At a debate on the Bill at report stage in the Lords earlier this month, former Conservative whip Lord Lucas, who edits the Good Schools Guide, warned that yeshivot would be “outlawed” by the government’s proposals.
“The principal conflicts are around the requirement that yeshivas would have to register at schools and thus be bound by the curriculum and moral teachings that we expect of independent schools,” he said. “This, the community feels, would be fundamentally in conflict with the Torah and would make it impossible for them to continue.”
Although he withdrew an amendment he had tabled to exempt them, he said the government “owe this community a clear way forward”.
Lord Glasman – whose full title is Lord Glasman of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill – also spoke up for yeshivot.
Stamford Hill’s Chasidic community was “a very precious remnant of a destroyed culture. It is a glory to our country that this very peculiar religious community could exist only in our country. It only survived in our country in all of Europe,” he said.
Yeshivot were “not schools,” he said. However, students spend “an awful lot of time in these yeshivahs, studying the Talmud and these things… So the children are, technically speaking, home-schooled.”
He assured the Lords that “the parents of these children are absolutely committed to their well-being and their education. When it comes to safeguarding, there has been the most dramatic improvement in this: every place has a phone number and a designated officer. I can testify that there have been huge changes relating to the wellbeing of children and the safeguards around them.”
He joked that during his visits to yeshivot locally, he was known as “the Lord above” – since he lived above a shop.
Lord Glasman (Photo: alansangle.com)[Missing Credit]
Another Jewish peer, Lord Marks of Hale, also mounted an eloquent defence of the role of yeshivot, saying that the provision to regulate out-of-school settings in the Bill had “singled out” one community – “the Charedi, or strictly Orthodox Jewish, community, whose boys attend yeshivahs”.
He went on: “As one professor remarked about the Bill’s intentions… it is fine to be Jewish in the UK in 2025 as long as you are not too Jewish.”
Yeshivot, he insisted, were “not schools and they cannot become schools. They are religious spaces operating alongside home-schooling with a wholly different purpose. They are settings where young men engage deeply with their heritage, to develop their spiritual and ethical character and absorb the wisdom and traditions of the Jewish rabbinic corpus.”
But former Labour Education Secretary Baroness Morris said that former yeshivah students she had met would not recognise Lord Glasman’s description of their education.
“I think our starting point should be that, as with any school or any community, there is a risk to children if we do not protect them in an orderly way and in the way that we should,” she contended.
“There are Charedi-registered schools where parents can send their children. It is not the case that if you close down the yeshivahs, no one can have a school based on this faith. They can – and it is in the registered sector. What I have a problem with is the yeshivah.”
Opposing amendments that would exempt them, she said: “My argument for doing so is very straightforward: if you are there at 8 am and you leave at 6 pm, it is a school.”
Baroness Blackstone, a former professor of education, also echoed concerns about yeshivot, citing the testimony of a woman “whom I shall call Dina…
“Like other Charedi women, Dina received a broad and balanced education in a Charedi school. She wants the same for her son, but boys are expected to be protected from secular education, and Dina found herself with no genuine choice but to send her son to an unregistered educational establishment called a yeshivah.
“The curriculum that Dina’s son studied was exclusively religious, with no provision for any secular subjects, including important subjects such as English and mathematics. This was not parental choice in any meaningful sense; it was the result of communal pressure within a context that often leaves families with no real alternatives.”
She added that “boys in these environments often attend for very long hours, including Sundays. That secular education can be delivered at evenings and weekends in the home is, in almost every case, entirely implausible, so there is no adequate home education for boys who are attending these institutions.”
