THE ETGAR CHALLENGE

grow. He cites the example of one student taking a BA in public sector management who combines two day’s study with three days work for a charity that is sponsoring his degree; he will graduate with much less debt than many of his peers.

A-level choices for JFS students remain pretty traditional with English, maths and sciences continuing to be popular. But in the current climate, “the arts are being squeezed. We are still running music, art and dance A-levels but running with very small numbers. I have to wonder what’s the future for those courses.”

That, he believes, reflects students being more “strategically-minded” about their A-level choices, looking closely at what subjects they might need for university entry. “They are looking to maximise their chances of getting into particular places,” he says. “When I was doing my A-levels, I don’t remember thinking about university entrance requirements. I went with A-levels I liked.”

But one creative option that remains available is the EPQ , the extended project qualification, equivalent to half an A-level which students can take in addition to their exams. “We have 60 to 80 sign up each year. It’s got a lot of appeal and some universities will make an improved offer with an EPQ because it really is an independent piece of work. It’s a bit left field — you can do a piece of drama, you can write a screenplay.

“It’s got that capacity to speak to people’s creativity in a way which perhaps traditional A-levels don’t.”

One challenge is to try to improve the take-up of A-level modern languages, which are also feeling the pinch. They are currently offered in Ivrit, Spanish and French at JFS but for a school its size (with an overall sixthform capacity of 550 a class of 10 in Spanish is small.

“The ambition is to try to increase those numbers and what we are offering,” he says. “The government wants to extend this notion of cultural capital but it seems to me a critical part of cultural capital is having a certain amount of familiarity with another language and the culture of another place.”

JFS students typically for degree courses such as law, English or business studies. And the universities with large Jewish societies — Leeds, Nottingham, Bristol, Birmingham — continue to attract applicants. But he was surprised to notice the popularity of Edinburgh. A colleague observed that the option of going to Israel was on the rise.

Another area the school has focused on is wellbeing. “We have had to think about what we are doing specifically for sixthformers because the pressures they face are not the same as the pressures lower down in the school,” he says.

“Are we making sure our young people feel properly equipped to go and be independent, whether that’s at work or at university?”

There’s a weekly wellbeing surgery where students can “drop in and bring to the table what sort of things they worry about”. The school has also produced a guide that signposts whom to talk to about particular issues. “Kids talk about their health and wellbeing in a way I didn’t. I don’t think it was as pressured [then]. I don’t think so many people were going to university, with all the associated financial costs.”

The greater concern for wellbeing partly reflects the social media age. “How do we safeguard young people from a very recent technological phenomenon? The difficulty is that it is people who have not grown up with it who are trying to safeguard people who are immersed in it.”

Sixthformers can use smartphones in “the Mez”, their common area, but for school business, such as checking timetables or homework, not social use. Using technology as an educational tool is also something students need to learn, he believes.

“It worries me that students can be very naïve,” he says. “They are not very good at judging what is an academic, scholarly response to something and what is just Joe Bloggs’s opinion he has just put on his blog.”

But even if classrooms now sport whiteboards rather than blackboards, he thinks schools remain “very oldfashioned… If William Shakespeare were to walk into this place, I think he would recognise it as a school. In that sense, they are quite monolithic environments. You are trying to be as diverse as you can in a structure that’s been pretty unchanged for a number of centuries.”

The fast Asarah b’Tevet commemorates a. the siege of Jerusalem b. the destruction of the Second Temple c. the end of Chanukah d. the Holocaust e. the Ten Plagues of Egypt

Who wrote the 1967 song Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold)? a. Ofra Haza b. Naomi Shemer c. Yehuda Amichai d. Arik Einstein e. Dana International

How old was Jacob when he died? a. 110 b. 120 c. 147 d. 180 e. 210

Kids talk about their health and wellbeing in a way I didn’t’

In a regular week, on how many occasions do