The new law will mean yeshivot having to comply with some state requirements but the detail is yet to be fleshed out by the Education Secretary.
No scroll-area: new law will ban smartphone use during school day (photo: Getty Images)Getty Images
Alluding to the Act’s incoming ban on children using mobile phones in state schools, Lord Hale said: “It is with a sense of irony that Charedi children already live in a world that we are trying to legislate into being. They do not own smartphones. They do not scroll.
“They are not groomed in the small hours by strangers in foreign jurisdictions. They are not driven into eating disorders by algorithms. They do not need a Bill, because they have a tradition.”
They were “not trying to be different for difference’s sake. To them, the precise content of what is taught – the topics permitted and the topics deferred, the relationship between religious and secular learning – are not preferences but obligations.
“They cannot, in conscience, accept a curriculum that requires them to teach what their faith forbids. They are not asking the state to fund their dissent. They are asking the state not to extinguish it.”
When they asked for certain topics, including aspects of sex education, to be taught in ways consistent with their faith, they were “not asking to opt out of being British,” he said.
“They are simply asking to remain who they are. The transmission of a 3,000 year-old inheritance from one generation to the next is not a lifestyle preference. It is, for them, a sacred obligation.”
There were, he said, “Charedi schools in this country that have been threatened with closure by Ofsted: not because their pupils are failing, not because they are unsafe, not because they are unhappy but because their curriculum does not include precise content in the precise terms that the Department for Education had decided that every child must hear.
“That is not safeguarding. That is conformity dressed up as safeguarding. These parents will not hand the moral formation of their children to the state, and the state has no business demanding it.”
In dealing with faith communities, he said, “let us proceed not with suspicion but with understanding and compassion, with the full consultation that this community are still waiting for and which is long overdue.”
