Wednesday 24 March 2010

How many Jews and Muslims are missing from education?

The idea has been floated on one of the home education forums that there are large numbers of Jewish and Muslim children who might be neither registered pupils at schools or electively home educated. This is an interesting notion. The starting point for this was something which Paula Rothermel wrote in 2000. She said, 'in 1997/98 there were 9,144,000 children aged 5-16 in the population, but only 8,583,400 registered in schools Where were the other 560,600?' Now straight away, most of us will see a problem with this idea that there might be half a million children milling about who are not going to school. This would be a little over 5% of all children. In other words, if you lived near a large comprehensive with a thousand pupils, you could expect to see around fifty children in the area who did not attend school. Unless they are kept locked up indoors, it is something of a mystery just where all these children are on weekdays. Does anybody see scores of children out and about every day who are not at school?

One solution put forward is that these are children of orthodox Jews and religious Muslims who do not send them to school. I suppose that this could conceivably account for some children. I lived for some years in Stamford Hill, the main orthodox area in London and still work round there. About twenty thousand orthodox Jews live in Stamford Hill and many of their children attend private schools, some of which are not registered as schools. Not all of them, of course. There are two or three excellent schools which the orthodox children go to. I don't suppose for a moment we could be talking more than a thousand or so children who are not attending proper schools. Most Jewish kids who are not from the orthodox community go to the same schools as everybody else of course. There is also a large community in Manchester, in areas like Crumsall, but there are far fewer orthodox than in Stamford Hill. I can't see more than a few hundred missing children being in Manchester. I can't really buy the idea that there might be hundreds of thousands of such children.

Then there are Muslim children. There are without doubt Muslim children who are not attending school for various reasons, but I could not say how many. A lot of Muslim children attend Madrassas at weekends and some evenings. These are rather like Sunday Schools. The kids learn about Islam, how to read Arabic and things like that. They are not a substitute for school: the children attending them are usually going to school as well. I don't doubt for a moment that there are Muslim children not registered at schools or being home educated, but I would be surprised to hear that the numbers are very high.

More to the point are the number of children whose parents have no right to be in the country at all. I certainly know quite a few of them and it is very tricky to know what to do about them. Their parents are anxious not to draw attention to themselves and enrolling a child at school involves paperwork which some of these types do not have. One solution is for a relative who does have a right to be here to pretend that the child is theirs and that their birth was registered abroad. This is not uncommon and most of the children only seem to spend a few weeks or months without a school place until something of this sort can be arranged.

In short, I cannot really believe that half a million children are on the streets on weekdays without anybody noticing. We would be even more likely to notice if it were half a million orthodox Jewish or Asian kids!

31 comments:

  1. Yes, I have to agree with you that I am not sold on the idea that there are whole communities of unknown missing children somehow hidden from view, although as I said previously it was certainly a local councillors view that they were being told (presumably by the govt??) that this was an issue with illegal immigrants in big cities.
    Personally although I think that there is a problem with illegal immigration, most of the people concerned seem to be young and childless. I would have thought that those with families are more likely to be asylum seekers, and so not "underground" and certainly able to register their children in school.
    Another issue is why? Surely both Jewish and Muslim communities value education - why would they not want their children to be educated?

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  2. A fair point indeed Julie. I think that the idea is that many of these "hidden" children might be receiving some sort of education in unregistered religious schools; yeshivot and madrassas. Even the ones that are registered, typically have Ofsted reports which say that, "progress in secular subjects is inadequate", which is code for, "these kids learn nothing but Arabic/Hebrew and studying the Koran/Torah." I think the hint is being made by some that the government is ignoring these thousands of inadequately educated Jews and Muslims and focusing their attention upon middle class home educators, who are an easy target. It's true that the middle classes are often the target for government initiatives, because they are not likely to riot or anything, but I don't think this is what is happening here. I have a suspicion that there might be even fewer unknown children than we generally think, rather than hundreds of thousands more. I don't know whether you go on the Badman Review Action Group forum, but a discussion is currently taking place there about this.

