Schools face demand for places

JEWISH SCHOOLS have been conferring with councils on how best to cope with the high demand for places during lockdown.

Although both primary and secondary schools in England were shut last week, vulnerable pupils and the children of key workers remain eligible for on-site lessons.

But the more flexible definition of key workers compared to last year’s spring lockdown has led to a jump in the number of children attending.

Under government guidelines, children without access to remote learning, or without a quiet place to study at home, can be classed as vulnerable.

Chris Kennedy, cabinet member for health, adult social care and leisure in Hackney, home to the country’s largest strictly Orthodox community, said the council had asked schools to provide risk assessments by Monday this week.

“We are aware that the vulnerable children criteria as set out by government potentially has a wider application in Stamford Hill’s Charedi community than in mainstream society,” he said. “And this may be leading to schools having more pupils attending during lockdown than the government would have intended when setting out those criteria.”

Hackney, he said, would work closely with each school “to try to find solutions which keep the community safe but also support children learning through this lockdown”.

Joel Friedman, of Hackney-based Charedi charity the Interlink Foundation, explained that demand was “exacerbated by the rate of large families living in limited accommodation with no internet or smartphones”.

He said that Chinuch UK, the Charedi education group, was helping “to guide schools through a very difficult judgment within Department for Education guidelines”.

One Stamford Hill rabbi told the JC that most strictly Orthodox children were going to school in the borough. “A lot of people are unaware that children can catch and transmit Covid,” he said.

There was, he added, “tremendous Covid denial and a lot of misinformation circulating. Some members of the community are under the impression that the Covid vaccine affects one’s DNA.”

Barnet’s director of education and learning, Ian Harrison, emphasised that lack of internet was not automatically a reason for considering a child vulnerable.

“Remote education must be available to all such pupils, including those who cannot access online learning,” he said.

“Schools across Barnet are offering hard-copy materials for children in such circumstances and are backing that up with other forms of communication including telephone calls and telephone conferences.”

A lot of people are unaware that children can catch Covid’

In correspondence seen by the JC, another Barnet official told one governor that for a school not to ensure it could provide online sessions or printed material would “indicate a degree of negligence on the part of the school, given the experience from the previous period of school closures”.

For schools teaching on-site, he wrote, a rota approach — with year groups coming in for different weeks — would be “certainly better than having a large number of pupils in at any one time”.

Meanwhile, Kirsten Jowett, chief executive of the United Synagoguerun Jewish Community Academy Trust, which is teaching on four sites, reported: “We’re working round the clock in extremely challenging conditions to support key worker children. The fact we have so many children in already is testament to the commitment of our staff.”

With remote learning and on-site lessons, the trust, she said, was in effect “running two schools for each site”.