, we were going to

give an opportunity to put our side across.

But that's what's what this is.

There's a microphone under your chin and you're talking into it.

Is that not putting your side across?

It is.

Yeah.

Some of what Sue and Steve told us was corroborated by other staff and students at Parkview.

Like the sex head class for instance.

Pretty much everyone agrees something happened.

And they all remember that the school did hold an assembly for the boys in that grade to tell them that sex without consent is rape.

That incident is perhaps more disturbing than Sue and Steve could even have known though.

Because in March of 2021, after our interview with Sue Soon Steve and years after Parkview ceased to exist, that same teacher who'd been teaching the sex side class at Parkview was convicted of sexual activity with a child from another school he'd gone on to work at.

He'd convinced a 15-year-old girl that she was his quote-unquote wife.

He was sentenced to three years and three months in jail.

We asked leadership at Parkview and others, teachers and students, whether an allegation of this kind surfaced about this teacher back when he was working at Parkview.

and they all told us no.

But it does seem from talking to people that while the school took the sex ed incident seriously enough to hold a special assembly, they did not do a formal investigation into this teacher and his conduct in the class.

Which seems like a horrible red flag missed.

The Packers wanted us to know that what they'd done in the Trojan horse affair, This years-long effort they'd embarked upon, was largely to protect this group of people they believed were suffering, Muslim girls and women.

In the disciplinary hearing transcript, Sue testifies forcefully on their behalf.

To hear Sue tell it, she sacrificed her career defending a Muslim woman.

That's how committed she was to their well-being.

But let's consider that incident, which Sue cites as the impetus of her time at Parkview coming to an end.

She testified about it under oath at the disciplinary hearing.

The incident on the bus, where a Muslim woman colleague, Amina, was spoken to brusquely by a teacher, a man.

Sue told us this interaction was indicative of the wider issues at the school, where sexism was going unchecked and women and girls weren't being respected.

And she says that's how Amina saw it too, that the atmosphere of the school had changed since she'd been a student there.

What were Amina's other specific things she told you that she saw as issues at the school?

Just this sort of pressure to behave in a certain way, you know, not to be individuals, girls not to be individuals.

She said that.

Yes, yes.

because she was she was very much an individual um almost her form teacher in your 70s yeah

so i know i knew her really well yeah beautiful girls

why did amina then watch you go through this um investigation without coming to your defense she just went quiet at that point she climbed up like what happened

well yeah i mean no no one would speak out

did you go to her and ask her say like can you can you back me up here i was i was speaking on your behalf, basically.

No, I didn't.

Knowing what had happened to me, I didn't want to possibly ruin her future.

I mean, just at the time, even,

when Mars said.

After visiting Sue and Steve, I got in touch with Amina to ask if this was how she remembered things.

She didn't want to do an interview, but she wrote back, pretty heated.

This was a routine outing where a colleague was a little short, she wrote.

If this incident was as serious as Sue's fantasy, I would naturally have raised a formal complaint and ensured there was a reported outcome.

This was a professional school with all the normal accountabilities and procedures.

I am perfectly capable to raising the issue if that was my intention.

Remarkably, in all the years Sue has been talking about Amina and this bus aftermath, Amina told me no one, not the British humanists, not any official investigator looking into Sue's allegations, not a single lawyer from the legal teams litigating the Trojan horse cases, has ever contacted her to ask if what Sue was saying about her was accurate.

Amina had no idea till I reached out to her that Sue had spent years pointing to this incident as an example of endemic sexism at Parkview School.

Amina said she never personally experienced sexism there, or had any colleagues tell her they did either.

Honestly, I got the sense from Amina's response that she was a bit annoyed with me for taking Sue's account seriously enough to write a whole email asking her about it.

Quote, the account stipulated by Sue comes across as nonsensical.

In summary, she is implying she has lost her job as a result of taking it upon herself to represent the collective rights of all women suffering such strife at the hands of male persecutors in a world war-like setting, and has been martyred by the oppressive regime for absolutely no reasons of her own.

If anyone believes such prepubescent notions, they are clearly cut from the same cloth.

By no means was Parkview School devoid of sexism or patriarchy.

Women we've spoken to from Parkview have been clear there were problems, just maybe not the way Sue has been portraying it.

