The number of Jewish children attending Jewish faith schools in the UK is set to reach 40,000 by 2025 - nearly eight times higher than enrolment 70 years ago.

There were 35,800 Jewish children registered in such schools in Britain in the academic year of 2020-21, according to a new report published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR)

That number looks likely to continue to rise, propelled by the growth of the Charedi population.

In the 1950s, just 5,200 British-Jewish children went to Jewish schools, but that number had climbed to 16,700 by the mid-1990s, despite a decline in the UK Jewish population. That growth was swelled by government support for faith schooling,

But it is not just in the Charedi sector that Jewish schools have experienced a boom. In the non-Charedi sector, enrolment has leapt by 55 per cent over the past quarter of a century.

From 2014-15 to 2020-1, the numbers in mainstream primaries rose from 6,082 to 7,021 - although they have dropped since hitting a peak of 7,131 five years ago. Over the same six-year period, mainstream secondary numbers rose from 6,595 to 7,304.

The main reasons parents sent their children to a Jewish school was to develop their Jewish identity (81 per cent according to 2018 data) and make friends with similar values (59 per cent). 

Concern about antisemitism was far less of a factor in the UK (19 per cent) compared to France (63 per cent) and the rest of Europe (31 per cent).

The third most popular reason for opting for a Jewish school among UK parents was academic standards (45 per cent).

And the latest UK data suggests that “the fundamental motivations behind parental choices of school do not appear to have changed at all over the past five years, despite the global pandemic, the challenging economic environment, and quite widespread concern about antisemitism,” the report said.

“Vanishingly few parents” anywhere cited the cost of Jewish schooling as a motive, despite large numbers of Jewish schools in both the UK and France being state-funded and competing against private schools for children.

Among parents who chose non-Jewish schools, the most common reason was “to give them a broader cultural experience”.

JPR also suggested that the Jewish school community could be boosted by immigrants from Israel. “The number of Israel-born individuals living in the UK more than doubled between 2001 and 2021, and there is no reason to suggest that this trend will not continue,” the report states.

Dr Jonathan Boyd, JPR executive director, who authored the report, commented: “More community investment in this type of research is urgently needed if we can accurately project levels of demand for Jewish schooling in the years to come.” 

In the meantime, the JPR has received a grant for a further research project on Jewish education.

'A secondary analysis on the impact Jewish educational interventions on Jewish identity outcomes in English speaking countries' will be led by Dr David Graham, a senior research fellow at JPR and Dr Adina Bankier-Karp from Brandeis University.

The grant was awarded by CASJE (The Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) at George Washington University. It was one of three grants ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 each.