Faith schools have long faced an onslaught of attention from secular society. In recent weeks an investigation by The Times has given London’s “inadequate” Orthodox Jewish schools, in particular, their fifteen minutes of infamy.
Certainly, many faith or unregistered schools have genuine deficiencies, and there are plenty of Haredi schools failing to ensure their pupils gain the basic skills mandated by the National Curriculum. Where this is the case, action is justified. However, it is inappropriate for the state to penalise faith schools -Haredi or otherwise – for not parroting mainstream cultural beliefs. In 2021 Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass boys’ school was rated “inadequate” by Ofsted for not teaching students about same-sex relationships or gender reassignment surgeries. Scores of other faith schools have routinely fallen foul of the same guidelines.
This ebb and flow of hostilities could dramatically ramp up if Labour is victorious at next year’s polls. This is not to suggest the current government’s approach has been palatable, but that the opposition’s current plans to abolish tax relief for independent schools and ramp up equalities legislation could disproportionately take a hit to many faith schools at a time of existing economic malaise and societal hostility. There is also the possibility that Labour would be keen to clamp down on homeschooling, a move the Conservatives have already attempted.
Where poor teaching and abuse are taking place, of course, there is much room for improvement, as Eli Spitzer, headteacher of Headmaster at Tiferes Shlomo Boys’ School admitted in response to The Times’ lengthy investigation.
However, this does not negate the argument that the state should not be in the business of forcing its moral agenda onto faith groups keen to preserve their own communities and beliefs. No one is forcing parents to send their children to religious schools. In fact, the opposite is usually the case, as the bulging waiting lists for The Oratory School and Yavneh College would suggest.
The political settlement of religious freedoms is constantly shifting, as the recent outlawing of peaceful demonstrations near abortion facilities proves. While there is no existential threat to the existence of faith schools, there are no doubt radical activists keen to consign them (like the grammars and direct-grant schools of days gone by) to the dustbin of history in the name of progress. The opposing case must continue to be made afresh – lest we tiptoe into catastrophe.
Some independent faith schools such as The School of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where pupils were filmed chanting antisemitic songs, have proved themselves an overt national security risk. Others cross the line from discernment into hatred: take the Abu Bakr Trust, which runs three schools and a nursery in the West Midlands and was revealed to have described gay people as “evil” via social media.
Such statements violate both Christianity’s concept of imago dei and Judaism’s tzelem elohim, which categorise all human beings as equal due to each of them being made in the image of God. This is not the same as a school seeking to explain and defend its values. Nor do such incidents characterise religious schooling on the whole.
One might struggle to count on one hand the number of mainstream British schools that can boast of Year-Seven children’s proficiency in four languages, or even their native one. Yet, scores of “backward” Haredi schools manage to give their students grounding in English, Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic. Meanwhile, in mainstream British education, a third of pupils are left functionally illiterate.
Where Haredi schools are adequate, their curriculum often ensures students can comprehend and interpret complex texts with huge religious and historic significance, a count on which state schools have failed for decades. They should not be judged on how many sixth-formers they send to Oxbridge, or how many sex-education assemblies they hold, because this is not the purpose they were set up to fulfil.
Ragging on religion is of course far easier than exploring why successive British governments took a sledgehammer to our schooling system, and why unprecedented access to information has corresponded with a decline in social mobility.
Those keen to stereotype and crush the freedoms of religious communities are blind to their own insularity. Religious schools are well within their rights to reject academic fads which so often sow the very seeds of the narrow-minded hatred that their detractors accuse them of. The materialist mind cannot conceive that parents might send their child to a faith school for anything but reasons of nefarious control.
In Mr Spitzer’s words, those keen for religious schools to improve don’t have to approve of his community’s way of life, but, “if they wish to succeed, they do have to understand it”.
(The Schola Cantorum from the London Oratory School | @Oratoryschola Twitter )
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