The government could face a legal challenge over its plan to regulate unregistered yeshivot.
The proposed measures are set out in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is nearing the end of its passage through Parliament after 15 months of scrutiny.
An estimated 1,500 plus boys from 13 to 16 in Stamford Hill study in strictly Orthodox yeshivot that offer little or no secular education.
Because of their focus on religious tuition, yeshivot currently do not meet the legal definition of a school and are therefore not required to register with the Department for Education, undergo Ofsted inspections or comply with independent school standards.
The Bill seeks to close the loophole by widening the regulatory framework and to give the Education Secretary new powers to suspend institutions.
Parents would also be required to register with their local authority children who are home-schooled or otherwise taught in out-of-school settings.
But the British Rabbinical Union, an advocacy group set up to defend the yeshivah system, believes the new measures would infringe the right of parents to educate children according to their religious beliefs under the European Convention on Human Rights.
In a Substack post, Rabbi Asher Gratt of the BRU said it had “instructed a senior human-rights legal team to act the moment this Bill becomes law – not as a gesture of defiance, but as an act of constitutional responsibility”.
The Bill, he argued, would create “disproportionate and unlawful interference” by the state.
Rabbi Gratt said the BRU had suggested alternative frameworks to Ofsted to assess safeguarding and quality of education.
The Bill, he argued, had failed to answer the question of “what counts as lawful education for a child being raised in a centuries-old religious tradition that bears no resemblance to the secular mainstream”.
Nor did it spell out how the new regulatory powers would “apply to religious education systems structured around talmudic study, immersive language acquisition, and pedagogical traditions older than the English state itself”.
This is not the first attempt to regulate of out-of-school settings: a previous move for new legislation by the last Conservative government eventually fell by the wayside, while the idea has also been raised in Private Member’s Bills.
Regular protests against the Bill have been mounted in Westminster by the BRU and other Charedi groups.
But even when it becomes law, regulation will take time to implement because it will require new guidelines from the Education Secretary.
However, the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations has called for the religious education offered by yeshivot to be legally protected. It says that students who attend them are home-schooled for secular subjects.
To get more from community, click here to sign up for our free community newsletter.