I think what Sue's done is Sue's taken the more sensational

route.

This is Nazreen Kamar, who joined Parkview as its acting head of English a year and a half before the Trojan horse affair.

You know, she's saying we're oppressed.

Females, they're being shouted down by these men or the girls in the classroom are not given their opportunities.

She's gone for more of a sensational which is the word of oppression

parkview had been led by a woman headteacher for about a decade but when nasreen was there it was all men at the top and nasreen saw how that influenced the school's culture a chumminess that she felt disadvantaged the women she found out some of her colleagues were an all-male whatsapp group for instance called the parkview brotherhood which was eventually shut down but nasreen's main complaint was that Parkview's leadership had a blind spot when it came to elevating women into senior posts.

Of course, this wasn't just true at Parkview.

It's true in secondary schools across the UK.

It's not a uniquely Muslim problem.

But Nasreen says at Parkview, a certain faction of staffers was seeing things through that lens.

You know, Muslim men don't include women, we don't have discussions with women, as other women are second-class citizens, etc.

That's their perception of Islam.

So it came under that kind of umbrella.

anti-Muslim, anti,

you know, men.

Sue told us she wasn't part of a group of any kind, but Nazreen and others from Parkview have described this contingent as a sort of clique.

Instead, it included Sue and a handful of other staff members, mostly women and a few of them Muslim women.

To give a sense of their energy, Nazreen referred to one of the more vocal participants as PP, Poison Planter.

They'd rile each other up.

They would just come into the office and openly discuss things.

They would sit around the table and they would openly discuss it.

Look, there's more Muslim staff coming in, there's more Muslim this.

And did you know they have this WhatsApp group?

Oh, look, he's just got promoted.

And oh, did you hear what happened to Su?

And it was very draining.

Nasreen believes her co-workers were reading too much into things.

The tennis issue, for instance, when the girls were brought back from the lesson because the instructor was male.

To Nazreen, not a big deal.

Okay, they've been brought back.

They want a female teacher, fair enough.

Because in P lessons, in this country, P lessons are girls are by females and males are by males.

And that's in every school.

But to them, it's a big, massive thing.

I remember Shu had a big issue with this.

And it wasn't just students at Parkview this poison group was concerned about.

One of Nazarene's colleagues in the English department, a teacher named Siddiqua B, married another Muslim Parkview teacher.

He was later suspended because of the Trojan horse scandal.

When Siddiqa showed up after summer break, newly wearing a hijab, Nasreen says, assumptions started flying.

Oh my gosh they're oppressing her.

He's oppressing her.

He's forced her to wear the scarf.

They brainwashed her.

Was that word used?

Brainwashed?

Yes, brainwashed.

Interestingly, another Muslim member of staff as well said it.

They forced her to do it.

I was just, you know, finding that I was so comfortable in this school and I always wanted to embark on wearing the hijab.

Here's Saddika.

And I just thought to myself, do you know what?

I'm in such a work environment that it just made me feel like I was welcome to be who I want to be.

So to be in a place where it was okay to not have to quietly hide.

I was like, I'm just trying to have my own journey, my own little bubble, in my own little place.

And you're telling me I was forced.

If anything, I was feeling nervous about putting the scarf on because of those opinions, because of the likes of Sue.

Sue says she's never had a problem with women choosing to wear a headscarf.

She told us she knows there are a variety of views among Muslim women, and she respects that.

She and Steve assured us that they were reflecting the views of many Muslim women at Parkview.

But one thing we'd noticed, reading through the records from the disciplinary hearing against Parkview's leadership, where Sue and Steve testified, not a single Muslim woman from Parkview School came to testify alongside them to give evidence against the school's leadership.

The Muslim women who did appear from Parkview spoke in support of the school.

We asked Sue about this.

Why are there no Muslim women from Parkview who kind of testify saying

we were discriminated against, we were oppressed?

Do you know why?

I think it's just because

the women aren't very good at speaking out.

I shouldn't say the women, sorry.

A lot of women perhaps aren't confident to speak out in that community, especially female Muslims.

I think they just sort of of fear about speaking out.

The Packers wouldn't put us in touch with any of the colleagues they say they were testifying on behalf of.

They told us these people didn't want their names passed along to us.

