The head of an Islamic faith school says he will challenge an Ofsted report written by inspectors who asked nine-year-old students to define homosexuality.
Enraged parents at Olive Tree Primary School, Bury Park Road, threatened to take their children out of the independent school on Thursday after the Ofsted representatives admitted to questioning a group of nine and ten-year-old pupils on their understanding of homosexuality and gay marriage.
The schools watchdog has said that the session was designed to gauge tolerance at the school and its pupils, though parents have said that the incident “unduly sexualised” their children.
Islam forbids homosexuality and Olive Tree does not teach sexual education.
Update:
‘Abhorrent to British society’: Damning Ofsted report accuses Luton school of promoting fundamentalist Islam and having library books on stoning women
“Abhorrent” — Jooliar G-Lard found Geert Wilders views about Islam abhorrent. I happen to know a lot of people who find JooLiar G-Lard abhorrent.
- Report condemned Olive Tree Primary School in Luton, Berkshire
- Accused of promoting Salafi ideals, which includes imposing Sharia law
- Claimed it did not prepare children ‘for life in modern Britain’
- Inspection was abandoned last week after parents complained
- Claims children as young as nine were being quizzed about homosexuality
After being confronted during a planned meeting with parents on Thursday, inspectors agreed to leave the school and say they have information to complete a report– despite completing just two of the four days they were to spend there.
Headteacher Abdul Qadeer Baksh revealed that more than 20 parents called him on Wednesday evening, while many more called during the meeting with inspectors on Thursday. He said: “Children went home and told their parents about it, I didn’t know that this had happened until I started getting calls about it. Parents told the inspectors that it was discrimination and it encroached on their rights.”
Picture from Luton today. The caption says ‘enraged parents’. Do these children not have mothers?
Farasat Latif, parent and chair of the school’s trust has collated the children’s accounts of the incident and will seek legal advice. He said: “The whole school was up in arms. What gives them the right to come into the school and ride roughshod over a curriculum which does not teach sexual education? We wanted an apology for asking the questions but they would not give us one.”
Ofsted inspectors have harshly criticised (the) school for promoting Salafi fundamentalist beliefs and rated the school as inadequate, in a possible prelude to it being closed or taken over by the Department for Education.In their unpublished draft report, the inspectors said the school … fails to prepare its pupils “for life in modern Britain, as opposed to life in a Muslim state”, and that its library contains books that are “abhorrent to British society” in their depiction of punishments under sharia law.
“Some books in the children’s library contain fundamentalist Islamic beliefs (Salafi) or are set firmly within a Saudi Arabian socio-religious context. Some of the views promoted by these books, for example about stoning women, have no place in British society,” the report argues. ”Pupils’ contact with people from different cultures, faiths and traditions is too limited to promote tolerance and respect for the views, lifestyles and customs of other people.”
The snap inspection was ordered by the Department for Education after reports that the headteacher had argued during a BBC radio discussion that homosexuality was punishable by death in an “ideal” Islamic state. Several other independent Muslim schools have also had recent snap inspections ordered by the department.
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