The school inspector who played for Manchester United

One of her responsibilities, she said, is to “make sure everybody feels quite  comfortable with the new framework. What would be unfair is to roll out a new framework and not have everybody at least supported in some way to know what the changes are.”

Originally from Southport, she has spent most of her life in Manchester but has also lived and worked in London and Amsterdam. Having taken a degree in design technology and trained as a teacher at Goldsmith’s College in London, she taught in a number of non-Jewish schools before developing her career as a trainer and mentor of teachers and as an educational consultant helping schools to improve.

Her footballing aptitude was noticed when she was a student when she was invited to try out for the Doncaster Belles. When she explained she was returning to Manchester, the talent-spotter gave her a contact for the United coach. “I went for a trial and I got picked for their first team. I played with them for a few years. I wasn’t England material and I wouldn’t say I was their number one for striker.”

But even after she hung up her boots, she continued her links with the game, qualifying as an FA coach and coaching underprivileged girls in Salford.

It was as a teacher trainer that she got to work with staff from Jewish schools, including from the Charedi sector.

“The pedagogy didn’t necessarily change for the different subject areas and I became involved in looking at Jewish studies and their curriculums and the trainee teachers that were qualifying to teach in that field,” she said. “And that’s where I started to become more involved in the Jewish studies aspect of teaching.”

For a time she ran the Northern branch of a teacher training programme offered by the Agency for Jewish Education, whose director of education was Jeffrey Leader. She was also a governor of a Manchester primary for some 20 years, Broughton Jewish Cassel Fox.

Around six or so years ago, she was approached by Jeffrey Leader to join the Pikuach inspection force, then to become one of the team responsible for revising its inspection framework.

The most important change is a new emphasis on Jewish personal and spiritual development. Rather than assessing simply what children know, inspectors have to gauge children’s appreciation of what Jewish values means in their own lives.

“It took quite a few years to develop that Jewish spirituality aspect.” The team recognised “that you couldn’t just throw in this new aspect. We really needed to rewrite the whole framework.”

Measuring a child’s spiritual progress is obviously harder than seeing if they can understand a piece of text so inspectors have had to be trained how to ask the right questions to solicit the information.

“I think we have a good set of tools for looking it at effectively. We are not just focusing on the skills, the knowledge, the understanding from an educational perspective, we are looking at that spiritual connection,” she said.

“Can a child connect with themselves, with others? Can they reflect on things, can they communicate that? Are they able to interact with the world around them in a positive way, connect to God and other human beings?”

It is, she added, “so important for children to feel what they are learning about in their Jewish education has meaning and purpose — it is something inside for them and helps them to be healthy, resilient children and hopefully remain part of the Jewish community that they are in and want to be involved with it because it has a positive impact on them.”

Unlike Ofsted, which can use the national curriculum to evaluate the content of teaching in schools, there is no equivalent curriculum for Jewish studies. Each Jewish school is assessed according to its own criteria and objectives for Jewish education, not against some communal-wide yardstick.

In the 15 inspections carried out by Pikuach from 2018 to early 2020, ten schools received an outstanding grade and five good. Ofsted’s chief inspector said earlier this year that she expected to see the number of outstanding schools drop.

Pikuach is not setting out to do likewise. “We wouldn’t grade according to whether we are trying to keep quotas down. That would not be something that I would expect,” she said.

But it might be harder to earn the top grade for spiritual development than for academic knowledge, she believes.

Although Jewish schools do not have to use Pikuach inspectors, state schools do have to get Pikuach approval for arrangements to inspect their Jewish studies. Naturally, she hopes more will be willing to ask Pikuach to do the inspection.

Internationally, Pikuach is considered “a beacon”, she said. “A lot of Jewish schools around the world are jealous of the fact we have this formalised assessment and inspection service.”