Headteacher Neena Lall was vilified online and accused of Islamophobia when she introduced a ban on hijabs
Neena Lall’s success as a headmistress stems from a simple mantra: ‘Every child can,’ she says. And: ‘If they can’t, why can’t they?’
It’s a philosophy which has turned St Stephen’s in Newham, East London, into one of the best primary schools in Britain.
At seven, pupils at St Stephen’s, which tops national league tables, know all their times tables. By ten, they have routinely finished the national curriculum a year early. At 11, SATs results prove they are the best in England at reading, spelling and maths.
Such achievements are all the more remarkable because St Stephen’s is in one of the poorest parts of London, where most youngsters have English as a second language.
The school was judged ‘outstanding’ in the most recent Ofsted report.
The ‘leadership and management’ was ‘outstanding.’ The ‘capacity for sustained improvement’ was ‘outstanding.’ Overall effectiveness was ‘outstanding’.
‘Outstanding’ is a description that almost everyone who has met Miss Lall — particularly parents whose children have flourished under her headship — would also apply to her.
Until now, it seems. Over the past few weeks, a deluge of poisonous emails — totalling several thousand — have swamped her personal inbox. One was headed ‘You horrible vile rat’. Another was signed: ‘Yours disrespectfully and may you never be happy.’
Others have branded her a ‘paedeophiliac person’, the ‘scum of the earth’, and an ‘Islamophobe’ and ‘racist’ who ‘deserved what was coming’.
So what had Miss Lall done to have her good name and professional reputation trashed so publicly?
Last September, she had stopped pupils under eight wearing the Islamic headscarf. The hijab is usually only worn by young women after puberty. Even Muslim clerics have argued that there is no religious obligation for girls to cover their heads before then.
Nevertheless, the campaign of intimidation against Miss Lall culminated with her even being compared to Adolf Hitler in a video uploaded to YouTube.
St Stephen’s in Newham, East London, is one of the best primary schools in Britain
The subtitles of a short clip from the 2004 German film Downfall, which focuses on Hitler’s final days, have been edited to portray the dictator as the head of St Stephen’s, ranting: ‘This is my primary school. But they want their scarves. Why don’t they just go and join Isis?’
It should not come as a surprise to learn that there have been times, according to those who know Miss Lall, when she has feared for her safety and been reduced to utter despair.
The hounding of Miss Lall, 50, a British-born Sikh, follows a disturbing but all-too-familiar pattern: someone challenges an aspect of Muslim culture and is, invariably, accused of bigotry and racism and forced to backtrack.
Miss Lall has now been bullied into reversing the hijab policy and apologising to parents.
The Department for Education allows schools to set their own uniform policy and yet, instead of speaking up for the beleaguered head, there has been a deafening silence from its officials. Meanwhile, conservative voices within the Muslim community have exploited the situation to shut down debate and traduce her good name.
It goes much further than that, though. Head of Ofsted Amanda Spielman said this week that religious extremists are ‘perverting’ education ‘to isolate and segregate, and in the worst cases, to indoctrinate impressionable minds with extremist ideology’. She said the sustained abuse Miss Lall has been subjected to was a matter of ‘deep regret’.
These individuals would have you believe that the campaign against Miss Lall resulted in a victory for parents and the local community: but some of the signatories to an online petition opposing the hijab ban were from outside the catchment area.
Started by Hafsah Dabiri, a TV presenter with the Islam Channel (available on satellite TV), signatories lived in places such as Bradford, Oldham and Northampton. Many lived outside the UK with signatures from people based in Malaysia as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh, where the majority of families with children at St Stephen’s originally come from.
Moreover, our own inquiries have established that hundreds of emails sent to Miss Lall — possibly as many as 700 — were identical; only the name of the sender was different.
A notorious video depicting Neena Lall as the Fuhrer and Arif Qawi as Stalin was posted by Zahid Akhtar (pictured)
‘This is unfair and has nothing to do with education,’ they all began. ‘If pupils choose to wear the hijab, it should be their freedom of choice . . .’
Providing ‘copy and paste’ letters and messages — propaganda many would say — is a popular tactic of the hardline Islamic group Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), which claimed credit for the hijab U-turn.
An organisation repeatedly accused of extremism, MEND gloated on Twitter that their hijab victory was an ‘important step towards resolving concerns about structural Islamophobia’.
The organisation insists it champions Muslim involvement in public and political life while fighting Islamophobia, but it has links to speakers who have promoted jihad, anti-Semitism and homophobia. At least one official has legitimised the killing of British troops in Iraq.
A group of Labour councillors, including three who attended a MEND event in 2016, played an instrumental part in the campaign against Neena Lall. They are unlikely to face censure from the party for any ties with MEND.
Last year, Jeremy Corbyn spoke at a Commons meeting staged by MEND — an organisation which attacks ‘Israeli zionists’ on social media. Just 24 hours earlier, he had turned down an invitation to attend a formal dinner with the Israeli Prime Minister.
The Mail names those councillors today along with other agitators who vilified Miss Lall, including the individual who posted the video portraying her as Hitler.
It is hard to think of any one less deserving of such shameful treatment than the inspirational Miss Lall, who has devoted her life to St Stephen’s Primary School. She’s worked at the school for 20 years, first as a teacher then as deputy head, before being appointed headmistress in 2011.
Miss Lall, whose family arrived in Britain from the Indian state of Punjab in the Sixties, was privately educated — her father ran a construction business — and is a graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London.
Among the allegations levelled against her was that she failed to consult parents about the new hijab policy.
In fact, we have been told that before the ban was introduced in September last year, a meeting was held in the school assembly hall to inform families; just one father is understood to have complained.