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  3. Simon it is not half a million- that is just the number who were at that given point not on a school role. So this number will include some children who may also have moved abroad or even died of natural causes .It includes all those who at the time were 'in transit ' and may have registered at a school after the move.

    However there ARE children in all 3 of the categories you mention and probably quite a few in Christian communities.
    Ask the LA in Manchester and North London. They know that some children from the orthodox Jewish communities attend unregistered yeshivas.
    I also know there are about 280 thousand Jewish people in the UK and we are talking in the region of 50,000 ultra orthodox Jews with an average birth rate of 6 children- so probably about 40,000 children of whom 'x' number are over the age of 13 and may attend the unregistered yeshivas. Of course the majority of orthodox children DO attend registered schools. It is irrelevant if it is 1000 children total (and that your guess is a s good as mine). These children would come under the CSF Bill if it went through and I doubt that the LAs would even know where to start trying to enforce their new powers .
    The same goes for the Muslim community although I am not sure if it has become as organised as the Jewish community yet . Most attend state school, some attend religious schools but there are 'moving houses' of religious schools. It is not possible to say how many but again , even if there are
    The immigrant community is an interesting one.
    I have a friend who was a social worker in Cardiff a few years back. When a large number of people all came from the Sudan the LA simply did not have the resources so for a while that community functioned as it would have before coming here- that included leaving infants with 7 year olds while parents worked and certainly did not include school attendance for quite a while.

    Julie you show prejudice in your last sentence. Surely you have worked out by now that not all people who choose not to register with the LA are doing this to avoid educating their children .
    That assumption makes me giggle- for example the orthodox Jewish boys from age 13 do 12 hour days 6 days a week and it has been established already in UK court that as long as it equips them to live in their own community it is 'suitable'.
    I am sure it is the same in the Islamic 'timetable'

    The point I am trying to make is if a law is brought in it will apply equally - or at least the LAs ought to be applying it equally and I think the LAs will have an impossible time identifying or monitoring the children in these communities. The DCSF has been strangely quiet about children in these communities although they would say it is a 'grey area'.

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  4. Tania,

    I have lost the plot here a bit by too many negatives.. so what are you actually saying is the sentence?
    "Surely you have worked out by now that not all people who choose not to register with the LA are doing this to avoid educating their children."

    (If I understand you rightly) - I am not suggesting anything of the sort; I am merely surprised by the suggestion (not mine) that there are supposedly so many CME but not home educated children around, but now Simon has suggested that they are in unregistered religious schools, that at least makes more sense. (I am not on BRAG, so am unaware of the discussion there)
    Back to one of your other points though Tania,
    the suggestion that such "schools" exist in the Christian community - I am not sure they do. Most of the "ultra-orthodox" in Christian terms (ie fundamentalist Evangelicals) either do home educate or send their children to Christian schools. What do exist is the unregistered tutorial centres, where the children are home educated but meet together for some periods of the week (many follow the ACE curriculum - I know a couple of such groups near here) but the children are definately EHE and the parents are held accountable for their education, not the centre. Most are actually run by the parents anyway, who are also present. I nearly became a tutor for a centre for Taylor Brethren children some years ago (which did use tutors rather than parents), and although it may have looked like a school, different children attended each day and for every 2 hour class taught in the centre, the teacher set 5 hours of work to be supervised by the parents at home. These places though may have fallen foul of the new regulations of how much of a week constituited full time (the thing which closed Tyndale Academy in London) but in fact the Brethren ones were replaced by real registered full time schools anyway.

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  5. The 'discussion' on BRAG is mainly me talking to myself as usual!
    I am making no comment what so ever on whether the education is 'adequate' or not.The LAs know they would lose in court.
    However , that does not mean these children would be exempt from the 4 visits a year.
    Until last week my guestimate about how many children we are talking about, suddenly had to include a category I had not previously considered.