Hamz and I have heard criticisms of Parkview from some women who attended as students.

One said even though prayer wasn't mandatory, she felt there was a social pressure from some staff to take part and that the atmosphere could be strict.

She said she couldn't wait to go to college.

Other students told us they really appreciated having prayer at school and the other religious elements, but they did remember one or two moments from their time there that bothered them in retrospect, like when a male teacher told a girl that her skirt, which was fine per the dress code, should be longer.

They agreed these were things that should have been addressed, but nearly all the women we talked to, staff and students, were uncomfortable with Sue being their emissary.

As one student put it, after we read her some of Sue's letters and writings about the school, that's a white person's view of Islam.

And they told us they were offended by the suggestion that they couldn't speak for themselves.

Do you think it's possible that you've misread some of the things that were happening at Parkview or the way that women felt there?

Absolutely not.

Okay.

It was really hard because you didn't, you know,

we're not prejudiced, you know, at all.

I mean, you know, my closest friend is a female Muslim girl.

And I've got lots of friends.

We both have.

You know, you're just afraid that

you'll be made out that you're racist, that you don't understand the cultures.

And I feel that we do understand the cultures, but it was just about,

you know, this group of men forcing one sort of

form of Islam on a whole community.

Can I ask you about your Ofsted complaint, Sue?

At one point at Sue and Steve's, I pulled out a copy of the letter Sue sent to Ofsted and Birmingham City Council about Parkview School in the summer of 2013.

I just want to confirm that this is what this is.

Can you confirm?

Do you recognize that?

Yeah.

And this was sent anonymously?

Yeah.

Okay.

In a story littered with letters, this one stands out.

Sue wrote it to Ofsted while she was in the thick of her dispute.

with Parkview leadership over what had happened to Amina on the bus, which led to Sue's resignation.

She wrote this months before she went to the British Humanists, and then to the Department for Education, and then all the other officials and journalists and investigators she spoke to.

And this letter is pretty raw.

I see it as kind of a cast mold of Sue's mindset during this time before lawyers and officials had an opportunity to maybe sand down the edges of her account.

So in this letter to Ofsted, Sue, you say that children said in a class that homosexuals should be thrown off a cliff or burnt alive and that the teacher who was head of that year agreed and said, That's what we believe.

It's what we believe.

Yeah.

You said the entire staff was told not to compliment girls in the school.

In this letter to Ofsted.

You said that young girls from Parkview are being taken away to get married, and that staff are not stopping it.

In this letter to Ofsted.

Yeah.

And then you say that there's a Sharia council promoting Sharia law in Alam Rock.

I never saw Sue bring up these specific allegations again, the ones I listed to her.

Also, interesting, I never saw her use the word Sharia again either.

You don't make these allegations again.

Why only here?

In this anonymous letter.

If it's true that children said in a class that homosexuals should be thrown off a cliff or burned alive,

and a teacher agreed,

you never mention it again when you're on the stand or in giving evidence.

Because I wasn't witness to that, but I know other people were.

So the reason is because it was hearsay.

Is that why?

Yeah, I mean,

a lot of things are hearsay, aren't they?

But

the concerns that I sent to Ofsted

were

legitimate, truthful concerns.

But you didn't want to stand by it.

in a sworn witness statement, it sounds like.

Is that what I'm gathering?

I tried to...

And that's okay.

I just want to understand why if there were these serious things, they're in an anonymous letter, but not in a sworn witness statement.

I think with the witness side of it, I was trying to stick to facts, the things that I had actually,

as much as possible, you know, witnessed myself.

Okay.

So that's the difference here.

How come you just didn't do that here?

Why not always stick to facts?

Because I was trying to raise an alarm here.

Right.

All right.

Is that why you use the word Sharia?

Possibly.

But it's true.

There are Sharia cancers in that area.

You say, I feel what is happening there at the school now can only be likened to Sharia law.

This is what you tell Offspeaker.

This was an anonymous letter that I did

after having the allegations made against me.

I certainly wasn't being treated properly.

I wasn't being treated fairly.

And obviously,

I was just doing some research into Sharia law.

One last part of Sue's letter that's worth mentioning.

In the middle of her four pages, anonymously written, there are a couple of paragraphs about, and I'm getting deja vu as I say this, an employment dispute.

