The Ofsted head’s latest speech won’t allay the concerns of faith schools
“The last thing a chief inspector should be is a crusader.” So said the Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, in a Guardian interview back in February. And yet the Ofsted chief has often been caught up in controversies over what she calls “muscular liberalism”, especially when she says her organisation should take a role against “those who actively undermine fundamental British values”.
Spielman has asked her inspectors to press young Muslim girls on why they wear the hijab. She has been forced to deny that Ofsted was singling out Jewish schools for criticism, after headteachers of traditional Jewish institutions said they seemed to get an unusually high number of visits. She has said that some schools use “the pretext of religious belief” to “pervert the purpose of education” and “indoctrinate impressionable minds with extremist ideology”. Given the consistent theme, Catholic schools will be among those who are watching closely.
If this were a campaign against Islamist extremism and the threat of terrorism, few would complain. But terror prevention is beyond Ofsted’s remit; and Spielman’s project is far more idealistic, to judge by her speech last week at the influential Tory-leaning think tank Policy Exchange. Spielman said she wanted “to explore why the promotion of British values is important in encouraging cohesion and integration, and so why responsibility for promoting them must fall to our schools”.
The “British values” agenda has been much mocked since the Coalition government first came up with it in 2011: it is supposed to encompass democracy, liberty, tolerance and the rule of law. Spielman defended the concept, while acknowledging its difficulties. For instance, her speech pointed out that, while “democracy” is on the list of values, “barely more than a quarter of so-called millennials in this country believe that democracy is essential”.
Spielman, however, sees the contested nature of “British values” as a call to spread them more widely: “We cannot simply take them for granted,” Spielman told Policy Exchange.
It’s at this point that many teachers will start to wonder if Ofsted is on their side. Last month, the chair of governors at Yesodey Hatorah, a Charedi (Orthodox Jewish) girls’ school in north London, accused Ofsted of “using their unfettered powers to try to force faith schools to comply with their agenda or fail”. This came after an inspection where Ofsted interrogated the girls about sex (“Our daughters came home severely shaken,” one parent reported) and followed up with a harsh report which rebuked the school for removing references to sex from textbooks. Whose complaint prompted Ofsted to send in the box-checkers? The secularist campaign group Humanists UK.
Spielman obliquely defended the Yesodey Hatorah incident. “It is regrettable,” she said, “that we at Ofsted are experiencing increasing hostility from a few schools to law and policy that do not fit well with the preferences of the most conservative religious groups.” These “conservatives” were too quick to allege bias, Spielman argued.
At the same time, Spielman suggested that families may sometimes fail to uphold “British values”. “The acceptance of the equal rights of women or of gay rights may not fit with the views a child hears at home,” she said.
What does “gay rights” refer to here? For instance, does opposing gay marriage make one a foe of British values? I put this question to an Ofsted spokesman, who said: “The promotion of British values is essential in encouraging cohesion and
integration.” The spokesman added: “The vast majority of schools, including faith schools, see no contradiction in meeting their public sector equality duty responsibilities, promoting British values of tolerance, and the tenets of their faith. These schools understand that they have to comply with the law and make sure that pupils are properly prepared for life in modern Britain.”
Spielman wants to avoid conflict. “Pupils should learn,” she said last year, “how our values make us a beacon of liberalism, tolerance and fairness”. But she stressed that education was not about indoctrinating anyone with British values or turning them against their parents.
It’s a tightrope, clearly. But Francis Davis, a former government adviser on communities, says Spielman did a poor job walking it. “If I were an inspector reviewing this speech, I would be filing a report saying ‘requires improvement’,” he says. “There are many things to be said for the Government’s integration strategy but this speech is riddled with confusion.”
Apart from anything else, Davis says, “It seems to hint, by omission, that everyone except a member of the Established Church is at risk of breaching ‘British values’. That’s a very old national narrative that Jews, Nonconformists and Catholics will recognise.”
A meeting is planned soon between Ofsted and Charedi leaders. But it’s not only Orthodox Jewish representatives who will be asking whether “British values” has run its course as a political agenda, and whether something more flexible might be needed.
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