Why Muslim parents are shielding their children from systemic educational abuse by home-schooling

The policing of ethnic minority students in British schools is increasingly on the national radar.

The horrific treatment of Child Q and the recent People’s Review of Prevent has some of the public, if not yet those in power, recognising that schools are only places of learning for some. For others, they are sites of state-enacted, and often violent, racism. 

Since the government’s introduction of the Prevent counter-extremism programme, the routine surveillance of Muslim students has been entrenched in law.

Vocalising support for Palestine, starting to wear the hijab or even becoming withdrawn – all of these innocuous expressions of developing teenage identity see students potentially referred to counter-terror police and even questioned without an adult present. All for the crime of being Muslim.

"For some Muslim parents, educating their children at home lies in a refusal to succumb to the state’s unjust policing and systemic coercion of Muslims"

Some Muslim parents are so concerned by the increasingly perilous position of their children in schools that they are choosing to remove them from the system altogether and educate them at home instead.

This is part of a nationwide trend of British parents opting out of the school system, with home-schooling through the pandemic leading more families to consider it a viable option for them.

But the decision taken by a growing number of British Muslim parents to home-school their children is multi-faceted and complicated. It intertwines fears about the criminalisation of their children with a desire to foster a strong Islamic identity in a way that the secular school system does not allow for.

For some, the decision of whether to home-school is a fraught one because whilst they fear for what the state does to young Muslims, they also acknowledge that sometimes enacting change must be done from within the system. 

For some Muslim parents, educating their children at home lies in a refusal to succumb to the state’s unjust policing and systemic coercion of Muslims. 

“I don’t trust a state that harasses me at airports to treat my child fairly at school, and stories about Muslim children being referred to Prevent for misspelling cucumber as cooker bomb tell me that I am right” 

Naima Ahmed, a mother of one, feels that “by taking responsibility for the education of my own child I am sending a message to the state that Muslims cannot be policed and coerced under the guise of learning.” Simply put, “I don’t trust a state that harasses me at airports to treat my child fairly at school, and stories about Muslim children being referred to Prevent for misspelling cucumber as cooker bomb tell me that I am right.” 

For some parents, the decision derives from fear and suspicion towards the school system: a common phenomenon in communities of colour that have experienced a historic breakdown in trust with authorities like policing, schooling and immigration. 

As Fatima Hassan puts it, “many parents are genuinely scared of sending their children into a setting where they relinquish power to an authority that is not sensitive to their cultural and religious needs.”

She cites examples such as “schools refusing to have prayer rooms based on the fact that they are ‘secular institutions’” and students being punished for making “comments about ongoing political conflicts” as reasons that she and others feel uneasy about their children attending mainstream schools.

As both a mother and a teacher, I like others, worry that the Prevent programme renders teachers, counter-terror informants, in our classrooms. Fatima feels that the problem lies in schools “being told to use their common judgement when it comes to radicalisation”. 

"Another major concern is that the curriculum is not sufficiently diverse or representative, and some parents would rather teach in a way that challenges and deconstructs white supremacy"

Teachers are human: some have actively discriminatory views, some have unconscious biases and all are potentially influenced by media narratives about Muslims.

Prevent expects that while teaching spellings and times tables, teachers must identify signs of potential radicalisation in their students. This has the potential to cause long-term legal consequences for the young Muslims they teach. 

For some Muslim parents, home-schooling is simply about having control over what their children learn - particularly when the narrative promoted in schools contradicts a parent’s own Islamic understanding.

Saiqa Hawa, who home-schools her two daughters, attests that it allows her to prioritise an Islamic worldview for her children whilst still teaching them to be respectful of other beliefs. Giving the example of not wanting her children to celebrate Halloween, she explains, “home-schooling means I can teach my girls about Eid and Ramadan instead,” therefore cultivating a strong Muslim identity in her daughters.

Another major concern is that the curriculum is not sufficiently diverse or representative, and some parents would rather teach in a way that challenges and deconstructs white supremacy. For Saiqa, home-schooling allows her to “teach real history and real facts that are missing from today’s history books”. 

As an English teacher, I can attest to the myopia of a literary canon consisting of dead white men, and I grow frustrated that pupils are forced through five years of Shakespeare and Dickens as though they’re the only writers to produce anything of worth.

Of course, Muslim parents are not altogether different to other parents and for some, it simply comes down to the fact that home-schooling engenders flexibility that the traditional classroom does not. As schools increasingly resemble exam factories, home-schooling allows for a love of learning to blossom that isn’t contingent upon exam results. 

Summarised by Saiqa, “I want my daughters to be wild and free” and it’s not just Muslim parents who feel that the rigidity of the school system turns inquisitive children into compliant robots. But perhaps children already hyper-surveilled by the state need a liberated childhood more than most.

It cannot be denied, however, that home-schooling requires a certain level of material and financial privilege – one not afforded to parents who have to work back-to-back shifts to make ends meet. Given that 50% of the UK’s Muslims live in poverty, this is simply not an option for many. 

Perhaps then, the answer is not to remove some children from the system but to dismantle it entirely. To radically reform it so that Muslim children are free to express their burgeoning ideas about the world and themselves, so that the curriculum reflects the faces in classrooms and so that policies like Prevent, which criminalise children for simply being Muslim, are abolished altogether.

Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London.

Follow her on Twitter: @najourno