Abstract: Communal anxieties about the possibility of an inadequate supply of secondary school places in Jewish schools in London have, on occasion, run high, and have occurred against a context of demographic changes and an increase in preference for Jewish schooling. These seemingly unpredictable dynamics have made planning very difficult and this new study helps to bring some empiricism to the table.
This statistical study, authored by JPR Senior Research Fellow, Dr Daniel Staetsky, and supported by Partnerships for Jewish Schools (PaJeS), uses an empirical approach to predict future levels of demand for mainstream Jewish secondary schools in and around London. Using Local Authority data to examine applications and admissions from 2011 to 2018, it projects forward to the academic year 2022/23 in order to support future planning.
It is a follow-up to previous work in this area, and it draws on observations from the field that allow us to assess the accuracy of that work and to extend our projections further into the future.
The study concludes that current levels of provision will be sufficient if the demand in the next four years remains at today’s levels. Whilst this is a possibility, two of three possible scenarios presented in the report suggest an increase in demand, at a level in which about fifty additional places will be required across the entire Jewish secondary school system in London. Given this projected scale of increase, the report recommends that schools should develop some flexibility in capacity to satisfy the increasing demand. That might mean preparedness to open an extra class, as and when required, rather than to open an entirely new school.
Abstract: Faith schools represent controversial aspects of England’s educational politics, yet they have been largely overlooked as sites for geographical analysis. Moreover, although other social science disciplines have attended to a range of questions regarding faith schools, some important issues remain underexamined. In particular, contestation within ethnic and religious groups regarding notions of identity have generally been ignored in an educational context, whilst the majority of research into Jewish schools more specifically has failed to attend to the personal qualities of Jewishness. The interrelationships between faith schools (of all kinds) and places of worship have also received minimal attention.
In response, this investigation draws upon a range of theoretical approaches to identity in order to illustrate how Jewish schools are implicated in the changing spatiality and performance of individuals’ Jewishness. Central to this research is a case study of the Jewish Community Secondary School (JCoSS), England’s only pluralist Jewish secondary school, with more extensive elements provided by interviews with other stakeholders in Anglo-Jewry. Parents often viewed Jewish schools as a means of attaining a highly-regarded ‘secular’ academic education in a Jewish school, whilst also enabling their children to socialise with other Jews. In the process, synagogues’ traditional functions of education and socialisation have been co-opted by Jewish schools, revealing a shift in the spatiality of young people’s Anglo-Jewish identity practices. Furthermore, JCoSS, as well as many synagogues, have come to represent spaces of contestation over ‘authentic’ Jewishness, given widely varying conceptualisations of ‘proper’ Jewish practice and identity amongst parents, pupils and rabbis. Yet, although JCoSS offers its pupils considerable autonomy to determine their practices, such choice is not limitless, revealing an inherent dilemma in inclusivity. The thesis thus explores how different manifestations of Jewishness are constructed, practised and problematised in a school space (which itself is dynamic and contested), and beyond.
Abstract: The increasing diversity of societies is one of the most important educational issues of the globalised era. However, while some attention has been paid to the schooling experiences of racial, ethnic and immigrant minorities in Western societies, little research has been conducted with religious adolescents.
This thesis explores the complexities of religious adolescents’ experiences of English secondary schools. As an exploratory study, I employed an emergent research design carrying out loosely-structured, group and single interviews at eleven places of worship to investigate the schooling experiences of 99 adolescent Christians, Jews and Muslims. In order to interpret their reported experiences, I applied a theoretical model based on the Students’ Multiple World Framework in conjunction with concepts of religious identity negotiation and construction.
The interview data show how Christians, Jews and Muslims negotiate their religious identities in the context of the numerous challenges presented by secondary schools in a religiously plural and largely secular society. In classroom worlds participants perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented. In peer worlds participants reported that they could experience prejudice, and criticism of their beliefs. Christians, Jews and Muslims reported two principal management strategies in the face of these challenges, either: declaring their religious identity openly, or by masking it in public.
The findings of this study are highly relevant to debates about the role of religion in education, including those concerning faith and Church schools and the nature and purpose of the curriculum subject Religious Education.
