The logo of Bovington Primary School, Dorset

Bovington Primary School in Wareham looks like any ordinary school. It appears to care for the children who attend it, and have been classified by Ofsted as ‘outstanding’. It looks like any parent’s dream school for their child. But this school is not as it seems, because this school is hell bent on brainwashing its young charges with a facile and dishonest view of the ideology of Islam, even though some parents have objected to this policy.

The headteacher, Ms Juliet Muir seems absolutely dead-set on throwing the children’s physical, mental and indeed spiritual safety onto the pyre of political correctness with mosque visits and the dubious content of these visits. Ms Muir has not only planned and implemented visits to a Bournemouth mosque, in the teeth of parental opposition, but has also failed to ensure that the children on these visits, one of which took place in January 2015, do not take part in any sort of Islamic religious practise, that parents may object to.

Ms Juliet Muir, headteacher of Bovington Primary School

In her effort to fulfil Ofsted requirements to expose the Bovington Children to other cultures and religions, Ms Muir has trampled on the rights of parents. You can see from some of the pictures grabbed off of the schools website (pasted below) that the children are plainly and obviously being involved in Islamic religious ritual, something that many parents would object to.

Here’s the school’s report on the children’s mosque visit with a link to some of the images below. As well as the abomination of forcing non-Muslim children to undertake Islamic religious rituals, such as bowing down on a prayer mat, there is also the naïve tone of the article which will horrify anybody with the slightest inkling of the reality of Islam, Islamic theology and Islamic culture.

On Thursday, 29 January 2015 some of the year two children visited the Mosque in Bournemouth

During the journey to the Mosque the children were very excited about the trip.
We discussed what it they thought it may be like.

When we arrived, we were greeted by our guides, and given a warm welcome. All adults and children removed their shoes before stepping inside the prayer room as this is part of the Muslim culture.

Guides were very informative, we found out about the types of clothing Muslims wear, the routine of washing before prayer, the five pillars of Islam. Then the children were shown how Muslims pray.

All Muslims must at some point in their lives, if Heaven and money allows, visit Hadj.

When the children returned from the visit they were given the opportunity to talk to the class about the Mosque and show and explain what was happening in the photographs that had been taken

All the children were very enthusiastic about what they have learnt.

Link to the source of this report on the mosque visit (and for the moment some photographs) can be found here:

http://www.bovingtonprimary.dorset.sch.uk/?page_id=3233

I would be disgusted, absolutely disgusted if my child was encouraged by their teaching staff to bow down for a bloodthirsty deity like Allah, I really would. My child’s religious education is solely the concern of my wife and myself and that is how it should be, and the politically correct agendas of the school should have no part to play in it at all.

Yes there is value in seeing how other people worship, but imparting that knowledge should not include having children bow down to deities that parents may believe are false, dangerous or wrong. It is noted that this mosque visit is part of a series of visits to the houses of worship of different cultures but I cannot imagine either the Jews or the Christians making their non-Jewish or non-Christian child visitors undertake what are religious ritual acts. I do not believe that a Church would make or encourage a Jewish child to say the Lords Prayer and I can’t conceive of a situation where a Synagogue would coerce or expect a Christian child to say the Shema, the Jewish declaration of faith. Bowing down on a Muslim prayer mat really is as central a religious ritual act as saying the Lords Prayer or the Shema, and these children should have been guided away and not towards this action. A technical evaluation of a key religious text such as the Lords Pray, the Shema or the Shahdaha, during a religious education lesson would be acceptable to many, but to make children take part in Islamic ritual is in my view really not on.

It seems that prior to this and other mosque visits parents of Key Stage One pupils found out about this bit of Islam-promo and discussed it and objected to it on social media. Ms Muir stood firm and in a letter to parents heaped abundant textual horse-crap about ‘modern Britain’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘respect’ on the heads of the parents who objected. Interestingly it seems to be military families who were among those objecting to Ms Muir’s plans, that doesn’t surprise me, bearing in mind that some of our military have had to fight Islamic jihadists as part of their duty. Here’s the letter that Ms Muir sent to parents whose children attend the school. Although this furore erupted over a year and a half ago it is still relevant, because the school is continuing with its mosque visits and the January 2015 visit is the that is involving the problem with non-Muslim children being encouraged to take part in Islamic ritual behaviour. As is the usual policy for this blog, the original text is in italics and my comments are in plain text.

