Forced out by fanatics: Head teachers reveal how they’ve been bullied, smeared and driven from their jobs for resisting Islamic extremists

By Sue Reid and Lucy Osborne

Erica Connor’s eyes widen as she reads the four-page letter purportedly outlining a plot by Muslim fundamentalists to take over state education.

It brings back terrible memories for the former headmistress who won £400,000 in compensation after religious zealots forced her out of the primary school she loved in the English Home Counties.

‘It’s a letter that makes me realise nothing has changed in our schools,’ she tells us with a sad smile. ‘Muslim extremists used an identical strategy to get rid of me and nearly ruined my life.’

At the height of the vicious campaign to oust petite, impeccably dressed Erica as head of New Monument school in Woking, Surrey, she faced vile abuse from school governors and was smeared as a racist hater of Islam in a parents’ petition.

She was even advised by police to carry a personal alarm in case she was physically attacked. One evening, she only narrowly escaped a skirmish with youths who surrounded her threateningly in the playground at the school, which is a few yards from the first mosque to be built in Britain, in 1889, called Shah Jahan or ‘King of the World’.

Erica has added her own concerns about the Islamisation of state schools in Britain to those of dozens of teachers, classroom assistants and school staff to whom we have talked following widespread reports of the letter in the media.

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