Who will win the battle over sex education?

On first glance, their efforts look to have been in vain. The latest version of the Department for Education’s RSE guidelines expects children to be taught some LGBT content “at a timely point” before the end of their school career.

But on closer inspection, the guidelines may give Charedi schools room to manoeuvre. The DfE distinguishes between relationships education, which is compulsory, and sex education, where parents retain the right to withdraw their children. Schools can define what goes into relationships education and what into sex education.

So the possibility remains for strictly Orthodox schools to bracket any LGBT issues under “sex education” and parents simply to withdraw their children from it.

Some in the Charedi community, however, remain unconvinced by this view. They argue a new government might not accept this interpretation of the guidance; and nor will the inspection service Ofsted, which has already put Charedi schools under pressure to talk about same-sex relations as part of the “British values” requirements to respect diversity. Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman only recently repeated her view that all children should learn about families that have “two mummies or two daddies”.

When the RSE guidelines were debated in Parliament on Wednesday, a vote was postponed. But the government did indicate the way it views the guidelines when Schools Standard Minister Nick Gibb, echoing Mrs Spielman, said, “One of the key elements of relationships education is ensuring that children are aware, including in primary schools, that loving families can be made up of two mothers, two fathers or one mother and one father.”

Professor Geoffrey Alderman, who has lodged a formal objection to the guidelines, notes that since tbey takes the form of secondary legislation, these cannot be amended directly by MPs. They have the choice of approving it, rejecting it or referring it back to the DfE.

The dissident Stamford Hill activist, Shraga Stern, believes a softly-softly approach is futile and the Charedi community should be more vocal. When the Charedi weekly Hamodia reported that leading rabbis were concerned about “heated calls” for action from individuals but discouraged lobbying against the government for the moment, he saw red and accused some in the community of being “kapos”.

Meanwhile, there are others campaigning in what they see as a critical battle for religious rights. Judith Nemeth, former director of the now defunct National Association of Orthodox Jewish Schools, is at the forefront as executive director of the Values Foundation, a multi-faith coalition set up to promote “traditional family structures”, which formally launches on Monday evening.

More than 40 rabbis were among the 140-plus signatories of an open letter organised by the foundation calling on the government to respect religious rights.

Only last week, one of the signatories, Rabbi Shimon Winegarten, one of Golders Green’s most senior Strictly Orthodox rabbis, in a letter in another Orthodox weekly, wrote: “Even if… a school may avoid teaching matters which are against its beliefs, how will its pupils, on becoming adults, be able to survive in a Britain whose younger generation is being nurtured upon the notion that having two daddies or two mummies is normal and that gender dysphoria and forbidden relationships are the norm.”