Arzu refers to a recent article for more information on education and the ideological drift of Islamophobia in the UK.
I stumbled upon this piece in LRB this week ‘Making Media Great Again’ by Peter Geoghegan on the media tycoon Paul Marshall. It provides more information on Ark Academy schools, which I alluded to in my piece last year as part of the long context of the Michaela School debacle, when the High Court upheld a prayer ban after a Muslim student challenged it.
In my piece, ‘Telling Tales of the ‘British’ Nation: The Michaela School Moment and the End of Minority Rights’ I foreground the development of free schools with a history of the New Labour founded policy of academy schools, of which the Ark Academy chain is one of the biggest providers:
Today some 80% of secondary schools (age 11+) and 40% of primary schools (ages 4 – 11) are academies [iii]. Whilst many schools volunteered to become academies, the government accrued powers to itself along the way to force academisation onto schools deemed to be underperforming. Many of these are part of Multi Academy Trusts – chains in effect – run by non-profit organisations.
Allowing not-for-profit organisations to get involved in the educational sector was supposed to help deliver innovation by bringing in business and other sector competencies to secure better, nay, transformed futures for the nation’s children. It is worth noting that the schools caught up in the Trojan Horse (hereafter referred to as the Trojan Hoax) affair, were schools whose leadership teams (including parent governors and teachers) had brought ‘turned around’ failing schools into the academy system, and who were lauded by government at one point and encouraged to take over other schools as part of the academisation model.
The profiles of the board of Ark Schools, which oversees 34 academy schools, provides some insight into the new regime. Five out of eight members are hedge fund managers. None has any background in education. One of the original board of managers for Ark Schools is Amanda Spielmann. In 2016 she was appointed Chief Inspector of Schools in the UK. She too has no background in education.
Geoghegan’s piece looks at the ideological underpinnings of Paul Marshall’s projects (which (have) include(d) GB News and The Spectator), their origins and the network of people and organisations around him[i]. For the purposes of this short note, here are some extracts on Ark, as Marshall is one of those hedge fund managers critical to the project:
He [Marshall] is a trustee of Ark (Absolute Return for Kids, a term borrowed from the hedge fund industry), a children’s charity he founded in 2002 with Ian Wace, the Conservative peer Stanley Fink and the French millionaire Arpad Busson. Ark began life as a vehicle for hedge fund managers to donate to existing charities. But the founders soon decided that they could do more good running their own initiatives. ‘They didn’t want to give their money to the government, or to other charities,’ someone who worked for Ark for more than half a decade told me. ‘They thought they knew better than anyone how to spend it.’ The charity grew quickly. Elton John, Prince, Stevie Wonder and the Killers performed at opulent gala dinners. Donations rolled in.
Ark initially prioritised overseas projects, particularly in Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. A UK-focused spinoff, Ark Schools, was founded in 2004. As political support for academy schools grew, first under New Labour and then under the Conservatives, the charity’s focus shifted to underprivileged children in England. Thirty thousand pupils attend Ark’s 39 academies, in some of the most deprived parts of the country.
Why does this matter so much? Many of these names, Policy Exchange, Michael Gove[ii] (whose failed attempt to run for Conservative Party leader (and thus Prime Minister) after David Cameron’s resignation after the Brexit referendum in 2016, Marshall helped fund), repeat across arenas of Islamophobia and theatres of societal conflict that instrumentalise Islamophobia. On buying The Spectator last year, Marshall installed Michael Gove as editor just two weeks later. Marshall himself has been caught tweeting and liking Islamophobic remarks (the discovery of which forced him to resign from his position as chair and trustee of Ark Schools in 2024) . The comments include one that Prophet Muhammad was ‘one of the worst men to ever live’; also: ‘If we want European civilisation to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately.’
This year is the tenth anniversary of my and Saied R. Ameli’s book, ‘Environment of Hate: The New Normal for Muslims in the UK’. In it we remark that whilst researching for this update on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred, we realised that a tipping point had been passed. Marshall’s journey that runs alongside and beyond the history we charted is more than relevant. We are post actual pogroms (albeit ‘limited’ in success) in the UK. We need to ask ourselves how, when Islamophobia is systemic and embedded within the economic, media, educational and cultural politics of this and many other state and regional structures, we can effectively mobilise against it.
Answers on a postcard please.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in the UK. Find out more of her work on this site or follow her on X and Instagram @arzumerali and on other social media platforms.
Photos: Michael Gove, by Jay Allen, 2017 CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 and Paul Marshall, ARC Forum, 2023, CC0 1.0 Universal
[i] The whole piece is worth reading from end to end (it’s around 4000 words), for charting how the Overton window of what can and can’t be said has not simply shrunk but moved radically right, in (large) part due to the influence of the networks that Marshall operates in.
[ii] According to Geoghegan: “Marshall had found a kindred spirit in Gove. As education secretary, Gove allocated significant funding to Ark’s schools. In 2012, when his proposal to send a leatherbound copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the UK was nixed by David Cameron on grounds of cost, Marshall was among those who stepped in to foot the £370,000 bill. The following year, Gove appointed him lead non-executive director in the Department of Education. ‘When we got into office Paul Marshall was a Lib Dem man,’ a former Lib Dem MP told me. ‘By the time the coalition was over, he was a Gove man.’”
