Yesterday a state faith school in London called Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School was failed by Ofsted, following (though not entirely because of) an exposé by Humanists UK revealing that it had been redacting and censoring its textbooks to remove mentions of same-sex relationships, women’s rights, and various other aspects of modern society. The Ofsted report , which everyone ought to read, has provoked cries of a ‘secularist plot’, and not for the first time. But this couldn’t be further from the truth
Let’s be clear about what the school was actually found to be doing. Ofsted found that school leaders: redact texts to remove references or images of men and women socialising together, detail on the persecution of LGBT people during the Holocaust, and images of women that show any bare skin on ankles, wrists, or necks; limit career advice in order to ‘deliberately [my emphasis] restrict the options available to pupils’ when they leave school; provide a ‘narrow curriculum’, focussing ‘narrowly on their own
No doubt everyone will have their own views about which of these is worse, but surely we can agree that they all detract from the core purpose of a school – namely, to educate its pupils, promote their individual development and wellbeing, and ensure that when they leave the school gates, they are better equipped to make their way through life than when they went in.