    Looking at the category I am most familiar with - individual families who may or may not be autonomous home educators who choose not to register with the LA, I had come to the conclusion that if there were 10,000 I would be surprised.
    Now I am wondering how many there could be in the groups mentioned above.
    In many ways it is irrelevant how many there are - the point remains that any new regulation will have to be applied equally.

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  6. Of course Tania, some of the registered yeshivot are also pretty dreadful. Beis Hamadrash Elyon in Golders Green for example is an ordinary semi-detached house which has almost a hundred pupils! (They work in shifts form 7 in the morning to 11 at night) Almost no education except for religion.) Ofsted tolerates places like this which would be closed down pretty sharpish if you or I tried to open them. Refused planning permission time and again over the last fifteen years or so and yet still continues to stay open. I should think that if the existing ones like this can stay open and register pupils, then there would not be any need for them to be operating underground as it were. I have no doubt at all that there are some girls from this group who are not receiving a suitable, full time education.
    Most of the Madrassas are really part time, people send their children in the evenings to learn about Islam and so on. There are two thousand of those attached to mosques which are known of. I dare say some operate in community halls and private homes which nobody is aware of, but I can't again see any way that this would conceal large numbers of Muslim children.

    The real and irritating point is that which I mentioned above. Ofsted and the local authorities are very reluctant to give Jewish or Muslim schools of this sort a hard time. Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or anti-Semitism. I'm sure that some ordinary home educators would like the option of simply registering a semi detached house as a school and then enrolling a hundred home educated children there! I can't see either Ofsted or anybody else being helpful about this though!

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  7. Julie wrote-
    ''I am merely surprised by the suggestion (not mine) that there are supposedly so many CME but not home educated children around, but now Simon has suggested that they are in unregistered religious schools, that at least makes more sense.''

    I have not seen this suggestion of CME or that these children are not receiving 'suitable' education -Simon made the suggestion of unregistered religious schools in his original post.Of course many would think that the education is not 'suitable' as it is too insular and specific to the particular religious community and would foreclose options to the wider community which they are citizens of. I am not 'going there' on that tangent way too contentious and besides the point I am seeking to make.
    The issues regarding application of any new regulations would equally apply and I hear nothing of these groups being 'targeted' in the way that individual families are being targeted over education and safeguarding.
    There is nothing in the current proposed legislation that leaves it to the discretion of the LA- even if education is 'suitable' each child gets the visits and each parent must re-register annually whether AE or yeshiva etc.......

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  8. Simon - we are on the same track......and yes there are smaller full time yeshivas which are not registered with Ofsted- they will happen more locally and amongst smaller family groupings than the larger registered ones.They are not 'underground' as the DCSF and Ofsted will say that it is no different than small groups of HE Christian parents banding together in homes. The LA would say that they are 'schools' and as such ought to be registered and Ofsteded. As I say 'grey area' because no-one really wants to concentrate on this as an 'issue'.
    Even if numbers are less than 1000 in the Jewish community, they have to be higher in the Muslim community because the Muslim community is bigger .
    This entire piece of legislation is about coming into line with the Childrens Act (safeguarding) and Every Child Matters.
    The justification is based on known numbers (Badmans 2nd try) where there are in a sample size of 50% of LAs less than 2000 possible 'issues'
    No need to go into why that number of about 2000 not an accurate reflection of the real 'issues'- fact is that small numbers are not a reason for government to 'drop it'- unless of course the possibility of the same small numbers comes from a religious group?

    I find it inconsistent and discriminatory to propose legislation to make my family an annual 'target' in a box ticking scheme whilst I know that other families will be left alone entirely.
    I of course have been vocal that the choice should be the parents unless someone has reason to believe that education or safeguarding is a concern and have no wish to take away that choice form the religious communities mentioned.
    I merely want to point out what the government is quiet about.
    I wonder if these groups even know this legislation is proposed and that technically it will include them.

