Ofsted chief wants new laws to tackle ‘illegal’ schools

AMANDA SPIELMAN, chief inspector of Ofsted, has renewed her call for more power to tackle unregistered schools.

In a letter to the public accounts committee of the House of Commons, she said the inspection service was operating with “one hand tied behind our back” in trying to deal with the issue.

Ofsted has identified 420 institutions that could be running illegally since the beginning of 2016 — 55 of which have closed.

Mrs Spielman told MPs she was “greatly concerned” that children in some of them were not being prepared for life in Britain because they were receiving a narrow, predominantly religious education.

While official statistics do not reveal how many of the institutions under scrutiny are Jewish, hundreds of teenage boys under the age of 16 in Stamford Hill are thought to be studying in unregistered yeshivot. The yeshivot, however, argue they are not schools under the current definition of the law.

Although, only last month, the Department for Education recorded its first successful prosecution of an illegal school — an Islamic centre in west London — Mrs Spielman said Ofsted wanted a “tighter definition of what constitutes a school” and “a lower hourly threshold for an institution to qualify”. (Currently, an institution is considered a school if it teaches 18 or more hours a week.)

She also called for all children who are being home-schooled to be registered with the local authority — although Ofsted was not asking for powers to inspect them. “While Ofsted accepts that home education is a legitimate choice for parents, and is often done well, too often the concept of home education is being warped,” she said.

In some cases, she argued, “parents use home education as a guise to allow them to use illegal schools or to evade the scrutiny of public services.”

A leading Charedi rabbi suggested earlier this year that a number of Orthodox children were being homeschooled in the UK.