Ofsted head challenged
OFSTED’S CHIEF inspector Amanda Spielman was accused of misrepresenting a strictly Orthodox Jewish school in claiming it had airbrushed Queen Elizabeth I out of history.
Robert Halfon, chairman of the parliamentary education select committee, challenged Mrs Spielman over her comments about the state-aided Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School in Hackney when she appeared before it on Monday.
The school felt the remark — made by her earlier this year -— was “incredibly untrue,” he said. It had blanked out a picture of the queen — “which was wrong,” he said — because it felt it was “immodest.”
But Yesodeh Hatorah girls had seen pictures of Elizabeth in their lessons as well as of other female leaders, he said.
The school — which lost its founding principal Rabbi Avrohom Pinter to coronavirus last month — was downgraded to inadequate by Ofsted two years ago when it was criticised for censorship of textbooks.
Mrs Spielman said she was confident her inspectors were “justified, fair and representative” in their report.
She said a whole chapter of a textbook had been glued together or redacted. “It wasn’t a question of an image, this was an entire chunk of history.”
Pages from a textbook used by the school — which were seen by the JC — showed it had screened out a picture of the Queen dancing with her favourite, Robert Dudley, as well as a passage on her father King Henry VIII’s complicated marital life and a reference to the accusation of adultey against Anne Boleyn.
Yesodey Hatorah was found to be meeting the requirements of the national history curriculum in a followup inspection earlier this year.
Faith communities, Mr Halfon argued, felt Ofsted had been “going in with a very heavy hand and without understanding the needs and beliefs of those faith communities”.
A spokesman for Yesodey Hatorah said after the hearing that Mrs Spielman had a “vendetta” against the school.
The chief inspector was also tackled at the committee by another MP over whether inspectors were departing from government guidance on relationships and sex education.
“We clearly have never set out to depart and to my knowledge, we haven’t,” she said.
Primary schools are encouraged — though not required — to mention families with same-sex parents, according to the government. Schools have leeway in deciding at what age certain topics are appropriate to introduce.
However, some Charedi primaries have complained of being penalised by Ofsted inspectors for not talking about LGBT people.
Mrs Spielman told the committee, “Age-appropriate is one of the greatest difficulties in this and that is why I am on record as saying it would be helpful if the RSE guidance had extended to year-by-year specifics.
“That isn’t the case. So it does leave a greater degree of subjectivity in applying the guidance.”