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  9. You say tania, "I wonder if these groups even know this legislation is proposed and that technically it will include them." I would have thought that they wouldn't care anyway!

    There is quite a tradition, not just in the field of home education, of avoiding the real problem and targetting respectable and generally law abiding citizens. For example, the real problem with firearms is crazed crack-heads loosing off UZIs in the street. Instead of risking trouble with them, why not give farmers with legally held shotguns a hard time and thus claim to be cracking down on firearms offences? When I live in Hackney, it was not uncommon for some flashy gangster in a BMW to park on a zebra crossing and pop into McDonalds. The traffic wardens did nothing, for fear of provoking violence or even a riot. Instead, they would skulk round the backstreets and put tickets on the cars of middle class families who might have one tyre on the pavement. Much easier and safer!

    I could carry on about this a lot, it is a pet subject of mine. The point is, nobody is going to tangle with a bunch of Muslims just in order to check out some Madrassa.

    Like Julie, I seriously doubt if there are many deeply religious Christians who are similarly unknown to the local authority. The local authorities love them in any case. their children are very polite and are usually studying something other than religion, although that might feature heavily.

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  10. ok Simon. We agree again.
    ' respectable and generally law abiding citizens' will be targeted and some will be left alone but the government can thus claim to be 'cracking down'.

    So can we agree that this is the point of the CSF Bill and that all the rhetoric in the position papers and responses to select committees which talks about support and training would actually be written into the Bill if it were to be something that was really intended . Fake carrot, real big stick?

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  11. To be fair, one can understand why anybody following up a report of children missing from education would feel this way. You come into work on Monday morning and find three reports to follow up. Hmmmm, which shall we deal with first? One is of an unregulated madrassa in a mosque which might contain children not registered at a school. If you go there everybody on the premises will pretend that they can only speak Urdu and later you will be accused of racial harrassment. The next is of house being run as an unregistered school in an orthodox area. Knock on the door there and all the people in the house will pretend that they only speak Yiddish and every time you speak to a child, an adult will tell the kid in Yiddish that she mustn't answer the question. After you leave, a Rabbi will ring up your line manager and say that you are an obvious anti-Semite with no respect for other faith's cultural traditions.
    The last report is of two children in a nice middle class family living in a pleasant suburb. They are apparently not at school. Go there and you can spend the morning bullying some hapless mother and insisting that she do as you tell her. It's a difficult decision to make.....

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  12. Have you ever tried looking at the figures yourself? Rothermel's are rather out dated. Ever time I've looked at population v. school pupil figures there have always been more pupils than children in the country. Not sure where I'm going wrong!

    Maybe someone else can make more sense of the figures?

    Try the figures for 2002:

    Key population and Vital Statistics
    http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/KPVS29_2002/KPVS29.pdf

    School pupils: by type of school
    http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D7297.xls

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  13. "The last report is of two children in a nice middle class family living in a pleasant suburb. They are apparently not at school. Go there and you can spend the morning bullying some hapless mother and insisting that she do as you tell her. "

    Yet you want to make it easier for them to do this? You want to give people like this more power and control over families?

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  14. On the contrary Anonymous, I want it to be harder for them to behave like this! I am describing how things are; not how I would wish them to be. Recommendations 3, 5, 14 and 15 of the Badman Report are specifically designed to put a stop to this sort of thing. As long as local authorities are left to their own devices, this is how they will behave. Once they are required to make annual returns and explain their actions to the DCSF, it is to be hoped that this will have the effect of making them a little more careful about this.

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  15. As regards those figures that paula Rothermel used, I am guessing that she did not really understand what she was about. often, when a lay person stumbles across statistics like that it looks very exciting. I don't for a moment think that half a million children are being home educated or missing from education.

