A Labour-run London council has put an Islamic primary school that makes girls as young as seven wear the hijab onto the public payroll.
From 1 September, Barnet Hill Academy in West Hendon stops being a fee-paying independent and becomes a voluntary-aided school — almost entirely funded by the taxpayer, legally free to pick every pupil and every teacher by religion, and still listing a white hijab as compulsory from Year 3.
Barnet Council called the uniform “legally compliant” and the school’s policies representative of “equality of opportunity.” The National Secular Society called it appalling.
An independent Islamic faith school that requires girls as young as seven to wear hijabs is to become state-funded.@rakibehsan: "We have a school that is enforcing that rule – I think many people would find that to be an unacceptable state of affairs."@JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/FJyKzaTDeu
— Talk (@TalkTV) September 1, 2026
Barnet Hill Academy has operated as an independent Islamic day school since 2006, but until this week families paid more than £6,500 a year. Those fees will now vanish, as the Dedicated Schools Grant takes over.
Voluntary-aided status is the mechanism. The local authority maintains the school and pays the bills. The governing body keeps the religious character, employs the staff and sets the admissions rules. Faith designation lets a VA school give priority to 100 per cent of places on religious grounds and appoint teachers by faith.
The school’s own uniform page is blunt. For girls in Years 3 and 4 a white hijab sits in the same list as the branded pinafore, black shoes and book bag. In Years 5 and 6 the hijab remains, with a jilbab or ankle-length skirt as the alternative lower garment.
Notes on the page state that full uniform is compulsory and the hijab must be “plain white ONLY.” Year 3 in English primary schools is seven years old.
Stephen Evans, chief executive of the National Secular Society, wrote to John Anthony, the council’s executive director of children’s services, stating “It is appalling that taxpayers are being asked to fund a school that forces girls as young as seven to wear the hijab. Women should be free to choose religious dress; young girls should not have it imposed upon them.”
“It's appalling that taxpayers are being asked to fund a school that forces girls as young as seven to wear the hijab.”
— Stephen Evans (@Stephenmevans1) September 1, 2026
I'm quoted here for @NatSecSoc about plans to bring an Islamic faith school into the state sector:https://t.co/eSWqYwcm5l
He added: “State-funded schools should bring children together, not divide them by faith and, by extension, ethnicity. The council must pause the implementation of this decision and subject this proposal to proper public and democratic scrutiny.”
In the same letter he said the society was “deeply concerned both by the substance of this decision and by the procedure through which it was reached.”
Barnet’s reply is the standard diversity script. A spokesman said the borough prided itself on “the diverse nature of our school landscape” and that the uniform policy was legally compliant. The written judgment claimed there was “a very limited level” of state-funded Islamic primary provision across London, “unevenly spread and primarily concentrated outside of Barnet.”
It added that the school’s “inclusive policies” support the “elimination of discrimination” and the “advancement of equality of opportunity.”
There are already 15 voluntary-aided Church of England schools in the borough. Barnet Hill will be the first VA Muslim school. The 2021 Census counted 47,700 Muslim residents in Barnet — just over 12 per cent.
The council’s argument is that Islam was “not represented within the state-funded education sector” and that “Muslim families do not have the same opportunity as those of other faiths to access a school aligned with their religious ethos.”
Evans responded that the NSS “failed to understand how a school very likely to be made up entirely of pupils from one religious background and which discriminates against pupils who don’t share its faith can be considered ‘inclusive’.”
Campaigners have said for years that making primary-age girls cover their hair treats childhood as a prelude to sexual availability. The hijab, in the conservative reading the school is enforcing, marks modesty before men. Imposing it at seven is not a fashion choice. It is a theological statement paid for by people who never signed up to that theology.
Some concerning news.
— Sedd (@SeddSezz) September 1, 2026
Labour will provide funding to a school that forces seven-year-old girls to wear hijabs…
Why are we now imposing religious garb on children?
This is coercive, cult?like and a breach of parental guidance!
Britain is losing its Christian roots by… pic.twitter.com/7gVYt7hY4h
This is happening all over. The emancipation of migrant women that comes with better education is no longer happening. Increasingly, girls are being corralled into "faith" schools where religious education is prioritised over academic rigour.
— Richard North (@ollieparrot) August 31, 2026
These girls will not be expected to… pic.twitter.com/UPdUugzgSO
There are Muslim faith schools in other parts of the country, such as Bradford, which are already state funded.
— Richard North (@ollieparrot) September 1, 2026
Theoretically open to all faiths, they are the exclusive domain of the Muslims as the dress code for girls included not only hijab but also the abaya (the full length… https://t.co/XLzInYGCv5
NSS research in 2017 found the hijab compulsory in eight state-funded Islamic schools in England, three of them primaries. The Telegraph reported that a handful of state-funded schools still run the same rule in 2026.
