WHO IS LUCY POWELL AFRAID OF?

Seven-Year-Old Muslim Girls Are Being Made To Wear The Hijab In A State-Funded School. The Education Secretary Can End This. Dare Dogwhistle Do It?

A state-funded school makes seven-year-old Muslim girls wear the hijab. When the complaints came, it exempted the non-Muslim girls and left the Muslim ones exactly where they were. That is what bloc vote reliant Labour Party politicians do when they are more frightened of Muslim men than of what happens to Muslim children.

THE RULE IS WRITTEN DOWN AND IT STARTS AT SEVEN

Barnet Hill Academy in West Hendon is an Islamic school for children aged three to eleven. Its uniform policy makes a white hijab compulsory for every girl from Year 3. It lists the hijab with the pinafore, the black shoes and the book bag, it specifies "plain white ONLY", and it tells parents what happens to a girl who does not comply. She is sent home and told to come back covered.

Children enter Year 3 at seven. At seven, a girl at this school covers her hair or she does not go to school. At nine the school adds a jilbab or an ankle-length skirt. The school is open about what this is. It says it uses "the terms uniform and Islamic dress interchangeably" because its pupils from Year 3 "are engaged in acts of worship, congregational prayer, recitation of the Quran", and that the dress code exists to direct children "towards Islamic values and norms".

This is not a uniform. It is religious observance enforced on the body of a seven-year-old girl by the adults who run the building, and it starts before she is old enough to be trusted to cross a road on her own.

The school opened in 2006 as Ayesha Community School, was taken over and renamed in 2018, and charged more than £6,500 a year for the privilege. On 4 August Barnet Council approved its application to become a voluntary-aided primary. From 1 September it is a maintained school. The governors keep control of staffing and admissions and can fill every place by faith. The rule has not changed. The only thing that has changed is who pays for it, and now it is you.

THE COUNCIL'S DEFENCE WAS THAT ONLY THE MUSLIM GIRLS ARE FORCED

When the policy was noticed, Barnet Council said it was "legally compliant and non-compulsory for non-Muslim pupils". That was the reassurance. A Labour council, asked why it was funding a school that forces seven-year-olds to cover their hair, told the public not to worry because the forcing only applies to the Muslim ones. A press officer typed it, a senior officer cleared it, and the Labour leadership let it go out under the council's name, and none of them stopped to hear what it said.

The rest of the defence is the script councils read from. "School uniform policy is not set by the council." Religious dress is "not unusual" in faith schools. The policy "is consistent with those of other faith schools". The borough prides itself on "the diverse nature of our school landscape". The proposal was "promoted by the school's governing body", the representations were "all overwhelmingly in support" and "we received no objections from residents".

They received no objections because a four-week consultation on a Muslim school, promoted by the school and answered by the school's own supporters, was designed never to reach anyone who would object. The council knows that. It ran it anyway and then quoted the silence as consent.

The published policy did not even say what the council said it said. It listed the hijab with no exemption for anyone. So on 3 September the school went to its website and inserted twelve words: "This is not a requirement for any non-Muslim students attending the school." Directly beneath them the page still says "all students are expected to wear the uniform and dress in accordance with the expectations set out above." They could not keep the deceit straight for the length of one web page.

Before the row, the hijab was listed with no exemption. After the row, it is listed with an exemption for non-Muslims.

THE FIX IS WORSE THAN THE RULE

Before the controversy the policy was badly drafted. After the controversy somebody sat down and wrote religious discrimination into the rules of a state school on purpose. A non-Muslim girl now has written protection from compulsory hijab. A Muslim girl has a written obligation. The correction did not remove the compulsion. It confirmed it, and it confirmed exactly whom it falls on.

Put two seven-year-olds side by side in the same Year 3 classroom. One is from a Hindu family, or no faith at all. The amended policy says in plain English that she does not have to cover her hair. The other is from a Muslim family. The amended policy says nothing about her, so the original rule applies. She wears the white hijab, the school calls it Islamic dress, and if she refuses the school sends her home.

Turn the policy round and a maintained school announces that Muslim girls are exempt from a religious garment but Hindu, Sikh and Christian girls must wear it. That school would be shut by Christmas and everyone in Barnet Council knows it. The only children this council is prepared to let a school compel are Muslim children, and it thinks that is the part that makes it acceptable.

