Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
This week a teacher at a school in Batley, Yorkshire was suspended after showing his year 9 (aged 13-14) pupils, some of them Muslims, a cartoon originating with the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicting...
Someone on Facebook shared an article from Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, on how immigrant (or immigrant-descended) Muslims in Germany react to Holocaust education efforts such as trips to concentration camps. The article notes that...
Recently my Twitter feed has been buzzing with talk of “fronted adverbials” with tales of children losing marks in their school English work for not using enough of them, parents having to ask their...
Today Keir Starmer, the Labour leader elected earlier this year, caved in to pressure from the Board of Deputies of British Jews to sack the shadow education secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, who had shared an...
The other day a friend shared this meme on Facebook: it reads “I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy to be told instead that she has leadership skills”. It reminded me of...
Yesterday the Mail Online website published a story about a “Qur’an school” in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, from which 300 boys and men were rescued last week having been held in chains in squalid conditions...
This evening, the Labour party’s national conference passed a motion to make the party committed to the dissolution of Britain’s private schools. The three-clause motion commits the party to include in its next general...
Today I saw a piece in the Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper, in which a professor at York University (the one in Toronto) called for schools to change the way they teach the...
Last night, at the rather late hour of 10:15pm, Channel 4 broadcast an hour-long Dispatches programme, presented by the children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, about concerns that home-schooling is being used as a cover for...
There’s a letter in today’s Guardian in response to a debate about the virtues of Pimlico comprehensive school, a concrete-and-glass building designed by the architectural team at the then Greater London Council which was...
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and according a poll published today which was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, 8% of people surveyed (roughly 1 in 20) believe that the Holocaust was exaggerated....
There is a letter in the weekend section of today’s Guardian from a teenage girl to an advice columnist called Annalisa Barbieri, who answers a question each week about difficulties with family relations. This...
Last week someone posted several accounts on Facebook of physical abuse he suffered at a well-known Islamic school in northern England. This was one of a group of schools that trains boys to be...
Last week an inquest opened on the case of a 13-year-old boy with a severe allergy to dairy products who died in a London school playground after allegedly having cheese put down his shirt....
So, last Friday the school in Newham, a borough in east London with a large Asian and Somali Muslim presence, which had introduced a ban on girls under age 8 wearing the hijab or...
Petition · Lyn Brown MP: Make Neena Lall remove the hijab and fasting ban at St Stephens in Newham! · Change.org This is a petition to the local MP in Newham, east London, against...
In the past week the ‘issue’ of primary school age Muslim girls wearing hijab to school has been on the front pages of some newspapers as the chief inspector of schools announced that her...
The Sunday Times reported today (gleefully as you might expect) that Alexandra Spelman, the head of Ofsted, the British schools inspectorate, had announced a plan for her inspectors to ask primary school-age girls who...
400 years on from Guy Fawkes, Britain’s Catholics still face prejudice | Catherine Pepinster, the Guardian Currently on the BBC there’s a serial about the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics in...
Last week a man who had been studying for a social work degree at Sheffield University lost his appeal against the university’s decision to expel him for remarks he made on Facebook in a...