Headteacher of illegal Islamic school says her students were ‘happy learners’

Nadia Ali and her father Arshad were convicted of running Ambassadors Home School in London illegally.

• Chandrashekar Bhat
• 30 December, 2022

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By: Chandrashekar Bhat

A headteacher, indefinitely prohibited from teaching, said the children at the school she ran were “happy”.

In 2019, Nadia Ali and her father Arshad were convicted of running the Ambassadors Home School on Mitcham Lane in London illegally.

Last year, Ali was sentenced to eight weeks imprisonment suspended for 12 months, 120 hours of unpaid work, and a 10-day rehabilitation activity requirement, a MyLondon report said.

Ali was also ordered to pay £500 in costs while Arshad was fined £300 and told to pay a further £200 in costs.

A professional conduct panel of the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) earlier this month barred Ali from teaching in any school in England. It also ruled that she “shall not be entitled to apply for restoration of her eligibility to teach.”

Ali said the school had adopted a “different approach” to teaching which not only yielded results but pupils were happy too.

“I’ve been teaching for 15 years and I’ve seen how children need a different approach and that’s what we’re trying to do at Ambassadors,” she told the BBC’s Today programme.

“This is why I believe in what we’re trying to do because we’ve seen a lot of results within our children. They’re happy learners,” Ali said.

Ambassadors had 34 pupils aged 5-13 on its register but an Ofsted inspection found the Islamic School, which charged £2,500 a year per student “wilfully neglected” safeguarding. It was also found that no background checks were conducted on six out of the 11 teachers registered at the school.

Texts found by the inspectors in the staffroom encouraged parents to hit their children if they did not pray and said a wife had no right to deny her husband. But there was no evidence that children had access to the books.

Ali said the books, donated by a mosque, were locked in the staffroom as they were unsuitable for kids.

She said: “I don’t believe that just by finding some books or a paragraph from a book like that makes us go against the fundamental British values… because our children and us, we’ve grown in British society.”