I am a Muslim. I am not writing about whether the hijab is good or bad and I will not be dragged into that argument, because it is not the argument. A Muslim woman who chooses to wear a hijab in her own time is exercising her liberty and I will defend her right to do it against anyone. A seven-year-old who is made to wear one by her school because she is Muslim is not exercising anything. She is being dressed. She did not choose the faith school and she did not write its dress code.

Under the admissions rules the council approved, her place in the faith category is measured by "mosque attendance and commitment to the pillars of Islam", which means by what her father does. Adults sorted her, adults dressed her, and an identity handed to her by adults is now the reason she has less freedom than the girl at the next desk.

BARNET CHECKED FOR "INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY" AND NEVER MENTIONED THE HIJAB

Barnet did not simply count places. The school first applied to join the maintained sector in 2022, and the council's assessment that year, signed off under delegated powers by the Executive Director of Children's Services, worked through a framework covering equal opportunity, integration and community cohesion, preparing children for "life in modern Britain", and whether the school promotes "fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect".

The council approved it.

That conversion fell through, the school came back in May 2026, and on 4 August an officer approved it again, finding "a very limited level" of state-funded Islamic primary provision in London and describing the school's "inclusive policies" as supporting the "elimination of discrimination" and the "advancement of equality of opportunity".

The 2022 assessment does not contain the words hijab, uniform or dress. At paragraph 1.56 it lists every policy the school handed over for its equality assessment: accessibility, anti-bullying, assessment, attendance, behaviour, British values and community cohesion, complaints, data, Prevent, SMSC. The uniform policy is not there. The council has published nothing since that mentions it.

An officer sat with the words "individual liberty" on one side of the desk and a school that makes seven-year-old girls cover their hair on the other, and wrote a report that never put the two together.

Barnet Council never interrogated this policy because interrogating it would have meant writing down what it said, and writing down what it said would have meant someone having to answer for it. Both decisions were taken under delegated powers. Neither went anywhere near the elected council. Barnet's Labour councillors did not vote for this because nobody let them, and the leadership was content to let an officer decide it twice, because a decision no councillor voted for is a decision no councillor has to stand up and defend.

The school's old uniform policy says one of the reasons it has a uniform is to "protect children from social pressures to dress in a particular way". The same page then tells a seven-year-old Muslim girl what she must wear on her head. The school wrote both sentences. The Council read neither.

THE PEOPLE THE COUNCIL DID NOT WANT TO UPSET

Barnet's 2022 report records that the school is owned and run by Barnet Hill Academy Ltd, that the land and premises belong to Hendon Mosque and Islamic Centre, and that the proposal was backed by more than 200 emails and letters from the leaders of Barnet's three main Islamic institutions. The headteacher since January 2024 is Shuayb Patel.

The report also records, in the school's own words, that its workshops with the Barnet Islamic Forum and the council were "critical in formulating Barnet's unique definition of Islamophobia" in 2020.

The school helped write the council's definition of Islamophobia.

Six years later the council assessed the school and did not ask about the hijab. No one has asked who proposed the conversion, who approved the dress code, and what the relationship is between the company, the governors and the mosque that owns the ground the school stands on. I'll let you decide why this is.

The moment a council officer questions an Islamic practice, the accusation waiting for him is Islamophobia. He knows it and so does everyone above him, and in Barnet the definition he would be measured against was drafted with the help of the school he was supposed to be scrutinising.

So nobody asked. The not-asking was then sold to the public as tolerance. The people they were afraid of were the mosque, the governors and the 200 letters. The person they were not afraid of was the seven-year-old, because she cannot complain, she cannot vote, and nobody will ever call a council Islamophobic for letting a Muslim child be dressed by category.

There is nothing pro-Muslim about being too frightened of Muslim adults to protect Muslim children. It is an anti-Muslim thing to do. It says a Muslim girl is entitled to less of the state's courage than any other child in the borough, and it calls that respect.

Courage is only ever demanded of the child. Saying no to a seven-year-old costs a council nothing. Saying no to a mosque and 200 letters costs it something, and I have spent twenty-five years watching councils decide which of those two bills they would rather pay.

THIS DOES NOT END IN BARNET

I have spent years writing about what happens when communities sort girls into categories, respectable and unrespectable, protected and unprotected, ours and theirs. Clothing is not irrelevant to that sorting. It is the first thing the sorting uses.

