About Alef Al-Quran Academy

Why we started

Every year a large number of British Muslim children finish Qaida, learn to recite fluently, and stop. They can read the Quran aloud without understanding a single sentence of it. That is not the child’s failure and it is not the local madrasah’s failure - it is what happens when thirty children share one teacher for two hours and there is no time left for the language.

Alef Al-Quran exists to close that gap: one child, one teacher, and Arabic taught as a language rather than as an afterthought.

Our teachers

Our teachers are graduates of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest continuously operating institution of Islamic learning in the world. They are based in Egypt and teach in English.

Every teacher will have a full profile on this site: their real name, their photograph, the qualification they hold and the institution that granted it. We do not use stock photographs and we do not hide behind first names.

Why we focus on the UK

Britain is a single time zone. That sounds like a small thing and it is not: it means we can hold the same lesson slot for your child every week, in the window between school finishing and bedtime, rather than shuffling times to accommodate four continents.

It also means we work to the British school calendar - half-term, exam season, and the long summer - rather than against it.

What we will not do

We will not claim our overseas teachers hold UK DBS checks, because that would not be true. We will not publish testimonials we have not received. We will not put a photograph of a stranger next to an invented teacher biography.

The market we are entering is full of academies that do some or all of those things. We would rather grow more slowly.

Where we are now

We are a new academy, onboarding our first teachers. There are no students yet and therefore no reviews yet. When there are, they will be real ones.

If you would like to be told when lessons open, you can register your interest - it costs nothing and commits you to nothing.