“Bovington Primary School

Holt Road Bovington Dorset BH20 6LE
Headteacher: Mrs Juliet Muir
Tel: 01929 462744 Fax: 01929 463238 office@bovingtonprimary.dorset.sch.uk

22nd January 2014

Dear Parents of Year 2 children in Key Stage 1

Reference: The forthcoming visit to the Bournemouth Mosque

As you know the school is planning a series of three visits to the Bournemouth mosque over the course of the next few weeks. There are several reasons for this visit. Firstly, studying Islam is part of the RE curriculum for Key Stage 1 children this term, just as Judaism is part of the curriculum for Key Stage 2 next term. Therefore, the visit to the mosque was arranged in November last year and scheduled at a mutually convenient time for the mosque and the school. We hope to arrange a visit to the synagogue in Bournemouth next term.

As I stated earlier you can teach about a religion and even visit a religious building but teachers have to be careful about what sort of messages they are putting across to children. Having children bow down to Allah or be told untruths about Islam strikes me as the wrong message. Yes these mosque visits are part of an ongoing programme but parents have the right to object to the inclusion of their child especially as this is part of the RE curriculum where parental will still has primacy. A child can study Judaism or Christianity without having to take part in ritual behaviour or be dishonestly told that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’.

Secondly, we have been tasked by the DfE to promote British values in school. This was sent out to all schools in November 2014 in a paper named: “Promoting fundamental British Values as part of SMSC in schools.”

‘I’m only following orders’! Now where have we heard THAT before?

Part of the advice given to all headteachers is that we should:

• encourage respect for other people;

Why should non-Muslims respect an ideology, Islam, that doesn’t respect us?

• further tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions by enabling students to acquire an appreciation of and respect for their own cultures and other cultures.

Seems precious little ‘respect’ for either UK culture or the rights of parents here. Also why should we tolerate the intolerable?

The further advice is “That schools should encourage an acceptance that other people have different faiths to oneself (or none) should be accepted and tolerated, and should not be the cause of prejudicial or discriminatory behaviour.”

You can accept that people have different beliefs, but how much of these beliefs should be accepted and tolerated. This is bland ‘diversity speak’ that obscures more than it reveals.

One of the actions that the school was tasked to develop in one of our Ofsted reports was to raise:

“The pupil’s awareness and understanding of the multicultural nature of modern British society..”

Yep, ‘only following orders’ again. It also shows how deeply the Left have embedded itself in Britain’s education system. That Ofsted can force social engineering like this on primary school pupils is an example of Leftist arrogance.

This was what we are trying to do as a school by encouraging children who do not live in a multicultural society here in Dorset to find out more about a different culture that is not too far from Bovington.

There’s such a thing called the ‘Internet’ these days. Children can see places, people, buildings and artefacts from a multitude of places and from a multitude of cultures, there is no need to take them on trips to the local ghetto. I wonder what is next for the children who are in the loco parentis of Ms Muir? A day trip to Rotherham or Tower Hamlets perhaps, to meet the Muslim taxi drivers and see how they live? This advice from Ofsted, and Ms Muir’s enthusiastic embrace of it, is preposterous and dangerous social engineering. Reading this letter and especially the more ‘diversity speak’ parts of it reminds me much of the ‘Death Conditioning’ scene from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. This time however the school is not convincing groups of strictly engineered human clones to not be frighted of dying, as in ‘Brave New World’,but are encouraging our children, our precious children to embrace a death cult called Islam.

We also found out about the Chinese culture yesterday with a visit from a specialist who taught the children about the traditions of Chinese New Year.

