Jewish Schools Targeted Again in Britain

Photo: CC BY-SA 3.0 Josh Goldman

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year after hostile government inspections of UK chareidi schools generated a storm, there are signs that things are getting worse, as a high-performing non-chareidi school came in recently for similar treatment.

Two weeks ago, Ofsted, a government agency that inspects schools across the UK, released a highly critical report of their March inspection of Manchester’s King David school. KD, as it’s known, is a major traditional Jewish school that has a Modern Orthodox stream called Yavneh constituting 30 percent of pupils. According to the school, Ofsted inspectors focused heavily on the fact that the Yavneh division is separated into boys and girls schools, which they claimed constitutes unlawful gender segregation. The King David episode makes clear that although the schools issue has gone below the radar recently, the threat to Jewish education in the UK is alive and well.

Ofsted’s own report into the inspection makes clear that the reason that the school was downgraded from outstanding in 2015 to inadequate — despite the fact that “pupils’ attainment is high” — was largely due to the separation of boys and girls. The inability of boys and girls to learn and socialize together, the report wrote, means that “they miss out on the educational and social benefits of doing so.”

Religious freedom in the UK is guaranteed by the Human Rights Act of 1998, and is limited only where it infringes on others’ rights. But in a letter to teachers, longtime King David chairman Joshua Rowe noted that religious freedom always seems to take a back seat in Ofsted’s assessments, adding that “some wonder whether this may be part of an agenda to diminish faith and religion and their associated denominational schools.”