Abstract: As early as the mid-1990s, individuals within the Jewish community in the UK were discussing the potential of setting up a pluralist Jewish secondary school in London. Until 1981, every Jewish school in the UK had operated under Orthodox auspices. By 1999, three pluralist primary schools were thriving, and the political and Jewish communal climate was ready to support the development of a new kind of Jewish secondary school. A feasibility study in 2001 led to the formation of a steering group and the project was born. Nine years later, JCoSS opened its doors in a brand new, state-of-the-art building in North London, and 150 eleven-year-olds began a new kind of Jewish secondary education. This article charts the journey of this project, from idea to reality, navigating political, economic and community challenges, and shows how one group of people changed the landscape of Jewish education in the UK.
Abstract: This study, which was commissioned by Partnerships for Jewish Schools (PaJeS), takes an in-depth statistical look at the demand for places for Jewish secondary schools in London over the past few years, and makes key projections for the future.
The report is authored by JPR researchers Dr Daniel Staetsky and Dr Jonathan Boyd, and grapples with an issue that has been of growing concern in the London Jewish community for some time. Parents have repeatedly spoken of their frustrations about an insufficient supply of places in Jewish schools in the area, and this is the first study in a decade to investigate this issue in statistical terms. The findings of the study were initially shared with senior representatives of the schools in summer 2016, and subsequently utilised by the schools to consider how best to remedy the situation. The data have also formed the basis of two JPR studies, privately commissioned by two of the schools in the area, to investigate their specific circumstances in greater depth.
The report demonstrates that there were an estimated 80 Jewish children who wanted a place in a Jewish school in the 2016/17 academic year, failed to gain one at that school or any other Jewish state school, and remained on the waiting list. The various projections covered by the report show that the future level of demand is expected to remain at that level over the coming few years, or increase.
Abstract: This research was commissioned by The Pears Foundation and the Department for Children,
Schools and Families (DCSF). The aims were to examine when, where, how and why the
Holocaust is taught in state-maintained secondary schools in England, and to inform the
design and delivery of a continuing professional development (CPD) programme for teachers
who teach about the Holocaust. A two-phase mixed methodology was employed. This
comprised an online survey which was completed by 2,108 respondents and follow-up
interviews with 68 teachers in 24 different schools throughout England.
The research reveals that teachers adopt a diverse set of approaches to this challenging and
complex subject. In the report, teachers’ perceptions, perspectives and practice are presented
and a range of challenges and issues encountered by teachers across the country are explicitly
identified. The research shows that, although most teachers believe that it is important to
teach about the Holocaust, very few have received specialist professional development in this
area. It also shows that many teachers find it a difficult and complicated subject to teach, and
that they both want and need support to better equip them to teach about the Holocaust
effectively.
The report is the largest endeavour of its kind in the UK in both scope and scale. The authors
hope it will be of considerable value to all those concerned with the advancement and
understanding of Holocaust education both in the UK and internationally
Abstract: Between September 2000 and August 2001, more than 600,000 babies were born in the UK. Of those, around 2,800 were born within the Jewish community. These babies – our millennium cohort – have grown up in complex, exciting and
challenging times. We are interested in the changing Jewish lives of the children born in that cohort.
We are following students, and their parents, who chose one of seven Jewish secondary schools for their children. We are following the children who entered Year 7 in September 2011. As we are collecting data every two years, the third and most recent phase of data analysis has just been completed, whilst the students are in Year 11. We are comparing this group to families who chose to send their child to non-Jewish schools.
This is a unique opportunity to conduct an in-depth and sustained exploration of the changing lives of young people and their
families.
In 2016, we received completed surveys from 799 students (almost 80% of the total);
278 from parents with students at Jewish schools and a further 57 from families with
children at non-Jewish schools. In addition we interviewed 110 families.
This publication focuses on what we have been learning with regard to our students’ developing identities. To what extent do they identify as Jews? As British citizens? We wanted to find out the extent to which these elements play a role in our students’ lives, and in what ways school plays a role in that development.
