Learn it, live it: just make sure it conforms to British values

Last updated on: April 16, 2015 at 6:50 pm by Gill Robins

Learn it, live it: just make sure it conforms to British values 2015-04-16T18:50:10+00:00 Gill Robins

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Yet another Orthodox Jewish school has just been brutally criticised by Ofsted, bringing to a total of six the number of schools within the Jewish community that have been downgraded to inadequate in recent months under new British values inspection rules.

Talmud Torah Tiferes Shlomo is one of the many independent schools that educate children in the Charedi/Hassidic Jewish communities of North London. Compared with the norm, fees are minimal: some schools rely entirely on voluntary donations. Orthodox Jewish schools are all single-sex – this one is a boys’ school with 219 pupils on role, aged between three and 15.

All Hassidic boys’ schools are broadly similar in ethos and practice. Yiddish is the children’s first language. They attend school six days a week, for 43 weeks of the year. The curriculum is divided into religious and secular studies; study of the Talmud and the Torah, the Jewish sacred texts, is taken very seriously in a community in which scholarship is highly valued. Computers and mobile devices play a minimal part in Orthodox daily life. There is a 100% parental opt-out of Sex and Relationships Education within school, as this is seen as the responsibility of parents. There is no drugs, smoking or alcohol education.

Talmud Torah Tiferes Shlomo was inspected in January 2015 by two HMIs (Her Majesty’s Inspectors) at one day’s notice. A previous inspection, in 2010, rated the school as good, with an outstanding quality of provision for pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. So what happened in the intervening five years? Quite simply, the rules were changed in order to impose a single social orthodoxy.

Ofsted now deems the balance of sacred and secular studies to render the curriculum inadequate. Maybe so, according to the commonly accepted definition of academic achievement. But this misses two things. Firstly, these boys aren’t being educated to live well as doctors, lawyers or accountants. Secondly, Ofsted fails to understand the concept of a God-centric study of the world and how to live well within it. It all depends on how you define living well.

When you read an inspection report for any Jewish school it’s immediately apparent that students don’t just learn it, they live it. In the case of this school, as with all others, behaviour is good. Pupils are polite, courteous and respectful to everyone. They are punctual for lessons, working within established routines that maximise learning opportunity. This is not just some of the pupils. This is all of them, each one coming from a home where these values and behaviours are modelled by two parents committed to each other and to raising their children to know and love God. Poor behaviour and fixed term exclusions are rare. Attendance is high. Pupils are proud of their school and they enjoy being there. They feel safe. They know that every member of staff will act swiftly on their concerns and as a result, there are no incidents of bullying. Child protection/ staff recruitment/health and safety and risk assessment procedures are all implemented effectively. What’s not to like? Yet the behaviour and safety of pupils is, in the view of the inspectors, inadequate.

The reason, at least, is honestly stated. Ofsted objects to ‘The ethos of the school’. Pupils are ‘not taught about e-safety, cyber-bullying or the potential dangers of the internet’. Just how, exactly, is this a problem in a community with children having no computers, no smart phones and no mobile devices? They are not ‘provided with drugs or sex and relationships education’ in a community where girls and boys don’t mix socially, where clubbing isn’t part of the social scene, where marriages are arranged and where the teenage pregnancy rate outside of marriage is 0%. Nor are they able to ‘discuss the issues around homophobic bullying’ – yet the report acknowledges that bullying doesn’t exist. So why teach about issues that just aren’t relevant to this community? Because Ofsted says so, that’s why.

The problem with this view is that it extends way beyond the school and reaches for the social fabric from which Jewish communities are made. Yiddish is the home language of most students from Hassidic families and it’s language that define our personal and community identities. So is this the first step in Theresa May’s vow to ‘help people to learn the English language’ with ‘new incentives and penalties’ in order to control a corporate identity? And if Yiddish medium schools are now so unacceptable, will the same measure be applied to Welsh medium schools?

Why should all communities have their school ethos and curriculum content determined by the lowest common denominators of drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, violence against girls and women, revenge porn, sexting, STDs and management of crippling debt? Maybe some communities choose not to prepare their children for this life in modern Britain, preferring instead to prepare their children for an altogether different life.

Like these pupils, children at Waldorf School of the Peninsula in California have no access to computers. As one parent, a Google executive, observed, he works to ‘make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible’ and as he doesn’t want his children to be brain dead, he sends them to a school where technology is banned. Why is it fine for Silicon Valley executives on educational grounds, but not for Jewish schools on religious grounds?

Is the price of life in modern Britain to be conformity to a centrally defined corporate identity, one in which communities are forcibly remodelled by the imposition of a secular ideology on their schools?

A few months ago, an Orthodox Jew told me that for centuries, Britain has been a safe place for Jews to live in peace. This struck me as odd – Jewish schools have guards, so great is the risk of anti-Semitic abuse. The level of local aggression rises and falls commensurate with rising and falling tensions between Palestine and Israel. Yet still, this is a country where Jews feel safe and welcome, able to pursue their lives without interference. For how much longer, I wonder, will that remain the case?

Since writing this post, 2 further Ofsted reports for Jewish schools have been published – the cross-communal Clore Shalom in Hertfordshire has been downgraded from ‘good’ to ‘requires improvement’ while the Orthodox Rosh Pinah school in Edgware has been downgraded from ‘good’ to ‘inadequate’. In both cases, the quality of English teaching was heavily criticised – both of these schools devote part of each school day to Hebrew studies. It appears that Ofsted’s latest strategy, following the British values fiasco, is to target Jewish schools by criticising the teaching of English.

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