en was informed in early November that the Cornerstone Christian school in Epsom Surrey will be closing at Christmas after it experienced what has been judged to be an unfair Ofsted inspection.
At its last inspection, Cornerstone was shown to be doing well. Data on the school showed that around 60% of A level students were achieving A* or A grades. There were no areas of real concern and the school had been praised for many aspects of its work, including its Christian ethos.
So what went wrong?
The picture, which is still developing, appears to show the school to have been caught up in the ripple effects coming from the Trojan Horse scandal in Muslim-run schools in the Midlands.
The inspection organisation prior to this Ofsted team going into Cornerstone had been the Bridge School Inspectorate (BSI). This organisation was one of three organisations by which non-state schools could be inspected if they did not want to register with Ofsted.
On its website, the BSI shows itself to have schools drawn from the Association of Muslim Schools (AMS) and the Christian Schools Trust. As part of the Trojan Horse schools investigations earlier in the year, it was announced that the BSI would be shut down as they were seen to have too close a link to extremist ideology. Some members of both the BSI and of the AMS had been recorded repeating extremist ideology including holocaust denial and using insulting terms about non-Muslims.
Christian members of the BSI had also been criticised for ignoring the teaching of literal six day creation in a Sheffield Christian school.
As a result, the BSI was disbanded and new rules came in, that for ‘private’ schools the inspectorate of a school must not be linked to the school which is being inspected. All schools who were inspected by the BSI would now receive an Ofsted visit, or could register with one of the other two independent school inspectorate teams.
Anti-Christian bias
Cornerstone did not register with either of these, and received the visit from Ofsted during October, where it appears a clear anti-Christian bias seems to have been at play within the inspection.
Whether this was directly linked to ‘proving’ that the government were correct in closing down the BSI or not, with a head teacher who is reportedly unwell and with no-one seeming able to take up the headship, after 27 years the Cornerstone school will be closing its doors at the end of December.
