No child should go to school fearing racist abuse and preventing that should be among the most basic obligations of any civilised education system. Yet for Jewish pupils in Britain, it is a principle that increasingly has to be defended rather than assumed.
The figures are stark: school-related antisemitic incidents have been recorded at twice the levels seen before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. More than one in five British-Jewish parents say their children have experienced antisemitism connected to school. More than half of Jewish teachers surveyed by the NASUWT teachers’ union say they have experienced antisemitism in the workplace in the past year.
These are not marginal complaints but describe an unbearable situation in which children, and the adults entrusted with teaching them, are encountering anti-Jewish hatred in institutions whose first duty is their safety. It is bad enough when such prejudice comes from other pupils. Children can be ignorant, cruel and susceptible to the prejudices of their surroundings, and schools exist in part to correct that. It is intolerable, however, if those responsible for educating children not only in literacy and numeracy but in basic civic and ethical standards are themselves involved in promoting, excusing or ignoring anti-Jewish racism.
That is why Sir David Bell’s independent review into antisemitism in schools is so necessary and why it is so deeply troubling that, as we report exclusively, a faction officially associated with the National Education Union (NEU), the largest education union in Britain and indeed Europe, has joined organisations calling for the review to be withdrawn. The NEU’s International Solidarity Network has aligned itself with campaigners who falsely suggest that efforts to define and combat antisemitism are a device to suppress criticism of Israel. It has also attacked the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, a widely adopted tool whose purpose is not to silence legitimate political debate but to help identify when such debate crosses into anti-Jewish racism.
The NEU cannot credibly claim to be anti-racist while tolerating within its own structures activists who campaign against measures designed to protect Jewish children. Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, and Labour MP David Taylor are therefore right to call for the union to act. The concerns expressed by the Jewish Leadership Council, Parents Against Antisemitism, Labour Against Antisemitism and the Community Security Trust that we cite in our front-page exclusive should be taken seriously. The union ought to disassociate itself from those who stand against the protection of Jewish pupils and support the Bell review without equivocation.
The NEU’s association with the International Solidarity Network and Parents for Palestine speaks to a larger problem. When addressing contentious political issues, teachers are required to observe impartiality, present competing views fairly and avoid treating opinions as facts. Yet the union’s disproportionate attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside the classroom has raised legitimate questions about what happens inside it, and about the wider culture in which those standards of impartiality are expected to be upheld.
The NEU leadership has made anti-Israel activism a prominent part of the union’s public identity, passing motions branding Israel an apartheid state and accusing it of genocide.
None of this should prejudge the conduct of individual teachers but it does underline why schools must be especially careful to maintain impartiality and ensure that Jewish pupils and staff can have confidence that antisemitism will be recognised and taken seriously.
Schools must be places where children learn how to disagree without hatred. They cannot become arenas in which adult political obsessions are imported into the classroom and visited upon impressionable children.
The Bell review is not an attack on free speech but a test of whether Britain’s education system can still recognise anti-
Jewish racism when it appears, and whether those charged with educating the next generation have the moral clarity to confront it.
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