Britain’s top private schools in Middle East teaching pupils to beat their wives

Harrow School has many centuries-old traditions that make it a jewel in the crown of British education: straw hats, black tailcoats and its own form of archaic slang, where “beaks” means teachers and “the ducker” is the swimming pool.

Soon it will need to grapple with some new customs. Sir Winston Churchill’s alma mater is opening two schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) this summer, where Muslim pupils recite the Koran and learn about beating their wives.

The Telegraph has spent months investigating what children are being taught in the UK’s top private schools operating in the Middle East. Textbooks reveal that, despite the quintessential Britishness they peddle, many of these schools have been teaching pupils how to deal with “rebellious” wives.

Headings in one include: “First: good counselling”, “Second: refusing bed-sharing” and “Third stage: beating lightly”. The book tells pupils that the last step refers to “beating for the purpose of remediation”.

Only Muslim pupils at the schools take these lessons, although expat children are required to have morality lessons set by the UAE government. Families must submit information about their child’s nationality and religion when they apply to the schools, with Muslim and Arab pupils separated from expat children for Islamic lessons mandated by the state.

Pupils are also taught “how to treat husband-related nushuz (ill-conduct stemming from the husband’s cruelty)” but are told simply that “if a wife fears cruelty or aversive behaviour on her husband’s part, there is no blame on them if they arrange an amicable settlement between themselves; and such settlement is best”. The chapter includes an exercise asking children to “explain why Islam made divorce the right of the husband alone”, and includes as an example: “Because he is more patient and tolerant.”

Britain’s top boarding schools have kept all this quiet as they expand abroad rapidly in an attempt to make money from wealthy expats. A legal loophole means the schools can send the profits they make through their overseas campuses back to the UK tax-free as Gift Aid.

Analysis by The Telegraph shows British private schools have funnelled almost £79m back to the UK this way over the past two years, much of it from their revenues in the Middle East.

Harrow has 18 international schools dotted around the world, but later this year it will open its first two ventures in the Middle East.

Far from the school’s origins in the leafy suburbs of north-west London, its new Dubai campus will sit on a strip of desert between Jebel Ali racecourse, where the ruling sheikhs race their horses, and Al Barsha police station, which has a detention centre and solitary confinement cells.

The schools will each teach about 2,000 pupils in large grey buildings. Promotional material for the campuses – due to open in August – largely glosses over this, instead focusing on the cluster of 17th-century red-brick buildings that make up the original British boarding school.

“Tradition meets tomorrow,” says a vast billboard on a dual carriageway near the Dubai school site.

The UAE’s requirement that private schools there teach morality lessons is a result of a recent “cultural identity” push. It applies to all students, including expat children, and lessons must be based on textbooks produced by the UAE government.

Students are segregated for these classes based on their ethnicity and religion, and Muslim children are required to take additional lessons in Islamic education. The textbooks used, which are mandatory under UAE law, are described as having a mission to “fortify students against aberrant and deviant ideas”.

The Telegraph has verified that they are being used in UK private schools in the region by taking virtual tours of classrooms and examining a school’s lost-property list.

Therefore, Muslim children at top British private schools’ Middle East campuses are being taught fundamentalist concepts of Islam, often in special classrooms.

A compulsory UAE textbook warns pupils of the “grave risks” of men and women breaking gender stereotypes in their clothing or demeanour. While it does not directly mention being gay, which is illegal in the country, it discusses the dangers of “imitating the other sex and other disgracing practices”.

The grade nine Islamic Education book from 2022, the latest available online, instructs students: “Allah has singled out men for masculinity because it earns them veneration and respect as it is synonymous with ardour, jealousy and chivalry.” It adds that women should display “femininity with its accompanying bashfulness, tenderness and modesty”. A virtual tour of Repton Dubai, the UAE outpost of a Christian boarding school founded in Derbyshire in 1557, shows the textbook on a shelf there. . . Another mandatory UAE education textbook pictured in a Repton Dubai classroom teaches pupils about “Jihad in the cause of Allah”.

Cranleigh School and RGS Dubai declined to comment. Harrow School, Repton School, Brighton College, Kent College, Rugby School and North London Collegiate School – and their outposts in the UAE – did not respond to multiple requests for comment.