Sue goes on a tangent about the acting vice principal and how he had applied for a job, but the school has said they weren't going to give it to him.

She writes, it's because he's not Muslim.

Quote, the leadership team promoted themselves into their new roles, and they have created jobs for male Muslims.

The acting vice principal who got passed over, that was Steve.

Though Sue doesn't say in the letter that she has any relation to him.

Sue told us again that she wanted to end the interview, and this time it was for real.

It had been dark for hours.

Um, good night.

Anyway,

I want to take it.

Yeah, we'll be right back.

Yeah, we'll be all right.

Thank you so much.

Brian, I shuffled out of the cottage and jumped in the car.

Can we get out of here, please?

On it, I told him, as I lined up the crooked driveway in my rearview mirror.

I may have run over some bushes.

What struck me about Sue and Steve was how this mild-mannered couple with their anonymous letters and goat-filled animal book had been taken so seriously by government agencies.

the media, the public.

Was it because they packaged their concerns as Muslim issues And that fit a worldview that so many hold.

That Muslims are like this, that we're sneaky, controlling, the men misogynistic, the women meek.

The next morning we went to see the person who played a large part in giving the package credibility.

Richie Thompson of the British Humanists, the secular lobbying group that was instrumental in empowering Sue and Steve.

They've since rebranded as Humanists UK.

As my brother alluded to, These British humanists have a reputation among some of being Islamophobic.

The humanists deny this strongly, and they say they've worked with lots of Muslims and ex-Muslims.

But that's not what Brian and I were there to discuss with them that day.

We went to see Richie to find out why he and his fellow humanists believed the Packers and what they'd done to verify the Packers' claims before endorsing them.

But in the midst of our back and forth, Richie would utter five words that were so callous, so enraging, that whatever so-called journalistic civilities I was meant to uphold came tumbling right down.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

It started off friendly enough.

Brian went through his standard.

First 15 minutes of the interview, butter-up.

Still from like a what's a humanist wedding?

Somehow, he and Richie got into the contradiction of God in the omnipotence paradox.

It's a paradox because if he's all-powerful, then he would be able to move the object, therefore, he can't create it.

I lost my patience about the time they began reading George Elliott's quotes of a poster on the wall.

Wear a smile and make friends, wear a scowl and make wrinkles.

What do we live for, if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

Of course, one thing interesting about George Elliot is that...

Let's crack on with the thing that we came to talk to you about today.

How did the British humanists get involved?

We asked what, if any fact-checking, Richie and his colleagues did of suing Steve's claims about Parkview and his answer was unsurprising.

At the time we did not go to any

effort to verify the allegations beyond talking to them and seeing whether or not we felt in broad terms that they were credible.

How do you make that assessment?

In broad terms even, how do you make an assessment from from talking to someone without seeing any evidence?

How do you get the confidence?

Yeah, well it's difficult and of course we can't be fully confident.

We just have to work out whether or not just from a broad conversation if they seem sincere and they did.

And

he said he was in touch with two or three other people from Parkview who shared similar concerns as the Packers, who alleged there have been instances of gender discrimination and homophobia at the school.

And he said as time went on, he felt the allegations were corroborated by other reporting.

But he also told us the humanists didn't have an obligation to verify or investigate Sue and Steve, because as far as he was concerned, his organization was just the messenger shuttling the Packers' issues over to the people in charge.

Do you think it's dangerous to put allegations out there specifically on the internet?

Unchecked, unchallenged, uncorroborated.

Do you think that's a dangerous thing to do?

Well, it depends on the nature of the allegations, obviously.

It was while Hamza was questioning Richie about a bunch of claims against Parkview that the humanists had published on their website without checking them or contacting the school first.

That Richie set them off.

I would also say, as well, with regards to your reference to fake news, that this, of course, was five years ago when the problems that we have seen since were fake news.

Things don't happen overnight.

It's a climate that's created through years and years of this kind of stuff, these kind of stories.

There's a sentiment that has now taken hold and taken over and is informing everyone's political choices and everything else in the world because of events like this.

The Trojan horse, which I'm sure you'll accept, as far as Britain is concerned, had a huge impact.

What impact did it have then?

What impact did it have?

