Five senior school leaders accused of involvement in the Trojan horse controversy in Birmingham are free to return to the classroom, after the government’s case against them was found to involve an “abuse of justice” by government lawyers.

The teachers were accused of allowing undue Islamist influence in the running of three Birmingham state schools. On Tuesday an independent disciplinary panel discontinued the proceedings against them, citing a repeated failure on the part of government lawyers to share crucial evidence.

The panel hearing the case at the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) in Coventry concluded that there had been an abuse of justice of such seriousness that it had no option but to end the hearings.

“It is fundamental to the proper administration of justice that the panel must be able to rely on the regulatory authority acting in a way which ensures the integrity of the process,” the panel concluded, in a decision that heavily criticised the Department for Education’s legal advisers.

It continued: “There has been an abuse of the process which is of such seriousness that it offends the panel’s sense of justice and propriety.”

Formal hearings began 18 months ago and involved dozens of witnesses. The outcome is likely to be an acute embarrassment for ministers who vowed to bar those involved in the Trojan horse affair from teaching.

The five teachers are Lindsey Clark, Monzoor Hussain and Hardeep Saini, all former principals of schools in the Park View Educational Trust in Birmingham, and Arshad Hussain and Razwan Faraz, who both held senior teaching positions at the trust’s schools.

The trust was at the centre of allegations of a lurid Trojan horse plot involving an Islamist “takeover” of several state schools in east Birmingham, laid out in an anonymous letter.

Andrew Faux, the barrister who represented Monzoor Hussain, said the case against the teachers had been “fundamentally flawed”.

He said: “For three years Mr Hussain has been unable to carry out his profession, with all the financial pressures that has caused to his family. He welcomes that this unnecessary prosecution has finally ended. He would like to thank everyone who stood by him,.”

Clark, who had retired after 13 years as Park View’s head as the allegations came to light, was said to be “hugely relieved” but distressed that she could not now clear her name, according to her lawyer Katie Langdon.

“Although Ms Clark is pleased that the proceedings are not continuing, today’s victory is a hollow one. She had very much fought for, and sought to obtain, a verdict clearing her of any wrong doing. This, now, is no longer possible,” Langdon said.

“The fact that the proceedings are now discontinued will not relieve the pain or remove the stain on an otherwise unsullied, indeed exceptional career.”

Clark was awarded an OBE for services to education in 2013, and by the time of her retirement Park View school had been rated by Ofsted as outstanding.

Central to the panel’s decision was the failure by lawyers acting for the DfE to disclose that they had access to interviews conducted for an inquiry into the affair by Peter Clarke, a former police counter-terrorism chiefThat inquiry was ordered by the then education secretary, Michael Gove, at the height of the controversy.

The DfE’s legal team – an outside firm of solicitors – appears to have withheld the interview transcripts even from its own barrister representing it at the NCTL hearings.

The panel found that the law firm, Nabarro, which has now merged into CMS, had had possession of the transcripts of Clarke’s interviews since 2014 but had failed to disclose that fact until a note was sent to the panel this month as it was about to announce its findings.

The issue surfaced after Langdon, a barrister with Cornwall Street Chambers in Birmingham, questioned whether the language used in the witness statements had originated from the transcripts – for which she was given a “torrid time” by the NCTL’s lawyers, according to the decision.



“The panel finds that the decision to make no reference at all to the existence of the Clarke transcripts, despite the fact that a number of them have been used by CMS in the preparation of the witness statements, was deliberate,” the panel noted.



The decision mirrors a similar embarrassment for the DfE in October, when the high court overturned lifetime bans on two former Park View teachers, Inamulhaq Anwar and Akeel Ahmed, because of “serious procedural impropriety”.

The panel’s decision calls into doubt the continuation of hearings against three other teachers – Saqib Malik, Shakeel Akhtar and Muhammad Umar Khan – which also began in 2015.

A spokesperson for the NCTL, which is an agency of the DfE, said: “The NCTL will carefully consider this latest panel hearing before deciding the next steps in this process. It would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.”

Tahir Alam, the former chair the Park View Educational Trust who has been banned by the DfE, said he would ask his lawyer to look closely at the decision.

“I hope justice will be done. As I’ve said before, this has been a witch-hunt and an abuse of authority,” Alam said.