King David High School Manchester has won a legal challenge which quashes Ofsted’s decision to downgrade the school from outstanding to inadequate over equality issues in June.

Inspectors were unhappy at the separation of girls and boys in the Yavneh streams of the school - catering for more religious students - and the reduced amount of time being given to some secular subjects in Yavneh compared with the main campus.

But the school turned to the courts to overturn the shock verdict, arguing the inspection service had got the law wrong.

Ofsted said on Friday, “We have taken the very unusual step of giving consent to the quashing of the most recent inspection report on King David’s High School in Manchester, which was published in June 2019.

"We have agreed with the school that, given the school’s particular arrangements, it was not open to us to conclude that there was unlawful direct discrimination on grounds of either sex or religion and belief, when comparing a pupil in either of the single-sex streams with a pupil in the main stream. 

“Quashing the report will allow us to re-inspect the school at an appropriate time, looking again at how it manages the separation of pupils by sex and assessing the education it provides against our new inspection framework.”

Joshua Rowe, chairman of King David, said that Ofsted had conceded “they were entirely wrong and therefore accepted our submission; that the latest report be quashed in its entirety; that the outstanding rating be reinstated forthwith; that they pay our costs."

But he believed the inspection service should have realised they had misunderstood the law during and after the inspection six months ago. “The reputational damage and the grief and angst caused to staff, parents and pupils is immeasurable and simply unacceptable,” he said.

“If there is any takeaway from this story it is not to criticise Ofsted as a whole but to pose the question whether it can be right that Ofsted checks Ofsted,” he added. “Can it be right that  a group of inspectors, however good they are,  can decide a school’s fate without any mechanism for an external independent review?”