UK Islamic Schools: No Oversight

Sat, Mar 3, 2007 at 7:53:03 pm PST

Following the revelations that many Islamic schools in Britain are teaching hatred of non-Muslims, and that clerics in “mainstream” mosques are preaching jihad, we learn today that more than half of the Muslim schools in the UK are not even inspected.

This is how you lose a nation.

More than half of private Muslim schools have not been inspected for five years, while some have not received a full inspection for a decade.

An analysis of the 114 independent Islamic schools in England registered with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has found that Ofsted reports are available for only 53. Most of these involve recent visits, but two reports are for the 1997-98 academic year.

Most of the other 61 schools, and their 6,000 pupils, were inspected five or more years ago but, because of a gap in the law, their reports have never been made public. The law has now been changed, but is not retrospective.

Seventeen schools have no listing on the website of Ofsted - the official inspection body - making it impossible to establish whether they have ever been visited.