I’ve found my highlight for this year’s British Sociological Association conference held at the University of Aston – a small fringe event in the lunch break organised by the BSA webzine Discover Society entitled ‘Questioning British values?’

It rarely happens (mostly because of my laziness perhaps) to come out from a conference session with a new way of seeing something. The panel did it for me in relation to the Trojan Horse scandal, unpicking its significance on multiple levels and raising questions whose implication are far reaching.  Is it not unusual that to address fundamentalism we recur to a vocabulary of fundamental values? Was the academisation of school not all about raising education standard and involvement of local communities? How come that the same initiatives that OFSTED had raised as evidence of success for one school, became evidence against the same school a few months later? How vulnerable to political instrumentalisation for political gains is the whole academisation project?