Claim comes during employment tribunal over dismissals at primary school linked to alleged infiltration plot by Islamists

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The headteacher of a school linked to an alleged plot by Islamist hardliners to influence state schools ordered staff to remove children’s books containing pictures of pigs, an employment tribunal in Birmingham has heard.

Rizvana Darr, the head of Adderley primary school in east Birmingham, which was linked to the so-called Trojan Horse plot, was said to have told staff to remove or cover up images of pigs on furniture in the school, and to remove books containing pictures of pigs, including popular children’s cartoon character Olivia.

The allegations were made by Yasmin Akhtar, a former teaching assistant at Adderley who is one of four staff members claiming unfair dismissal against the school after it accepted what she says were forged letters of resignation in 2012.

Adderley and its governors have maintained that the resignation letters were part of an effort by the staff members to destabilise the school, as detailed in the Trojan Horse letter that was circulated anonymously in late 2013 but is widely regarded as a hoax.

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In her evidence to the tribunal, Akhtar said the headteacher instituted policies at the state primary such as inviting an imam to conduct Friday prayers for boys; holding twice-weekly Islamic assemblies; setting up a prayer room for the exclusive use of Muslims; and converting a pupils’ toilet into a washing facility to be used by Muslims before prayers.

Akhtar said that in 2009 Darr told staff and pupils to collect up all the books in the school. “Mrs Darr instructed the support staff, including myself, to check for any images of pigs to be removed,” Akhtar said. “Mrs Darr made it clear that she wanted the books removed because she found pigs offensive.”

Staff were also told to black out or remove images of pigs appearing on furniture in the school canteen.

“When I was working there [under Darr], there were no pigs allowed,” Akhtar told the tribunal.

But her claims were disputed by lawyers acting for the school. “You know they are complete nonsense,” Edward Williams, the barrister representing Adderley, said. “No, they are not,” Akhtar replied.

Williams suggested Akhtar was in league with conservative Muslim parents attempting to influence the school, and had hosted a meeting of parents at her own house to organise complaints about Darr, which the former teaching assistant denied.

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Akhtar also argued Darr had instituted “etiquette” lessons at the school, in which children were taught to eat with their right hand only, and had applied for a dispensation to allow Islamic rather than Christian collective worship.

In response, Williams said such policies “were modest and pragmatic responses in a school where 97% of the children were Muslim”.

The resignation letters at Adderley were mentioned in the original Trojan Horse letter, which first became public in December 2013, and sparked a series of investigations by the Department for Education, Ofsted and Birmingham city council.

The four women said they told the school they had no intention of quitting and their signatures were forged after they made formal complaints about their treatment at the school with Birmingham local authority.

A handwriting expert has provided a forensic report for the tribunal that strongly suggests none of the four signed their own resignations.

Asked if she thought Darr was the real author of the letter, Akhtar said: “I’m not saying that. I’m saying I don’t know who wrote it.”

“So someone from the school must have faked those letters?” Williams asked. “Yes,” Akhtar said.

The Trojan Horse document claimed that the four staff – three Muslim women and one white, non-Muslim woman – were conspiring to get Adderley’s headteacher sacked in the dispute over the forged letters at the end of 2012.

“Three of our Muslim sisters … along with an English woman who is their close friend, have raised an allegation of fraudulent resignation letters against the head (even though they did actually write the letters themselves),” the document claims.

In April 2014 the four – Akhtar, Rehena Khanom, Shahnaz Bibi and Hilary Owens - were arrested by West Midlands police in an investigation into fraud involving the letters but no charges were brought and the arrests lapsed.

The tribunal is to continue until just before Christmas.