Five words.

Richie had been a booster of the Trojan Horse affair for years.

He'd helped bring it into being.

He'd promulgated it through the halls of power and into the national consciousness.

He'd held a fundraising drive off the back of it with Sue.

But he was asking Hamza to catch him up on what impact the Trojan horse had.

It changed our educational policy.

It changed our counterterrorism policy.

It gave lifetime bans to educationalists in East Birmingham.

It destroyed Parkview Trust that was doing things that people around Europe were coming to learn from.

It had a swarm of headlines.

This was referenced in the Tory Party conferences.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like, this is not a little thing.

This wasn't a little thing.

It continues to inform debate and dialogue about Muslims in this country.

Yeah.

Sure.

Sure.

Okay.

So you asked what that's the impact it had.

So I don't know.

You know what?

Well, I don't know that it's quite...

I think,

obviously,

I don't know what to say for all that impact.

Clearly, all the impact and everything else that went around it was not

on us.

Hamza and Richie kept at it.

Things were getting tense.

Humanists were looking at us through the glass wall.

I got why Hamza was pissed.

but he was no longer doing what I'm used to doing in interviews.

He was supposed to be asking Richie for his take on events, not spewing his own take at Richie.

I didn't think it was getting us anywhere.

I mean, that doesn't justify.

We gotta go, man.

We gotta actually go to our next interview.

I mean, we'd like to know what these other people...

You seem quite angry, Richie said to Hamza.

I'm angry because

I feel like there's things being talked about, and the consequences of this are not quite registering with the people who are responsible for it.

That's why I'm angry.

Can I ask you two final questions?

First, Richie asked Hamza, do you think we were right to pass on the allegations to the Department for Education and Ofsted?

Yes, Hamza told him.

But he wished the humanists had made clear.

We haven't looked into any of this ourselves.

Yeah, so I think a bit of caution on your part may have helped.

What's your second question?

The second question is...

Do you agree by the time the humanists really started amplifying Sue Packer by sending her out for press interviews in April 2014, the Trojan horse affair was already a massive story?

Nothing we could have done at that point would have made any difference anyway, Richie says.

Here's what you could have done by April.

If you'd started by April investigating your own sources, and if you found Sue Packer to be an untrustworthy source,

that's what you could have done by April.

Before she gets in front of Peter Clark, before someone's getting a lifetime ban, that's something you could have done by April to change the entire spectrum of this conversation.

So there was still something left for you to do in April if you had done your job.

No

Richie turned from us, stricken, and walked out of the room.

I packed up our stuff and headed out of the building to get us a cab.

I saw Hamza go look for Richie to shake his hand.

Did you just invite him for a drink?

I wanna, because he's a young lad.

He's a young lad that's having to quite frankly answer for things that are

beyond him.

And I appreciate that he tried.

You gotta stop yelling at people.

I think you can say exactly what you're saying and not yell at them.

That's what turns them off.

I don't give a fuck, mate.

That doesn't what turn him off.

That's what gets him to find you just stop fucking around.

This isn't a fucking joke.

You're asking me what did the Trojan horse do?

Fuck this, mate.

Fuck this, mate.

It's about as accurate a reflection reflection as you could come up with of where Hamza was by this point, two years into our investigation.

And I'm not just talking about with the Trojan horse story, I'm talking about where Hamza was at with journalism.

This whole thing is just

makes me lose my mind sometimes, mate.

And you're asking me to stop screaming.

And this wasn't the first time he and I had had a disagreement about how to do this work.

Next, on the Trojan horse affair: cucumbers and cooker Bombs.

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Hamza Syed and me, along with Rebecca Lacks.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by our contributing editor, Aisha Menazar Siddiqui.

Fact-checking and research by Mark Cronolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Meller with additional music by Matt McGinley and Stephen Jackson.

Sound design, mixing, and music supervision by Stephen Jackson and Phil Domahofsky at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is Nde Chubu.

Executive Assistant is Alberto De Leon.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

Special thanks to Tala Hurrera and Osama Syed, as well as Sidrus Syed, Iman Syed, and Shireen Syed.

Socia Ahimovich and Sam Doyer of Fort Draw.

Audio is licensed by Lola Clips ITV Archive.

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and the New York Times.