King David High in Manchester is one of the few schools to have taken on Ofsted and won.

When the Ofsted downgraded it from outstanding to inadequate three years ago, the school mounted a legal challenge, the inspection was annulled and King David recovered its costs.

Now it has suffered a similar fate in its latest inspection, which again has relegated it from the top grade to the bottom one, resulting in King David being put into special measures.

Before publication of the report last week, the school had lodged a complaint with Ofsted, to no avail. So now it must consider whether it is worth going back the courts for a second time.
In 2019, Ofsted’s main contention was that the separate provision for the boys and girls in the Yavneh streams — which cater for more religiously observant students — fell foul of equality laws.

In the latest report, inspectors criticised the school over safeguarding, saying that a “significant minority” felt unable to share worries with staff and some felt anxious because staff did not treat them with respect.

They also found that some staff felt ill-equipped to teach about contraception in the new “learning for life” programme; and that some governors did not understand their roles and interfered in the running of the school.

Again, they had a problem with the set-up at Yavneh, arguing that since the boys in the religious stream could mix socially with other pupils on the campus, whereas Yavneh girls could not, this amounted to discrimination. Yavneh girls felt “isolated,” Ofsted reported.

Their strictures provoked a strong response from King David’s longstanding chairman Joshua Rowe, who told parents the inspectors had presented an “unrecognisable” picture of the school.

The evidence used to justify the criticism of safeguarding was “not well-founded,” he said. “As is the case in all schools, there will always be instances where the school might have done better but in general, our school makes a huge effort to ensure the safety and wellbeing of  pupils and this was recognised in all previous Ofsted reports.”

He believes the claim of discrimination against the girls to be wrong. Governors, he added, were “concerned that Ofsted’s agenda of promoting ‘muscular liberalism’ fosters a culture that is critical of faith schools”.

“Muscular liberalism” is what Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman thinks schools should be encouraging to counter the threat of extreme ideologies.

But the phrase has come to haunt her, with some citing it as evidence of an Ofsted bias against faith schools, a claim which she has repeatedly denied.

Ofsted’s critics may well see the challenge to Yavneh as another example of an over-intrusive use of equality law to limit religious freedom.

Just under a year ago, the Department for Education issued guidance on separating boys and girls in co-educational schools, while leaving it up to inspectors to make the final call.

According to the DfE, “If a school chooses to separate pupils by sex for all lessons and social activities, so that they have no opportunity to mix during the school day, this practice will amount to unfavourable treatment… This is still the case even if the school argues that pupils are treated equally or that the separation is the result of parental choice.”

The guidelines go on to say that “if pupils have made a genuine choice to be educated in a single-sex group, it is possible for inspectors to conclude that any detriment arises from that choice and not from their sex, therefore there is no unlawful discrimination.”

In which case, inspectors must be satisfied that “there has been a genuine choice, such as any pupil having the opportunity to be educated in a mixed-sex group in the same school”.

The school is taking advice from lawyers but it will no surprise if it again looks to a judge to settle the argument.