The moment adults teach children that the covered girl is fulfilling the Islamic norm and the uncovered girl is departing from it, they have drawn a moral line between those girls. A moral line that leads all the way to which girls can be gang raped.

Even the school says in its own words that its dress code exists to direct children towards "Islamic values and norms". That line is drawn at seven, and from this month the state is funding it.

Objecting to compulsory hijab for a seven-year-old is not hostility to Islam. It is closer to the opposite. In every classical school of Islamic law the obligation to cover attaches at puberty, when a girl becomes legally accountable for her own religious duties. Before that she is not obliged to wear it and she is not sinning if she does not.

The tradition that tells parents to teach a child to pray at seven is about prayer, and it is an instruction to parents, not a licence for a school to enforce adult dress on children who have not reached the age at which the faith itself asks anything of them.

So the British state is now funding a religious requirement that goes beyond what the religion requires. Islam contains obligations of vastly different weight and every scholar worth the name knows it. Turning the hair of a primary school child into an institutional test of religious conformity is a choice made by adults. It is not a prerequisite for treating that child as Muslim.

The men who insist on it are defending their own authority, not the faith, and they know that too.

Sharia does not arrive in Britain because a Muslim woman chooses to cover her hair. That is liberty. Sharia creeps into the state when public institutions start enforcing religious rules on Muslim children that they would not dare impose on anyone else, and then congratulate themselves on their diversity. That is what Barnet has done, and Barnet is not the first. Compulsory hijab in state-funded schools has been on the record for years and the Department for Education has let it stand.

The Secretary of State's consent was not needed for Barnet's decision. But on 26 August, in Lucy Powell's name, the Department for Education made an order designating Barnet Hill Academy as a voluntary-aided school of Islamic religious character, in force from the following day. Her department signed the paperwork for this school eight days before term. So I am asking her three things.

1. Did anyone at the Department for Education read the uniform policy before that order was made?
2. Does the department consider it acceptable for a state-funded primary school to compel Muslim girls aged seven to wear religious dress while expressly exempting non-Muslim girls?
3. Will she permit maintained schools to make religious dress compulsory for primary school children?

She holds the position. The questions are hers.

CAN A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD MUSLIM GIRL SAY NO?

The Shadow Education Secretary, Laura Trott should put questions to Barnet Council and to the school. So should Reform and Restore if they had any sense. If it was me, I would be asking at least the following;

• Did the council's officers see the uniform policy before either approval?
• Did anyone assess it against the "individual liberty" the council says it examined?
• Which provision of the law does "legally compliant" rely on, given the council's own words concede the rule is compulsory for one religion only?
• Can a Muslim girl at Barnet Hill Academy decline to wear the hijab? What happens to her if she does?
• Will the school now give Muslim girls the same exemption it has given, in writing, to non-Muslim girls?

Whether they will ask these questions is yet to be determined.

I advised the Home Office on community cohesion programmes. I know what that work was for, because I helped build it. Its central principle was that a Muslim child is a citizen, not a delegate for a community, and that her rights belong to her and not to her father, her imam, or the men who claim to speak for her.

Barnet Council has now brought into the maintained sector a school that decides a child's religious dress according to the faith category adults have placed her in, and its assessment calls that equality of opportunity.

I do not ask whether a non-Muslim girl can attend Barnet Hill Academy without a hijab. They have answered that. I ask whether a seven-year-old Muslim girl can?

If the answer is yes, the school should amend its policy today to say so, in the same plain words it found for everybody else. If the answer is no, Barnet Council must explain why the state-funded school it approved and now maintains gives a Muslim child less freedom over religious dress than the non-Muslim girl sitting next to her, specifically because she is Muslim. And it should have to explain that in public, to the people who elected it, in the chamber it bypassed to make the decision.

Compulsory religious covering of a seven-year-old girl is oppression. When the state funds it, calls it liberty, and looks away because it is frightened of the adults who asked for it, the state is not watching that oppression. It is taking part in it.

For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.

Now the harder fight begins.

Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.

As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.

Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.

Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.

At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.

The pressure to protect a serving Prime Minister will be immense. The institutions that failed these girls will have every incentive to avoid putting the country's most powerful politician under oath. Much of the media will once again find reasons to look the other way.

That is why this campaign cannot slow down now.

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Raja Miah MBE