School governor banned over involvement in 'Trojan Horse' affair

A former chair of governors at a school involved in Birmingham’s ‘Trojan Horse’ affair has been banned from office.

The Department for Education said Waseem Yaqub, who served at the Al-Hijrah School, had been found to have engaged in “conduct that is so inappropriate that, in the opinion of the secretary of state, it makes a person unsuitable to take part in the management of an independent school”.

It added that Yaqub was also deemed unsuitable to take part in the management of an academy or free school and was barred from being a governor at a maintained school.

The DfE said that in his various roles on Al-Hijrah’s governing body, Yaqub “promoted, permitted or failed to challenge inadequate financial monitoring and decision-making”.

When an interim executive board was appointed in June 2014 by regulator Ofsted, Yaqub “engaged in unlawful conduct designed to prevent its members from performing their lawful functions”, the DfE said.

The department earlier this month dropped attempts to ban teachers involved in the Trojan Horse allegations from the profession.

Trojan Horse began in 2014 and ministers intervened at Birmingham City Council following a critical report on the allegations made in the anonymous letter about alleged Islamic extremist attempts to take over school governing bodies.