Either way, tensions only arose much later after Miss Lall gave a filmed interview to the Sunday Times in January, explaining a host of changes at St Stephen’s and in which she also highlighted her obligation to teach British values.
‘A couple of years ago I asked the children to put their hands up if they thought they were British,’ she said. ‘Very few put their hand up. They thought they were Indian, they thought they were Pakistani, but very few thought they were British.’
Salim Mulla, a serving Labour councillor in Blackburn – some 240 miles away – is accused of being part of a campaign that led to Miss Lall caving in
The hijab was banned mainly for health and safety reasons because of the risk that very young children could get tangled up in their headscarfs when they played on climbing frames or took part in other outdoor activities. One St Stephen’s pupil who wore a headscarf was just three years old.
Fasting on school premises during Ramadan was also stopped in case children became ill.
Within days of the interview, published on January 14, nearly 20,000 people signed Hafsah Dabiri’s petition against the new policies. It claimed St Stephen’s was in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Children by denying their right to religious freedom.
Why, though, if parents were so concerned about these new polices, did it take them more than four months and the intervention of Miss Dabiri, who does not have a child at the school, to kick up such a fuss?
The petition was immediately followed by a letter in the local paper ‘slamming’ St Stephen’s and trotting out the same argument about undermining religious freedom, which set a ‘dangerous precedent’.
The letter, titled ‘we must trust parents’, was penned by, among others, Newham councillors Firoza Nekiwala, Zuber Gulamussen, Idris Ibrahim, Mas Patel and his brother Salim Patel. Idris Ibrahim and the Patel brothers were at a MEND event at Manor Park Library in Newham in 2016 to publicise ‘Islamophobia Awareness Month’.
Salim Patel is also a trustee of the Plashet Grove mosque, where many St Stephen’s pupils attend after-school classes in the madrasah (where Islamic studies take place)attached to the mosque.
In December, a number of those children were due to attend the school’s annual residential trip to an activity centre in Essex. One morning, shortly before they were supposed to leave, some children arrived at the playground in tears, having been told by their parents that they were no longer joining their friends on the trip.
The Plashet Grove madrasah had told children that if they missed any after-school Islamic classes, they could be suspended. The threat was spelled out in a letter to their parents.
‘Dearest Parents and Guardians,’ wrote headteacher and imam Maulana Abdul Wahhab. ‘We are writing to you with regards to taking leave from the madrasah. Kindly note, no form of leave is permitted during term-time . . .
‘Any students who are determined to take unauthorised absences will most likely lose their position in the madrasah . . . It is absolutely crucial to provide one’s child/children with an Islamic education. As such, it is important that they attend lessons regularly and fulfil this obligation.’
Two pupils did not go on the trip.
Maulana Abdul Wahhab has met Neena Lall. Staff at the school said he declined to shake her hand, allegedly on the grounds that it was ‘un-Islamic’ because she was a woman.
Imam Wahhab epitomises the conservative voices Neena Lall was up against when she and the then chairman of the governors, Arif Qawi, 54, took the decision to change the school’s hijab policy.
They are the same conservative elements the head of Ofsted was referring to in her speech a few days ago about the threat to British values in some of our schools.
Head of Ofsted Amanda Spielman said this week the sustained abuse Miss Lall has been subjected to was a matter of ‘deep regret’
Another of the ‘countless’ outraged members of the so-called community who opposed the hijab ban was Salim Mulla, a former mayor and serving Labour councillor — though not in Newham but 240 miles away in Blackburn.
He called Miss Lall an ‘evil racist’ on Facebook. Mr Mulla says he stands by the ‘racist element’ but, with hindsight, would ‘probably retract’ branding her evil.
A photograph of Salim Mulla handing over two new dialysis machines to a local hospital appeared on the MEND website three years ago.
Mr Mulla is a controversial figure. In 2006, while sitting as a councillor, he gave a character reference to a man accused, and convicted, of sexual assault and inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activities. He said the man, also called Salim Mulla but who was no relation, lived in the same street and was ‘not a bad lad’.
In 2016, he was suspended by the Labour Party over alleged anti-Semitic posts online. ‘Zionist Jews,’ he said, were a ‘disgrace to humanity’. After an investigation, Salim Mulla was cleared of the allegations and reinstated to the Labour Party last year.
The orchestrated campaign against St Stephen’s paid off last month. Miss Lall apologised to parents, the hijab policy was reversed and Arif Qawi resigned as chairman of governors after days of relentless trolling. He said he did so ‘against every fibre in my body’ in the hope that it would lay the matter to rest.
It didn’t. A few days later the now notorious Hitler video emerged depicting Neena Lall as the Fuhrer and Arif Qawi as Stalin. It has been viewed more than 4,000 times on YouTube.
The person responsible for posting it is Zahid Akhtar from Walsall. An IT professional, he founded a group called DOAM (Documenting Oppression Against Muslims).
Speaking from his terrace home, Akhtar was unapologetic. ‘There’s nothing illegal about putting up the video,’ he said. ‘It’s a joke and many people who clicked on it thought it was funny.’
Akhtar then asked rhetorically: ‘What do you think happened to the Jews before the genocide? They were dehumanised so that people thought of them as sub-human. This is what is happening to Muslims across Europe today.’
But not at St Stephen’s, where thousands of Muslim children down the years have benefited from the special environment Miss Lall has created at the school.
In her speech, Ofsted boss Amanda Spielman called on headteachers to ‘tackle those who actively undermine fundamental British values, facing them down using “muscular liberalism” rather than being afraid of causing offence’.
Neena Lall did just that — and was hung out to dry by a Department for Education who should have bent over backwards to support her.