Pressure was on after critical

THE OFSTED squad which turned up at the JFS campus in Kenton, northwest London one morning in July 2014 took the school by surprise. Ranked as an outstanding school and enjoying an excellent academic reputation, JFS had not expected to be the subject of an unannounced inspection.

The investigation had been triggered by a number of complaints to the inspection service. Among the things Ofsted wanted to know was whether the curriculum prepared students for life in modern Britain and prevented “extremist behaviour”.

This was around the time of the so-called Trojan Horse inquiry into alleged Islamist radicalism in schools in Birmingham. Inspectors must have wanted to appear even-handed, although they denied targeting faith schools.

At JFS, inspectors “found no evidence to support the concerns raised in a letter to Ofsted claiming students were being indoctrinated by the extreme Orthodox views of some teachers”.

Pupils generally felt that incidents of bullying were dealt with effectively and that there was no evidence to support “more serious” allegations about the safeguarding of children.

But their report caused widespread dismay, because not only did they strip the school of its outstanding status, they rated it below “good” and said that it “requires improvement”.

Although teaching remained good, sometimes outstanding, and children performed consistently above the national average in exams, inspectors identified other concerns. The school’s leadership did not monitor attendance and disciplinary records well enough.

The “very small number” of students with disabilities or special educational needs, although making better than average progress in English and maths, performed more variably in other subjects. This contrasted with Ofsted’s report of five years earlier which noted that students with learning difficulties at JFS were then making outstanding progress.

In addition, the “small number” of lower-ability pupils were judged in 2014 to have made less progress than similar students in other schools.

The use of disciplinary measures was found to be inconsistent. More pupils were ending up in the detention room with the Orwellian title, Room 17. Inspectors reported that in one year one group those sent to Room “17 included a “disproportionate” number of less advantaged children (those eligible for free school meals).

Nothing has been said to link this week’s resignation of head teacher Jonathan Miller to the repercussions of the Ofsted report. But it certainly must have added to the pressures of the job of running not only Britain’s largest Jewish school, but one of the country’s largest overall, with more than 2,000 pupils.

Like his predecessors, Jo Wagerman

Staff felt like cogsina machinebeing told to do this, dothat