Another year of wrestling with Ofsted
V ONE CONSEQUENCE of the Conservative election victory is that the future of Ofsted — which both the Liberal Democrats and Labour had pledged to replace — is secure.
Not only that, but the inspection service has been promised extra money and more power to make visits without notice, a prospect hardly likely to be greeted with enthusiasm in the Charedi community, which believes Ofsted a baleful force.
Ofsted proved to be the instigator of this year’s biggest school story when it dramatically downgraded King David High School in Manchester from an outstanding to an inadequate school.
Inspectors decided that the school’s Yavneh streams, where boys and girls learned separately and had a more intensive religious curriculum, fell foul of equality rules.
The judgment seemed perverse, given that pupils were free to join the general King David stream if their families chose and sometimes shared classes anyway.
But King David did not take it lying down. It mounted a legal challenge and Ofsted beat a retreat, accepting that it had overstepped the mark.
The episode was another instance of the potential reach of equality law. Hasmonean High School, which for years had taught boys and girls on separate sites, was forced to split into two single-sex schools in order to comply with legal requirements. A Charedi primary, Yesoiday Hatorah in Manchester, has also had to divide into twin boys’ and girls’ schools.
The long-running saga of Charedi resistance to bringing same-sex relationships into the classroom entered another year. The government tightened independent school regulations in order to remove any loophole schools might use in trying to avoid mention of LGBT people.
In March, Parliament also approved new guidelines on relationships and sex education - due to come into force next year - that made it clear that children should know about same-sex relationships before they leave school.
Such was the strength of feeling in some quarters that the former head of the Manchester Bth Din, Dayan Gabriel Krausz, invoked the language of martyrdom, saying a person should rather give up their life than comply with government demands. More restrained Charedi voices saw a ray of hope, however, in the small print, which suggested that as long as Strictly Orthodox schools were meeting educational requirements in most respects, they may escape sanctions if they fell down on just the odd one.
But however protective Charedi parents are of their children, events showed they are still affected by issues in wider society. Pajes, the Jewish Leadership
Council’s schools network, ran a series of safeguarding evenings for parents after a number of girls, including from the Strictly Orthodox sector, were groomed by a sexual predator.
Earlier this year, without fanfare, the United Synagogue launched its Jewish Community Academy Trust, a consortium of four primary schools that quickly became five. Although the government has promised relief from the austerity-squeezed education budget, many schools are struggling and the new trust is seen as one way to make the money go further.
Besides funding, staffing also continues to be a major challenge. Former UJIA chief executive Michael Wegier is involved in a new Jewish Agencybacked recruitment initiative, TalentEd, due to launch early in the new year, while the London School of Jewish Studies’ new Teach to Lead programme is also designed to attract entry into the profession.
It was a good year for JCoSS, which enjoyed record results and the accolade of being named in the Sunday Times annual Parent Power guide as school of the year for Greater London. Yavneh College was listed by the paper as the second best comprehensive in the country, one of, remarkably, six Jewish comprehensives in the top 20.
Ofsted beat a retreat, accepting it had overstepped the mark’