Why I’m not sending my kids to Jewish schools

I went to my local state primary and secondary school and enjoyed both. They were in my community, friendly and mixed in sex, culture and social background.

The same environment is something I always imagined for my children, because it is as close to a picture of the real world as you can get.

I knew very few people that went to Jewish schools, though I knew they always had a reputation of being better than the mainstream. I thought of them as a strange concept, although part of that was down to an inherited disapproval of faith-based schools in general, which now, as a free-thinking adult, I have largely left behind.

However, I have always felt it would be rather dull to be in a school with only people of the same background as you.

But having visited many Jewish primary and secondary schools while reporting for the JC over the years, I can also see the appeal. It is lovely to have a setting that grounds your child’s identity positively in a world where that might not always be so easy. It feels safe and familiar and the fact that many of the Jewish schools outperform on an academic front is appealing.

But I can’t help but notice a significant downside: for some reason, the pastoral care and wellbeing of students often seem to be lacking in schools that market themselves on a strong sense of community.

I just missed growing up as a teenager with social media. I had Facebook at college and university and back then it wasn’t the dark place it is now.

The pressure that social media places on young people is unrelenting. I can’t imagine how difficult it is navigating your teenage years, with all the change and confusion that comes with them, alongside it.

Parents as well as schools have largely been unprepared to deal with the unrealistic expectations placed on young people, from body image to the picture-perfect life experiences people show.

The desperate need for likes and followers even has negative effects on grown adults I know, so how are young people meant to safely navigate a world that is so unregulated and inescapable?

I read with sadness and dread about the anguish of the father of Mia Janin, a JFS pupil who took her own life in March 2021. He believes social media posts may have sparked the suicide of his 14-year-old daughter, and appealed to parents to come forward with any information.

This is after, it seems, pupils at the school were ordered to delete Snapchat accounts by teachers, just five days after the tragedy took place.

Mia was the third student at the school to have taken her own life since 2017. Shockingly, her family is still in the dark about what led to her suicide.

In 2017, an Ofsted report downgraded the school from “good” to “unsatisfactory” and announced that many students had been subjected to bullying, with little to no intervention from staff.

It matches a picture I hear anecdotally from parents with kids in Jewish schools across the board: a culture of bullying and cliqueness that just doesn’t seem to be present in non-Jewish schools.

The descriptions of school life are certainly not something I’d experienced growing up and they are not ones I’d want for my children. Parents also talk about academic pressures placed on students over and above considerations of their mental health.

And it is always after those conversations that I’m left wondering why it is that these schools are still the first choice for so many parents — and how long it will be before that starts to change?