Time to inspect Ofsted's anti-bullying policy

The facts of the matter are beyond doubt. As verified by a report in the Jewish Chronicle, the school removed references to Anne Boleyn’s affairs and a picture of Elizabeth’s dancing with one of her court favourites.

There is nothing remarkable about this. Yesodey Hatorah either removes or redacts any reference to sex and any depiction of men or women dressed immodestly by the standards of the Charedi community. You can agree or disagree with that, but it is what any Charedi school would do. What makes Yesodey Hatorah relatively unusual is the effort they have put into building up a library of texts to give their pupils a first-class education, which has meant more than the usual amount of redaction. The most serious criticism one can level is that they have gone about this in a clumsy way and that they have been naive about how this kind of censorship presses the buttons of mainstream society.

It is perfectly reasonable for an inspector to query why textbooks have pages stuck together and perhaps, even, to judge this as an example of not following best practice. However, it is not reasonable to simply infer sinister motives and then refuse to listen to explanations when offered, even by members of a parliamentary committee. The Chief Inspector’s behaviour, however, in choosing to relentlessly attack Yesodey Hatorah in public forums as a ‘school where girls’ education was being very restricted’, goes beyond being merely unreasonable.

There are two components to this allegation: the first is that the purpose of redacting books at Yesodey Hatorah is to restrict access to knowledge and the second is that this is done because the pupils are girls.

The first is, as I have explained, already an inversion of the truth, but the second is simply surreal. Anyone who knows the Charedi community knows that girls receive a much better standard of secular education than boys. Nearly every Charedi girls’ school in the UK meets or exceeds national standards; nearly every Charedi boys’ school fails to, often by a wide margin.

Furthermore, Yesodey Hatorah, by being state-aided, is able to give girls a wider range of opportunities, such as GCSEs in Music, Art and Computer Science in addition to a range of NVQ qualifications. The near-unanimous attitude of parents is of deep gratitude that they can give their daughters a first-class education without compromising on their commitment to bringing them up with Charedi values and mores.

I think that even a genuinely failing school led by incompetents does not deserve to be the whipping boy of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, if only because of the way it humiliates staff-members trying to do their job. The role of OFSTED is to build schools up, not knock them down.

However, what should be uncontroversial is that Amanda Spielman should refrain from making false claims and apologise unreservedly when she does, rather than double down. 

There is much more at stake here, though, than one unfairly hounded school.

Amanda Spielman’s comments demonstrate that, after three years of deadlock and wrangling over the state of Charedi schools, she lacks a basic understanding of Charedi education. While the girls at Yesodey Hatorah continue to get fantastic GCSE results, literally hundreds of Charedi boys leave school each year without basic literacy skills and often the ability to hold a conversation in English. OFSTED have done precious little to improve this situation and I have often puzzled over why its actions have been so bizarre and counter-productive.

The distressing and demoralising answer appears to be this: the Chief Inspector has been convinced that she is dealing with a London-branch of Boko Haram, dead set on denying education to women. So much time has been spent, by so many people, explaining that this is not so, that I am truly at a loss as to how anyone can get the message across.

The new OFSTED inspection framework is tough but fair. It gives no credit to schools based on their study of classical Hebrew, Aramaic, or Jewish law, but it is still possible for a Charedi school that takes the National Curriculum seriously to pass if it has a fair-minded impartial inspector. I know this because my own school was graded Good a few months ago.

However, if an inspector is hostile to Charedi culture or religion, it is clear that he or she has more than enough latitude to fail a school simply for being Charedi. It would be bad enough if OFSTED’s leadership were simply turning a blind eye to this kind of abuse of power, it is far worse that Amanda Spielman’s public comments appear to be spurring them on.

I am not alone in noticing this. A report by Policy Exchange published earlier this year takes OFSTED to task for usurping the role of the Department for Education by setting its own policy of ‘muscular liberalism’ and taking upon itself to ‘determine which statutory obligations schools should, or should not, be required to comply with’. The report demonstrates that ‘there have been too many occasions when a secularist bias has been displayed' by OFSTED inspectors, with no action being taken by the leadership to curb this. 

Another feature of Rabbi Pinter’s life that did not come up in his obituaries is the criticism, and sometimes outright abuse, he received from extremist members of the Stamford Hill community who, correctly, saw him as a pioneer working towards better education not only for pupils in his school, but the whole of the UK Charedi community. In return, Humanists UK, the National Secular Society and self-styled ‘anti-extremism’ organisations in the Jewish community have cynically targeted Yesodey Hatorah as a state-aided school, convinced that they can succeed where others have failed in imposing their worldview on the Charedi community.

Clearly, such people couldn’t care less about whether a Charedi boy can spell his name if it interferes with their secularist agenda, but one would have hoped that Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector would.