As reported by the National Secular Society, there have been more revelations regarding the bizarre ethos that pervades the Islamic Free school in the UK city of Derby …
As previously reported, concerns have been raised that female staff are being forced to wear head coverings, even if they aren’t Muslim. However, it has now emerged that lessons are routinely scrapped to make way for prayers, that singing is banned and children are prevented from reading fairy stories (because witches are un-Islamic). It has also been alleged that the original head teacher and his deputy were “bullied” out of their jobs. …sources had revealed that since it opened, the school had become extremely religious. Girls are made to sit at the back of classrooms away from boys and some teachers claim that during Ramadan lessons are sacrificed to prayer sessions. Teachers claim the children’s education is suffering. …”They have three prayers every day, an hour of Koranic studies and an hour of Islamic studies as well as Arabic. They are not following the national curriculum, there isn’t enough time.” …lunch and break times had been extended to give more time for prayer.
Least you wonder about this “Free School” concept, let me explain. A free school is a school that is fully funded by taxpayers, free to attend, and not controlled by a local authority. So let’s be completely clear about all this – You, the UK taxpayer, are paying for a bunch of religious nutters to ram their religion down the throats of non-Muslims, only about half of the pupils attending are Muslim, and also many of the staff are not. So what is going on here, can’t the head of the school take some responsibility? Apparently not, he (a non-Muslim) and his deputy have been bullied out of their jobs, by the religious fanatics running the trust …
Andrew Cutts-McKay resigned from his role as head teacher in August. His deputy, Suzanne Southerland, had already resigned in June. Both are understood to have been side-lined by members of the school’s trust, who are predominantly Muslim. …Sources close to Cutts-McKay and Southerland told The Sunday Times that the two former school leaders, who are not Muslim, had made official complaints alleging bullying to the Department for Education. Other teachers have raised concerns about the way the school is being run and about employment contracts.
The bottom line here is that what we now have is state funded religious indoctrination. There are of course private Islamic schools, and while I and many others might indeed criticise how they teach and what they teach, they should be free to do so, because it is their time, their money, and so is their choice. This however is different because it crosses the line – your money and my money is funding this religiously motivated lunacy, and so I strongly object to this. Unfortunately the hands of the Department for Education have been tied by the government’s grand money saving scam that involves letting extreme religious interests run things. The current policy is to hand over more and more schools to religious lunatics who say one thing at the approval stage and then do something entirely different when the school opens. At the very least, the Department for Education needs to be given some teeth here to enforce basic educational standards and clamp down hard upon an ethos of intolerance to anything and everything except a very specific irrational belief that is not actually true at all. The good news is that the Al-Madinah School is currently under investigation by the Education Funding Agency for alleged irregularities over its grants, lets hope that they can put a stop to this gross abuse of public funds. .