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  16. Simon please refrain from belittling people . You may not agree with Paula on things but i doubt you have looked at the census data for all children age 5 -16 and compared it to children registered in state or private schools.
    One thing I ma sure about- Paula has more experience than both you and I combined. This does not mean she is correct .
    This is why actual numbers are not relevant. There are 'some'.
    'Lay' is a misnomer here- there are no official statistics only those people who try to read between the lines and the government has no interest in really knowing

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  17. "Recommendations 3, 5, 14 and 15 of the Badman Report are specifically designed to put a stop to this sort of thing."

    Haven't time to check, are recommendations 3, 5, 14 or 15 covered in the current Bill?

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  18. anonymous at 05.02.
    NO the bill does not make any mention of the training or provision of optional financial 'help' by way of access to exams or colleges.

    what would remain is in legislation that which is in the bill

    and it is not a given that even that would end up being funded.....

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  19. I am unable to see Tania how referring to Paula Rothermel as a lay person is at all belittling. Nor can I understand your confidence that she knows more about this than both of us put together. I worked for the office of Population Censuses and Surveys for a couple of years when they were based at St. Catherine's House; I am pretty sure that I know more about this than Paula Rothermel. All she has done is take one large figure which is widely available, the number of children in the country and subtracted from it a somewhat smaller figure, the number of children registered at schools. I dare say you too could perform this calculation if you were minded to do so.

    I am not at all sure that I see upon what you are basing your opinion of Paula Rothermel's expertise in demographic analysis. When all's said and done, she left school at fifteen and worked as a typist for some years. She then became an artist and much later did an Open University course, before studying psychology at Durham as a mature student. All very worthy of course, but she is still a lay person when it comes to statistics and demographics. Pointing this out is not belittling her; rather drawing attention to an objective fact.

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  20. "She then became an artist and much later did an Open University course, before studying psychology at Durham as a mature student. All very worthy of course, but she is still a lay person when it comes to statistics and demographics."

    Wouldn't courses that involves research as an integral part of study and a thesis include statistics and demographics? If they don't it would be like serving a meal without providing a knife and fork!

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  21. "anonymous at 05.02.
    NO the bill does not make any mention of the training or provision of optional financial 'help' by way of access to exams or colleges."

    Thanks Tania. So it does appear that Simon approves of giving these people more powers without any attempt to counter the problems he knows exist at the same time (and no guarantee that they ever will be countered).

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  22. No Anonymous, it means nothing of the sort. The recommendations which I mentioned above all related to local authorities being obliged to gather information and forward it to the Children's Trust Board. That the Children, Schools and families Bill does not include these recommendations does not mean that they will not at a later date be the subject of guidance from the Secretary of State. The aim of these four recommendations was to prevent local authorities behving in a cavalier fashion in the way that I desribed. It might help if people were to read them before commenting!

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  23. Anonymous, Paula Rothermel may well have covered a certain amount of statistics during her studies; if so this is not particularly noticable in her work. I was really countering Tania's assertion that, "One thing I am sure about- Paula has more experience than both you and I combined." I know nothing of Tania's academic background and she knows nothing of mine. It is therefore impossible for either of us to make a statement of this sort. Another reason for supposing that Paula Rothermel is talking a lot of piffle is of course that nobody else has ever thought that there might be more than half a million children in this country who are not at school. It is such a peculiar notion, that over 5% of school age children are not attending school, that one wonders that these half a million children are invisible both to government statisticians and also physically invisible to the extent that we don't actually see half a million children roaming around on weekdays. You might ask yourself whether or not if true, this is not something which those opposed to home education might not have mentioned before!

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  24. "No Anonymous, it means nothing of the sort. The recommendations which I mentioned above all related to local authorities being obliged to gather information and forward it to the Children's Trust Board. "

    You are for the Bill and there is no guarantee that the other recommendations you mention will ever be enacted. Where have I misunderstood your views? Or do you only support the Bill on condition that these other recommendations are carried out? I've not seen you place these conditions on your support of the Bill so far. As it stands at the moment (in the unlikely event Bill should squeak through) the LA will have more powers with no additional controls on their actions and no requirement for controls to be introduced.

