Protests should be banned outside schools, an official review will recommend, as it highlights how a teacher forced into hiding after showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad was failed by his school and the authorities.
As reported by the Times, Dame Sara Khan, the independent social cohesion adviser, will issue a damning indictment later today (Monday 25th Marcy) of the police force, school leadership and local council involved in the Batley Grammar School scandal.
The teacher at the centre of the incident, who was head of religious studies at the school in West Yorkshire presented a drawing taken from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during one of his classes. This single act, undertaken during a lesson on blasphemy, led to several days of demonstrations outside the school gates, with large groups of men also gathering outside the teacher’s family home.
In response, the school swiftly suspended the unnamed teacher pending a formal investigation. Gary Kibble, the headmaster, issued an “unequivocal apology” for the teacher’s use of a “totally inappropriate image”.
Footage on social media showed police reading out the head’s apology statement to the protesters
The teacher was put into police protection after receiving death threats, and remains in hiding nearly three years on. According to his family, he has since suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and is unlikely ever to return home.
Less than six months earlier, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher, had been beheaded in Paris by an Islamist terrorist after showing pupils a cartoon of the prophet from the same magazine.
Khan’s review will reveal how the Batley teacher felt “totally isolated”, “abandoned” and “suicidal” owing to a lack of support from the agencies that should have protected him. It will find that West Yorkshire police failed to understand the threat he was under; Batley Grammar School mishandled its response and may have made things worse, and Kirklees council demonstrated a “lack of consideration” for him and his family.
Speaking before the review’s publication, Khan, the former Home Office’s lead commissioner on counter-extremism, said the incident was “incredibly shocking” and still “personally upsets me”.
“What struck me,” she told the Times, “is that this could literally happen to anybody in our country, just because of the job they are doing, their academic research, or because of something they have taught in school, or because of their civic society activism. The fact that we have so little awareness of what to do, how to help, how we should respond, is just not good enough.”
Despite the scale of intimidation and threats the teacher faced, with groups of men gathering outside his home, Khan notes no one has been arrested. A local policeman who spoke to Khan anonymously claimed the training given to officers to deal with complex theological interpretations and the beliefs of ethnic minorities was “shockingly dismal”.
The review is highly critical of the school, which suspended the teacher and later two other members of his department.
While an investigation by the school’s trust later cleared the teacher of wrongdoing, it found the use of the image in a lesson was inappropriate.
However, Khan challenged this, arguing that “protecting pupils from offence, which is often subjective, should not be the priority”, and suspending the teacher, “a victim of harassment”, gave the impression to some protesters they had secured a “win against a blasphemer”. Khan said a more appropriate response would have been to pause teaching of the lesson pending the investigation.
The review highlights how the type of abuse experienced by the Batley Grammar School teacher, termed freedom-restricting harassment, is forcing individuals, institutions, academics, councillors and professionals from all backgrounds to self-censor and make changes to their daily lives. Khan said this is when people experience or witness threatening, intimidatory or abusive harassment online or offline, intended to make them self-censor out of fear. Examples include doxing (publishing details such as the home address on the internet), inciting hatred and violence, and making death and rape threats.
Her review calls on the government to recognise victims of the type of harassment as being on a par with victims of crime, and for formal action plans to be drawn up to better deal with such incidents. They are among 15 official recommendations she has submitted to ministers.
Michael Gove, the levelling-up secretary, is expected to back the majority of them this week and to incorporate her findings into a wider social cohesion and counter-extremism plan due within weeks.
Dr Patrick Roach, NASUWT’s general secretary, said, “We will want to look in detail at what the government is proposing to ensure that it is workable in practice and enforceable.
“However, there has been an increasing trend of threats, intimidation and abuse directed against teachers which we have called on the government to tackle. We want every school to be a safe environment, both for pupils and for the staff who work in them.”