Barnet is not a one-off experiment. It is the latest conversion of a private religious enclosure into a public one, with the dress code intact and the admissions sieve intact.
The classroom numbers around that enclosure have already flipped. A Telegraph analysis of the school census found White British children are now the minority in one in four schools in England. In 72 schools the census recorded no White British pupils at all.
In 454 they were under 2 per cent. In every London borough except Bromley, White British children are a minority; in Newham the figure was 5 per cent, in Harrow 7 per cent.
The same paper has shown White British pupils down to 46 per cent of grammar-school rolls and White students in the minority at 27 universities.
Minorities in their own country.
— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) September 1, 2026
But remember: it’s not happening. pic.twitter.com/ZjY1mtlVMt
That is the country into which Barnet has just poured a faith-selective, hijab-compulsory primary and told the rest of the borough to call it inclusion.
Meanwhile, in yet another example of the parallel society of the UK now, Cardiff Council has spent more than £2 million of council-tax money over recent years translating and interpreting for people who do not speak English.
Council spends over £2m in taxpayer cash to translate materials for people who cannot speak Englishhttps://t.co/SxUam54Drn
— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 1, 2026
The five-year bill published by GB News came to £2,047,975: £1.14 million on pre-booked interpretation, £506,000 on instant interpretation, £396,000 on document translation, across more than 60 languages. Arabic alone accounted for £314,446.
The 2025/26 year logged 13,000 instances of support. A council spokesman said Cardiff is “a proudly diverse, multicultural and multilingual city” and that translations help residents “access essential council services.”
Conservative councillor Calum Davies asked why a city “running out of money under Labour” was “frittering away millions on translation and interpretation, indulging a broken immigration system and failing integration policy.” William Yarwood of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said ratepayers face record bills “yet councils continue to subsidise foreign families that don’t bother to learn the language.”
The same state that will not require English will require a seven-year-old girl to cover her hair if she wants a desk in the new VA school. The same state that lectures the native majority about cohesion builds the institutions that make cohesion optional.
The pattern extends to other areas of society. In July the Home Office was shown to have handed Skilled Worker sponsorship powers to Islamic bookshops stocking Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones — the text that argues for toppling secular governments by “physical power and jihad” — alongside works flagged for antisemitism and Bilal Philips’s The Fundamentals of Tawheed, which UK prison inspectors ordered out of jails in 2016 over wife-beating guidance.
Reform UK’s Lee Anderson called it “a perfect illustration of 14 years of Tory failure: rather than doctors and engineers, we brought in staff for Islamic shops selling books on jihad.”
In March, Labour-run councils in Leeds, Calderdale, Oldham, Wakefield, Sefton and Tameside circulated “Sharing the Journey” guidance warning schools that children’s drawings of human figures or prophets “could be blasphemous” under some Islamic interpretations.
Music, dance, drama and mixed PE were listed as potential flashpoints. The text told staff it was “very important that the school understands this and is also careful not to ask its students to reproduce images of Jesus, the Prophet Mohammed or other figures considered to be prophets in Islam.”
The same week Whitehall urged schools to monitor and report “anti-Muslim hostility” under a new non-statutory definition. Communities Secretary Steve Reed said the definition gave “a clear explanation of unacceptable prejudice, discrimination and hatred targeting Muslims, so we can take action to stop it.”
Critics including Jonathan Hall KC and the Free Speech Union warned it would chill legitimate criticism of Islamism. An “anti-Muslim hostility tsar” was promised for schools and universities.
The leaked social-cohesion draft that sat behind that drive branded the Union Flag and the St George’s Cross as potential “tools of hate” the “extreme right” had tried to turn from “symbols of pride.” Reform’s Richard Tice called the paper “divisive nonsense that should be consigned to the bin.”
By late August the two-tier was no longer a draft. Birmingham City Council sought a High Court injunction against “unauthorised” England and Union flags on lampposts, with breach carrying unlimited fines and up to two years in prison.
Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Palestine flags were confirmed as exempt. Palestinian flags had flown for months after 7 October 2023 without an injunction. Raise the Colours co-founder Ryan Bridge said he would carry on: “If I go to jail for it, so be it.” Robert Jenrick called it “blatant two-tier bias against the British people.”
The state will now bankroll a school that sorts children by mosque attendance and covers girls at seven. It will translate council forms into sixty languages so nobody has to learn English. It will license bookshops that sell jihad primers to sponsor visas. It will tell teachers a child’s drawing might be a blasphemy incident. It will build a snitch channel for “anti-Muslim hostility.” And it will treat the national flag as a hate exhibit and leave foreign flags on the lampposts.
If this isn’t evidence of a completely hostile cultural takeover, then what on earth is?
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