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  25. ""One thing I am sure about- Paula has more experience than both you and I combined." I know nothing of Tania's academic background and she knows nothing of mine."

    I think it's reasonable to assume that Paula has had some training in statistics for the reasons mentioned previously and you have demonstrated a lack of understanding here over the months (although it may be that you use your knowledge when it supports your position and ignore it when it does not), so it seems a reasonable conclusion to reach on Tania's part.

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  26. Simon says-They are apparently not at school. Go there and you can spend the morning bullying some hapless mother and insisting that she do as you tell her. It's a difficult decision to make.....

    so that is what LA officers are paid for to bully middle class family?

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  27. Care of Westminster baby death family questioned

    A 10-month-old baby boy is believed to have starved to death in north-west London despite being monitored by doctors and social workers.

    The child, whose family was in contact with at least nine NHS professionals, was found dead in a flat on 8 March.

    His 29-year-old mother died of an illness two days later. A serious case review has begun into the family's care

    Plenty of monitoring contact but of course of no help to the child! and now the baby is dead!

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  28. It is a very odd and awful thing, the way that many home educators seem keen to brandish dead children about in order to score a debating point! I noticed the same thing with the child who died of an asthma attack at school. Some home educators were falling over themselves to cry, "There you are, that's what those schools are like!" I am not altogether surprised that you wish to remain anonymous after making such a tacky comment.

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  29. I was referring to Paulas experience in court with families in different situations- which means she knows of the existence of types of educational provision that may not fall in any category. As far as statisitics go, yes anyone can look at numbers of children in school vs numbers of children who were in the census.
    there was for the dates used (2007?) a shortfall of half a million. I did not imply (nor does Paulas work imply) that they are all educated 'otherwise' as some may even be living elsewhere out of the uk or even dead. ..It is just that some more of them than we previously were considering as EHE could now be considered EHE or again fall into no catgory in this EVERY child matters farce.
    It will not matter how many there are as the government and the LAs will not target this population...in the case of orthodox Jews it may well be because Halachic law considers a boy at 13 to be counted in the adult community and Uk law considers adjudication according to religious normativities .

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  30. Interesting what you say about UK law, Tania. We sometimes hear about the idea of Sharia law being used in this country and people get uneasy about it. In parts of London, Halacha essentially is the law and rates above UK law every time! You probably know about the shomrim in Stamford Hill and Golders Green. I wonder what the reaction would be if a Muslim area started their own uniformed police force? The idea of people in either community paying overmuch attention to the provisions of the Children, Schools and Families Bill is pretty laughable! In a way,I can understand why. I always view the Bible's instructions as more important than UK law. If there were a conflict, I think Biblical law would take precedent. So I can't really criticise those who feel the same way about Koran or Torah.

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  31. Simon says-It is a very odd and awful thing, the way that many home educators seem keen to brandish dead children about in order to score a debating point! I noticed the same thing with the child who died of an asthma attack at school. Some home educators were falling over themselves to cry, "There you are, that's what those schools are like!" I am not altogether surprised that you wish to remain anonymous after making such a tacky comment.

    Old crazy Badman was quick to use khyra Ishaq death to attack home educators Badman was on TV and Radio using Khyra name! so was Uncle Balls and DCSF using Khyra name!

    Badman is always going on about montoring and checking well that baby had plenty of checks by all sorts of people but the baby is still dead! and that school some members staff have been suspended at a school after an 11-year-old boy had a fatal asthma attack.

    An inquest into Sam Linton's death last week decided neglect at Offerton High School, in Stockport, "significantly contributed" to his death.
    come on Simon you your self have used khyra death t oattack home educators or do you regret that now? are you trying to say sorry?

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