arrest of Mohammad Yousef Hasna,<\/a> an individual employed by Al-Khair Foundation, in the UK last week. Hasna was extradited to the US and charged with conspiring to provide material support to Hamas.<\/p>\nThis prompted UK Lawyers for Israel (UKFLI) to send a report to the DfE’s Counter-Extremism Division on 10 July 2026, detailing Al-Khair\u2019s links to the Hamas terrorist group and raising concerns about safeguarding, extremism, and compliance with the Prevent duty at schools operated by the charity.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Post viewed correspondence between UKFLI and the DfE regarding the Al Khair Foundation.\u00a0DfE said it is “continuing to work with other government departments and agencies to assess all the information that has been provided to us and determine next steps”<\/p>\n
The four schools run by Al Khair Foundation are Al-Khair Preparatory School in Croydon; Al-Khair Preparatory School in Oldbury, Birmingham; and Al-Khair Secondary Schools for Boys and Girls in Croydon. \u00a0Over 550 children attend the four schools. The annual school fees are \u00a35468 for the Croydon schools and \u00a33600 for the Birmingham school.<\/p>\n
UKLFI’s letter to the DfE warned that the schools could be exposed to safeguarding and Prevent-related risks arising from Al-Khair\u2019s employment of individuals allegedly linked to proscribed terrorist organizations. UKLFI’s investigation found that at least two people employed by Al-Khair Foundation had been identified as Hamas operatives, while another employee had significant links with Hamas figures.<\/p>\n
UK schools required to assess risk of pupils being drawn into extremism<\/p>\n
Schools are subject to the statutory Prevent duty, requiring them to assess the risk of pupils being drawn into terrorism, challenge extremist narratives and manage potentially harmful external influences. UKLFI said the evidence it had gathered justified examination of whether those safeguards were operating effectively at the Al-Khair schools.<\/p>\n
A UKLFI spokesperson said, “The allegations concerning Al-Khair Foundation are extremely serious in themselves, but they become still more concerning when an organization facing such allegations is also responsible for the education and safeguarding of children.”<\/p>\n
“UKLFI alerted the Department to these concerns because schools must have robust procedures to protect pupils from extremist influence and from being drawn into support for terrorism. We hope the Department will now examine carefully the governance of all four schools, their relationships with the Foundation and its personnel, and whether their safeguarding and Prevent obligations have been properly discharged.<\/p>\n
“The Charity Commission’s statutory inquiry and the separate criminal allegations now being pursued by the US authorities underline why these concerns required urgent investigation.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UK’s Department of Education (DfE) is assessing information regarding four Muslim independent schools after the Charity Commission…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[3510,1363,3571,5,6],"class_list":["post-104555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-campus-antisemitism","tag-extremism","tag-hamas","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117105426660140505","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}