Serial Productions & The New York Times
11 episodes listed below
A letter, a panic, and a paper trail.
The Trojan Horse Affair follows Brian Reed and Hamza Syed as they test the official story behind a notorious Birmingham schools panic. Paper trails, doorstep confrontations, and uneasy interviews slowly expose how much power rested on one contested letter.
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The Trojan Horse Affair begins with a letter and keeps asking why so many powerful people treated it as proof. The series follows Brian Reed and Hamza Syed through the Birmingham schools scandal that became known through the Trojan Horse letter. Its central question is plain: who wrote the letter, and why did the answer matter less than the panic it triggered? The route to that question is anything but simple. The investigation moves through interviews, audit reports, witness statements, school conflicts, government meetings, and the afterlife of counter-extremism policy. It has the patience of a document review and the pressure of a doorstep confrontation. A missing page can change the mood. So can a meeting date, a phrase in an official report, or a diagram that turns ordinary civic involvement into something ominous. Brian Reed and Hamza Syed do not present themselves as detached observers floating above the story. Their reporting process stays in the frame, including disagreements over method, uncomfortable calls, doubts about bias, and the strange feeling of asking people to reopen damage they would rather leave alone. Hamza Syed's reflections give the series a second charge. He wrestles with what it means to move easily through white institutions while investigating a scandal that framed Muslim educators and parents through suspicion. The show is serious without being stiff. Its dry moments usually come from bureaucracy, evasion, or the absurdity of official certainty. Tahir Alam is examined as a figure painted as the ringleader of an extremist plot, but the show spends time on what his work in school governance actually looked like. Rizvan Adar's conflicts at Adderley Primary become another possible route into the letter's origins. Sir Albert Boer and Michael Gove appear through the machinery of local and national power. The result is not a tidy whodunit. It is a careful account of how an allegation can harden into policy before the source has been proved. For listeners drawn to investigative journalism, the pleasure is in watching the evidence move. For listeners interested in race, religion, education, and the British state, the discomfort is harder to shake.
Made for: For listeners who like investigative journalism built from documents, interviews, and visible uncertainty. It especially suits people interested in schools, counter-extremism, media accountability, and British politics.
What sets it apart: The series turns bureaucratic minutiae into suspense while keeping the reporters' doubts and arguments inside the story. It is as interested in how journalism works as in what the investigation finds.
A strange letter appears on a city councillor’s desk in Birmingham, England, laying out an elaborate plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the city’s schools. The plot has a code name: Operation Trojan Horse. The story soon explodes in the news and kicks off a national panic. By the time it all dies down, the government has launched multiple investigations, beefed up the country’s counterterrorism policy, revamped schools and banned people from education for the rest of their lives. To Hamza Syed, who is watching the scandal unfold in his city, the whole thing seemed … off. Because through...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
A document-led investigation of how an unverified letter gained official force and transformed Birmingham's schools.
The Trojan Horse Affair follows Brian Reed and Hamza Syed as they pursue the origin of a disputed letter and trace how officials used it to reshape Birmingham schools and counter-extremism policy.
One slammed door turns a paper trail personal, and you get to watch certainty earn its keep.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A letter, a memory, and an interview that leave the case harder to settle.
Part 3 returns to the Trojan Horse Affair at the point where the letter reaches Sir Albert Boer, and it uses that small moment to press on the larger official story. The episode does not treat the case as a simple missed clue.
A school scandal becomes a study in how reports are built, tested, and challenged.
This episode traces a journalist's uneasy self-correction after pushing back on Hamza for crossing lines, then returns to the earlier investigation into Adley Primary School, where records were being sought about head teacher Rizwan Adar and the four teaching assistants who said…
A patient investigation that turns school politics and the Trojan Horse letter into a sharper mystery.
This episode treats a school dispute as a story about paperwork, power, and the damage a Trojan Horse letter can do. It stays close to Tahir Alam in a covert classroom, follows the logic of the accusation, and keeps circling back to who wrote the letter and why it was taken so…
A careful investigative chapter that keeps proof, process, and public consequence in the same frame.
This chapter keeps coming back to a plain but hard question: what counts as proof when the evidence points one way but never quite seals the case?
An audit report and one London meeting start to look like the hinge of the scandal.
The episode keeps the Trojan Horse story grounded in two paper trails that start to press against each other: the Birmingham City Council audit report on whether headteacher Rizvan Adar had faked resignation letters from four teaching assistants at Adderley Primary, and the…
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
Brian Reid and Hamza Yusuf revisit a letter Hamza wrote to Aslam, then discover it has been filed in the Midlands West Employment Tribunal and quoted back at them.
Four pages cast Tahir Alam as the ringleader.
The letter starts to look less self-contained once Brian and Hamsa go back through Birmingham City Council's audit report.
Proof is what keeps slipping away.
The episode starts by pushing back on the simplest version of the story.