But the big difference between Islam and Chinese culture, is although Chinese festivals may be loud, strange and may occasionally block the traffic, we have little to fear from Chinese-Britons. It’s not a Chinese-Briton who is going to suffer from Sudden Jihad Syndrome and chop of some random woman’s head, nor is it likely to be a Chinese-Briton who plots, plans and carries out terror actions or who is involved in multiple instances of sedition. There are a lot of differences between Chinese-Britons and Muslims, and they can’t, as Ms Muir has tried to do be held as equivalents.

I was therefore, really saddened to read some of the negative comments both on Face book and sent to school with regard to this trip. We are also very saddened to hear some of the negative comments that the children have heard outside of school and are repeating to each other in school about people from different cultures.

‘Saddened’ about the comments, or saddened that you’ve been caught out promoting Islam to parents who may object? My money would be on the latter not the former.

I do understand that the children are from military families and I did read the article in the Dorset Echo, but I have been reassured both by the army security and the local MP that the current threat is generic and does not pertain specifically to Dorset. I would never allow a school trip to be undertaken if for one moment I thought that it was unsafe.

‘Oh I’ve only got the best interests of your child at heart’ is what Ms Muir appears to be saying– yeah right, I don’t think so? It is for the parents to decide whether or not they feel that their child would be safe or unsafe on a mosque visit. If parents feel that their child would be physically, emotionally, spiritually or morally unsafe in an Islamic environment, then they should refuse permission for their child to go on a mosque visit and also have the right to speak to other parents about their concerns.

My understanding from many of you in the military is that you or your husband or families went to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq and other historic wars so that the children of this country could grow up understanding the meaning of tolerance of others. We, in school, are just trying to support that.

Headteacher speak with forked tongue here. Forcing children to visit a mosque when their parents may have a very different attitude to Islam, having lived and fought in an Islamic country, is disgusting. Some of these children may have had fathers or mothers who have been shot at by Islamic jihadists, they may have spent their early years wondering if Mummy or Daddy was going to walk through the door or come home via Brize Norton in a flag covered box? Sometimes supporting tolerance means both protecting against and fighting against ideologies like Jihadism that are the very antitheses of tolerance.

If you wish to discuss this further with me, my door is always open and I would be happy to talk to you and explain the school’s perspective further. I will also put the advice from the DfE on the school website together with this letter so that when we go to visit other places of worship in the future everyone can see the reasoning behind it.
With kind regards,
Juliet Muir
Headteacher

Here’s the link to the letter

http://www.bovingtonprimary.dorset.sch.uk/?page_id=3014

Here we have in the final paragraph and example of the arrogant, headteacher who think she knows more than the parents and who is quite happy to push the blame for this policy upwards in order to evade responsibility for it.

This case underlines just how important it is for parents to keep a close eye, maybe a much closer eye than they may previously have done, on the style and content of their child’s education. Teaching has become much more agenda driven, as we can see from this case, and parents should take responsibility for what information is being fed to their children. We seem to have come to the point where we cannot trust the teaching profession to teach our children without bias or political agenda, unless the teachers are under the close supervision of concerned parents. This is not a good place for the nation’s education system to be in and it will not change, or get better, until more parents stand up and say to teachers and head teachers: ‘No, you are not teaching my child that guff’ or ‘no you are not taking my child to a mosque’. Parents need to wrest control of schools from the educational establishment because this establishment is failing our children and failing the country.

The school summer holidays are now here and this would be an excellent chance for parents with children at the school, and who object to the Islam promotion, to get together and start campaigning against the existence and nature of these mosque visits. At the very least parents could collaborate in voicing their objections to the Head’s policy, ensuring that there is adequate suitable work available for the children not on visits and that the style and content of any educational visit, meets with parental approval. Parents also need to work together to avoid a repeat of the incident in Cornwall where teachers publicly humiliated children whose parents had refused them permission to visit a mosque.

Parents must, as a matter or priority, exercise more power, more responsibility and more involvement in their children’s education. It’s the only way to ensure that they are safe, open minded and educated properly.