Born in 1951, Idris Mears is a historian who was .educated at Oxford University and the University of East Anglia. He reverted to Islam in 1973.
Mears is the director of the Association of Muslim Schools, UK (AMSUK) and a member of MCB Central Working, Education, Regeneration, and Media Committees.
He was previously director of Diwan Press, an Islamic Publishing House.
AMSUK is an umbrella organisation for the 116 existing fulltime Muslim schools in the UK and helps new schools to gain registration. At present, five of these schools are voluntary aided schools in the public sector and the rest are independent.
AMSUK is the voice of the Muslim schools in the media, the national educational institutions, and other government agencies.
AMSUK provides support for ongoing professional, educational, social, and spiritual development of the administration, teaching staff, and students of member schools. Amongst its successful programmes is an assessment-only route for achieving Qualified Teacher Status for presently unqualified teachers working in Muslim schools, which is being delivered in collaboration with the Teacher Training Agency and the University of Gloucestershire.
To counteract the ignorance and misinformation in the public domain about the education that Muslims schools deliver and the impression (and occasional reality) that these institutions are isolationist and fuelled by a fundamentalist (whatever that may be) agenda, AMSUK has launched its community cohesion programme. This initiative is aimed at the schools developing and implementing a charter of policies and practices that will break down this failure of communication and contact.
AMSUK has designed a youth project, Fitrah, to help young Muslims and other young people who face an identity dilemma around the issue of “Englishness” and “Britishness” to resolve it through a connection to place and heritage rather than culture. This programme has developed activities to challenge and stimulate young people in the environments of the city, the countryside, and the wild places.
