This chapter looks at the abuse and regulation of schools. It begins with a brief history of religion and education law before examining the Trojan Horse Affair which began in 2014 and reverberates today. An extraordinary volume of disinformation encrusts this series of events, which is here related via an outline of the salient facts as drawn from official reports and court cases, with minimal reference to newspaper articles and academic commentary. The related issues of illegal schools and unregulated madrassas are touched on. The theoretical discussion illustrates that liberal individualism views education as a means to emancipate the individual into secularism, while multiculturalism treats it as a means to preserve and perpetuate minority cultures. It concludes that these perspectives fail to take schools seriously as institutions whose primary purpose is to provide as many British children as possible with a good education. The pluralist response points to what the Trojan Horse Affair and education law are really about: ensuring that every school, regardless of classification, is properly regulated, well-governed and capable of rebuffing any threat to its good functioning.

This chapter analyses the nature, functioning and regulation of Muslim clans. It begins wih a history of the regulation of endogamy in England, as clans are held together through consanguineous marriage and the prohibited degrees of relationship are the most relevant branch of law. Then it analyses the clan as a group unit with negative implications for public health and the nation’s social and political fabric. The point is to demonstrate that clannish behaviours, which present most prominently among British Muslim populations, are the product of a set of institutional norms rather than manifestations of any supposedly inherent ethnic, cultural or religious characteristics. The chapter’s theoretical discussion observes that liberal individualistic approaches tend to focus on rights and demographic statistics while ignoring the clan phenomenon itself, while multiculturalism tends to insist on the integrity of minority cultural forms, over-emphasising the positives and evading difficult questions about the place of clans in the UK. The pluralist response focuses squarely on clans as group entities and constructs the legal argument for their dissolution through marriage law reform.