Charedi leaders step up protests against Schools Bill ahead of Commons debate
Rabbi Weiss claims move to regulate home-schooling 'designed to hinder religious practice'
Lee Harpin is the Jewish News's political editor
Strictly Orthodox leaders have written a letter to the Education Secretary claiming a Bill that would make it compulsory for local authorities to maintain registers of home-schooled children, is “specifically designed to hinder religious practice”.
In a letter written by Rabbi L. Weiss, and backed by other Strictly Orthodox leaders, it is claimed the Children’s Wellbeing and School Bill, introduced into parliament next week, “takes an unreasonable, blanket approach akin to drug therapy for the well.”
The letter to Bridget Phillipson adds:”Our system of education not only meets but far, exceeds the so-called standard objectives. Our children’s exemplary behaviour and good moral grounding are models to follow, not stifle.”
Another protest will go ahead on January 8th outside Westminste, the day MPs debate the Bill, as the Charedi community attempts to show the strength of opposition to the proposed move.
Some within the Charedi community fear the proposals will be the first step in regulating yeshivot, which are currently not defined as schools and therefore outside the scope of Ofsted inspection.
The previous Conservative government had intended similar measures, but the proposed legislation that contained them was scrapped.
Critics of the Bill allege imprecise and wide-ranging powers that would be given to unelected bureaucrats to change the law without accountability.
Rabbi Weiss described this as a dangerous precedent: “I do not think the problem is the will of the government but their inability to resist pressure from influential humanist groups. These groups drive the agenda with misleading arguments and are fooling the government that this is the way to curry popular support, whereas actually they try this opportunity to break up a successful education system with its roots in faith and tradition.”
Rabbi Asher Gratt, president of the British Rabbinical Union, a conservative group within the Charedi community, has also lobbied against the Bill.
He calimed:”The Bill not only criminalises conscientious parents who seek to provide an education aligned with their religious or philosophical beliefs, but it also sets a dangerous precedent for the erosion of fundamental civil liberties”.
At least 1500 boys aged from 13 to 16 currently learn in unregistered yeshivot in Stamford Hill where they receive little or no secular education.
The government insists it will continue to allow homeschooling deemed to offer a “good, safe education” but measures in the Bill would “ensure that the most vulnerable children cannot be withdrawn from school until it is confirmed that this would be in their best interests, and that the education to be provided outside of school is suitable.”
The Children’s Wellbeing and School Bill would also make the national curriculum binding on academies, as it is in other state schools.
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