A GOVERNMENT integration expert has condemned a councillor for stepping in to insist a Catholic school allow a four-year-old girl to wear the hijab Islamic headscarf - in defiance of its uniform policy.
Dame Louise Casey, who last year produced a hard-hitting report on social cohesion in Britain, said the row has echoes of the Trojan Horse affair in which governors imposed a hard-line Islamic ethos on several inner city schools.
The Government’s Integration Tsar has written to council Labour leader John Clancy over the behaviour of his cabinet member for equalities Waseem Zaffar.
In January the Birmingham Mail revealed that Cllr Zaffar (Lozells and East Handsworth) had demanded in a Facebook post that St Clare’s Catholic Primary School change its uniform policy as its ban on the hijab was in breach of the Equalities Act. It was not.
We also later revealed he was a relative of the girl - a fact Cllr Zaffar had not made public, although the council said he had informed it and the school of the link.
In the letter Dame Casey said: “After careful consideration, I don’t think I can just let it go. Not only did the lead member for community cohesion visit the school to discuss the issue he took to social media to say ‘I’m insisting this matter is addressed asap with a change of policy.’”
She pointed out there is no religious requirement for a four-year-old to wear the scarf and the school was within its rights to ban the headgear.
Dame Casey also asks Cllr Clancy to clarify what support the school, and any other school coming under such pressure from outsiders, had been given.
She also asks why Cllr Zaffar thought it appropriate to intervene.
Dame Casey added: “What action the council leadership has taken to address this? And why you think this won’t happen again?”
Earlier in February Cllr Zaffar told the city council that he had acted as a ward councillor raising an issue on behalf of constituents, not in his role as cabinet member for equalities, openness and transparency.
The council has also insisted that the city’s education department has been advising the school. The council has responded privately to Dame Louise Casey.
Earlier this month Cllr Zaffar told colleagues he had taken advice from education officials before raising the issue with the school and that the ‘storm in a teacup’ does not reflect the excellent work of the school or the relationship he personally has with it.
Last year in her review of integration in Britain Dame Casey warned that some communities in Britain had become segregated, fuelling inequality.
She found “high levels of social and economic isolation in some places, and cultural and religious practices in communities that are not only holding some of our citizens back, but run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws.”
She hit out at misogyny and patriarchy and said public agencies must act and challenge such attitudes.
