BIRMINGHAM, England — When the three government inspectors came to Park View School to look for evidence of a purported takeover by Islamists, one of them joked about the many “beards” among the teachers there. They looked at the loudspeakers, the ablution rooms and the prayer mats in the gym behind the volleyball net. And, according to accounts by school officials and students, the inspectors asked teenage girls in white hijabs:

“Is anyone forcing you to cover up?”

“Aren’t you hot in those long skirts?”

“What are you taught about menstrual cycles?”

Park View, a public high school in a heavily Muslim part of Birmingham that was once judged one of the worst in Britain, now sends nearly eight out of 10 of its students into higher education. It is many times oversubscribed, and as recently as March, inspectors told the school it had again received top marks.

But 10 days later, as headlines about the takeover plot of Birmingham schools spread, the inspectors were back again. This time, they came to a very different conclusion: The school was “inadequate,” they wrote in a report published this month. The children there were not prepared for life in multicultural Britain and were not protected from “extremism,” the report stated.

An anonymous letter containing the accusations is now widely believed to be a fake, and most of the allegations of a takeover plot that followed in the news media — forced prayers, gender-segregated classes and militant clerics preaching at school assemblies — have largely failed to stand up to scrutiny.