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. [Birmingham Mail] Read more
