It’s “My swansong”, the executive headteacher of the Lubavitch Multi-Academy Trust said of the role she took up a little over two years ago. After more than 40 years’ service since qualifying as a secondary-school teacher in English, Judith Nemeth might well be considered the grand dame of Jewish education in the UK.
If the Strictly Orthodox grandmother had already opted to put her feet up, who could have blamed her? Instead, she came to Stamford Hill to try to turn around the beleaguered trust, a consortium of three state-aided Chasidic schools. Over its head dangled a financial warning notice, while parents were complaining to the DFE that the trust had lost its way.
Now the warning notice has been lifted. The girls’ primary and secondary schools have earned good Ofsted reports, while the previously inadequate-ranked boys primary has moved a grade higher to “requires improvement” and is, she said on an “upward stretch”.
“It’s been extremely hard work” she said. “I don’t think I have worked as hard in my life. But I have loved every minute of it. There have been so many balls to keep in the air.”
Her long career has included heading a Strictly Orthodox teacher training college, MST, founding the training and business incubation charity, TrainE-TraidE — which morphed into Work Avenue — and running the National Association of Orthodox Jewish Schools.
More recently, she has helped set up a girls’ high school in Gateshead, been principal of the Hasmonean High School for Girls, where she helped start the Midrashah for text study, and assisted a Jewish girls’ high school in Gibraltar.
She has launched an agency, Al Pi Darko, offering courses on parenting skills and also established an advocacy group, the Values Foundation for Faith and Families in Education.
“I felt the Jewish voice would be heard better if we combined with people who think the same way but who are not necessarily Jewish,” she explained. The foundation represents “Judeo-Christian values in education to try and ensure they are maintained. The big work we did was in relationship and sex education”. The foundation lobbied successfully for a number of clauses in the guidelines to preserve an opt-out in sex education and to ensure that religious schools could teach RSE according to the tenets of their faith.
“Unfortunately, not all schools know that and don’t stand up for themselves well enough,” she said.
When she arrived at the trust, “I inherited a totally overgrown field — thorns and thistles and bushes. Although I came in primarily to transform the education, I realised that if I didn’t sort all the weeds out, which included finance and administration, and started to rebuild trust with staff, we weren’t going to get anywhere. That took me the best part of 20 months.”
She had to stick to a tight budget, which among other things meant managing the repayment of a large loan from the DfE. The recovery plan bequeathed to her also meant reducing staff and combining classes.
Putting year groups together wasn’t always popular with parents — or pupils who preferred to be with their own age group. But she saw it as “an opportunity rather than a problem. The way education is traditionally delivered in our schools is with horizontal grouping by age. You might be more advanced than your age or you might be trailing behind what’s expected of you.
“I trained the teachers who were going to take combined classes — originally over the two [primary] schools we had four combined classes, this year we managed just to have two — to look at it as an opportunity. We had year 1 and 2 together.
“There might be some children in year 1 who could access year 2 work; there might be some children in year 2 who need to revise.”
Rather assign work by age, teachers assessed the capability of children and gave them “opportunities at every level of attainment to progress. Everybody benefited basically. But it was a big challenge for the teachers,” she said.
“I made sure any combined class had a full-time teaching assistant for support. And it worked. The attainment levels have gone up.
“When I came here, less than 50 per cent of primary school [pupils] were at expected level, now we are over 75 per cent.”
She introduced profiling for every primary child so that teachers would know not only about the academic level of each child but also their talents, their learning styles and any social or home issues that needed to be taken into account.
Lubavitch boys primary
On the way up: Lubavitch Boys Primary School
With the finances under control, she can now focus more on educational development. In the Lubavitch ethos, “kodesh [religious studies] is kodesh but chol [secular subjects] is a vehicle for kodesh. Everything has its own kedushah [holiness] and we want the education to reflect that.”
So there will be more cross-referencing between subjects. “Whatever we are teaching in literacy we are going to be sharing with kodesh because we want that to be developed in kodesh as well — with writing their dvar Torah or the skills they are developing in terms of knowledge retrieval.
“In history, for example, we are in the process of mapping out what history we can learn from the Chanukah story from reception to year six — and then looking at what was happening in rest of world at the time.”
The Lubavitch education system is unique in being guided by a particular vision — to prepare the shluchim and shluchot, emissaries, of the future, who will devote their lives to serving Jewish communities across the world.
In the girls’ secondary school, pupils “are encouraged to question and challenge, particularly about themselves and their Judaism”. The Jewish curriculum offers them a depth of learning not only for its own sake but which also enables them to develop self-understanding. “There’s a vibrancy in the kodesh in the girls and boys schools that is hard to match,” she said.
There’s an emphasis too on “mental health and physical wellbeing” that stems from the Chabad outlook. And a willingness to harness technology in the service of education and outreach. “We are looking at using VR [virtual reality] in teaching kodesh,” she said.
The senior school aims to provide a route for “whatever career the girls want to follow. So if we have a girl who wants to go into medicine, we will provide the science…
“The alumni of our school say a lot about what the school provides —there is a television presenter in Israel who’s very popular and she grew up in Lubavitch. There was another girl from Italy who was sent here because there was no education in Italy and she’s doing amazing things in America writing books.” Plus those on active shlichut in different parts of the globe.
“That’s why I came,” she said. “Because of what Chabad does for Klal Israel [the Jewish people], we need to be educating their children to the best that we can because they have such an important mission.”
And while this job may be her swansong, she plans to stay around “for a while. I want to see it all through.”
Now the trust is in a better place, she can begin to consider expansion. There is a call from parents to open key stage three classes for boys (11 to 14). “We are waiting to hear from the DfE. If we can, we will.”
