The parties and concert that were planned may have to wait another year. But the headteacher of JCoSS, Patrick Moriarty, is not too disappointed by the Covid-enforced curtailment of its 10th anniversary celebrations.
After all, he points out, a Jewish school can still mark its bar/batzmitzvah and some of the events may be able to go ahead in future.
In a decade, JCoSS has become an established part of the Jewish school set-up in London, so much so that it is easy to forget that the first cross-communal secondary was a radical idea when first mooted.
Originally, the plan had been to open it in Hertfordshire. But the Orthodox Yavneh College got there first. When JCoSS was then proposed for East Barnet, some wondered whether another Jewish comprehensive in the capital was needed, let alone one with a pluralistic religious outlook.
“There was some scepticism and even some hostility about whether we were going to flood the market with places and the whole question about whether the ethos had Jewish integrity to it,” Mr Moriarty recalled. Although by the time he arrived to be deputy head eight months before opening, the negative sentiment had subsided, he said.
But that old adage favoured by communal entrepeneurs, “Build it and they will come”, proved triumphantly true. JFS, Yavneh, Hasmonean and Immanuel College are full and the demand for JCoSS is such that it has just launched a £4 million appeal for a new building in order to increase its annual year-seven entry permanently from 180 to 210.
A quarter of that money has already been pledged by one of the school’s longstanding sponsors, the Ronson Foundation, which is now reflected in JCoSS’s full name— the Ronson Jewish Community Secondary School.
Recruited from a leading private school, Haberdasher’s Aske’s Girls, he said, “It needed to be something really good to persuade me away from Habs.” In the early days, driving to the new site, he would pass children on their way to other schools and think, “My goodness, how lovely it must be to have a very stable and established school. Then I blinked and the next thing I knew, there we were.”
From 150 students and 15 teachers in its first year, it has grown to 1,330 students and 104 teachers. Within two and a half years, he found himself acting head after the school’s first head left for Australia and a few months later he was appointed permanently to the role.
Initially, he wondered whether its academic results would reach the “dizzying heights” of other Jewish schools. But “we got there”. When the Sunday Times annual schools guide chose JCoSS as school of the year for Greater London, the accolade was “the icing on the cake”.
While JCoSS enjoys “friendly rivalry” with other Jewish schools, he said, “one of the greatest revelations to me has been the support and friendship I have had from all the other Jewish schools”. The Jewish education networks and What’s App groups he is part of are the “most supportive, helpful and constructive of all and I didn’t think that would ever be the case”.
Its Jewish studies programme —ranked outstanding by the Board of Deputies inspection service Pikuach — has been “transformational,” he said.
“I think people understand and value what we are doing now. We have created a different option for Jewish families. At the beginning there were some who wanted something more like JFS and thought we would provide it. And there were others who weren’t quite sure what we were going to offer.
“It has been revolutionary and exciting to find in lessons honest and fruitful debate between the different denominations, where nobody is saying this is right and this is wrong.”
He is proud of having two groups of A-level students doing religious studies — more than in most schools, he says — which stems from “a self-generated thirst for Jewish learning and intellectual exploration”. His own speciality is religious studies and he himself is an ordained Anglican priest whose parish work is “an interesting distraction” from his school duties.
It took four years for JCoSS to come into its own, he said, when the appointment of a second deputy and three assistant heads laid the basis of a senior leadership team which has remained “pretty constant” since. It was then “we truly began to believe in ourselves”.
As the pupil population grew, he has witnessed a “transformation” in student leadership. Sixthform Jewish studies includes a leadership programme, preparing students for roles, “be it in the synagogue, social action or youth work”. Purim festivities, for example, are now “almost wholly run by the students”.
“We have got an environmental group who are pressing for all sorts of changes. We’ve done a student-led review in the wake of Black Lives Matter.”
One of the outcomes is to look at how the curriculum in subjects such as English and history can better reflect the experiences of minority ethnic groups both within the Jewish community and beyond.
“We have the trust and confidence to listen more to the students, who are incredible,” he said. “We will be giving even more responsibility to students to set the pace over what we should do and how we should do it.”
In the past five years, he highlights development within one of the school’s distinctive features, the Pears SRP — Special Resource Provision, which admits seven students a year on the autism spectrum. Its curriculum has become more sophisticated and its induction of students much better, he said..
“The magic of it is we have got students who are educated in that bit of the school but also go into the main school as and when they are able to. That’s a very complicated thing to achieve and involves massive flexibility.”
The Pears SRP serves a “huge range” of ability. “There are some who have gone on to do aeronautical physics at university and there are some for whom their next step is into supported accommodation”.
Soon to complete 11 years, he has no plans to move in the immediate future, seeing “plenty more to do here”.
One of his ambitions is to improve the vocational offering. In the past year, the school added music tech to courses already offered in sport, health and social care, business and media. It has dropped A-level media studies in favour of the more practical creative i-Media option.
There were “significant teething problems” when first introducing vocational courses into the sixthform which were a “very different beast” from A-levels, he acknowledged. “We had some missteps there — I think we’ve protected the students from those missteps”.
But Jewish schools collectively, he believes, would recognise that “we don’t do all we could do for those for whom academic attainment is never going to be their thing.” The focus is still largely on A-levels and the more academic vocational qualifications.
There must be 20 to 30 students in each school, he says, for whom the current options aren’t right and who instead leave after year-11 for further education colleges. Perhaps the new T-levels coming on stream might provide a more suitable route. “ I think we have got a moral duty within the Jewish schools to try and do better,” he said.
He also wants to “get better at imparting cultural capital”. When students gain a place at Oxford or Cambridge or at medical school, that’s “terrific”, he said, but “what’s even more special is when the student concerned is the first in their family to go to university” — as was the case with one of JCoSS’s Oxbridge entrants this year. He felt the school had “added real value” to that family.
“If all we were doing is sending the children of Oxbridge graduates off to Oxbridge, that would feel like social maintenance.”
Although he is “not champing at the bit” for exam reform, after the Covid-affected exam experiences of this year, he is sympathetic to calls to review the current system and whether schools are preparing students for life and “assessing them in ways that get the best out of them”.
At a meeting of United Synagogue rabbis some years ago, one voiced his unhappiness at the thought of any congregants’ child attending JcoSS.
But in the past three years the US has become more accepting and Mr Moriarty says that relations with the US are “much better. We have some excellent relationships with a number of local rabbis”.
The religious complexion of the pupils has remained pretty stable since it opened, he said: around a third are from Orthodox-affiliated homes, a third Reform, 20 per cent Masorti with the rest from Liberal families or unaffiliated.
The Chief Rabbi, however, is yet to pay a visit. “We are working on that,” Mr Moriarty said. “When he’s able to fit us into his schedule, we’ll be delighted to welcome him.”
