Here's a sample of the posts. Commenting on a BBC report about gays in Pakistan, Teacher A says: "If you have just eaten, read after two hours. Caution advised." To which Teacher B replies: "This stuff is disgusting and must happen but we should try to lift our imam (faith) in these difficult times rather than buy into this type of cheap sensational garbage . . ." 

Teacher A goes on: ". . . these filthy crime is happening in the land that our parents belong to . . . the practice of homosexuality is certainly the signs of the end of times. This agenda is also being promoted by our government in the UK, therefore, it's imperative that we as educators don't shy away from this . . ." 

Besides children being encouraged to disparage Christmas — with celebrations banned at two primary schools, Nansen and Oldknow Academy — Clarke cites allegations of "racist attitudes promoted in assembly". One example is the teacher reported to have told children that Christians were "all liars". A teacher is also said to have told children Christians and Jews were ignorant.

The fact that Gove chose a former head of counter-terrorism was widely interpreted as proof that he was Islamophobic. He was accused of conflating ordinary religious conservatism with extremism, and therefore terrorism. 

A chorus of disapproval came from the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police ("desperately unfortunate"); Birmingham MPs (Shabana Mahmood: "deeply provocative", Liam Byrne: "Parents are bloody angry"); former Respect leader Salma Yaqoob ("a disaster for community cohesion"); the Association of Teachers and Lecturers ("Politically motivated"); and Guardian commentator Seumas Milne, who asserted that Gove wanted to "humiliate the Muslim community", while the paper's education correspondent concluded: "There's not much evidence of anything."

Of course Clarke found no evidence of AK47s being stored in school lockers — but then he never imagined he would. As he repeatedly stressed: "I most definitely was not approaching my role from the perspective of looking for evidence of terrorist activity, radicalisation or violent extremism."

Nonetheless, the MCB, Salma Yaqoob, Liam Byrne and others endorsed the "straw man" argument that looking for radicalisation was what Gove had tasked Clarke to do. And because Clarke found no such evidence, his critics reached the bogus conclusion that, as Yaqoob put it, the "central allegation . . . remains unproven". 

But the central allegation was emphatically not that schools were directly radicalising children. It was that a group of conservative-minded governors and teachers was using entryist tactics to take over secular state schools — an Islamist version of the 1980s plot by the Militant Tendency to infiltrate the Labour party — that risked making children vulnerable to radicalisation.

These tactics were set out in the now infamous and anonymous "Trojan Horse" letter. That letter purported to be the outline of a five-stage plot to remove those head teachers in state schools with a majority of Muslim pupils who were not prepared to run their schools on strict Islamic principles. The idea was to replace them with heads who would. In recent years ten heads in east Birmingham have resigned or been dismissed, with the ousted female non-Muslim head of Oldknow Academy having been subjected to "relentless" pressure.