Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Marks of Hale Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley has just said. Perhaps I can say to my noble friend Lord Glasman that I am Lady Blackstone of Stoke Newington, so we share part of our region in our titles. I am familiar with the Haredi community and have been for very many years, and I admire a great deal of what they do, but I am concerned about what is happening to some of the boys in this community. I share the concern based not only on the meetings that I have had, with my noble friend Lady Morris, with some of the young men who have been through these institutions, but also on the very good charity Nahamu, which is concerned about the abuses of children that are taking place in these yeshivas in north London and, I think, Manchester as well. The trustees of Nahamu are proud members of the Orthodox Jewish community and they are concerned about what is happening to fellow Jewish young men and boys. I think that we should respect that concern in considering how we approach the whole issue of these yeshivas. I will speak at greater length in the next group about what I and my noble friend Lady Morris think we should do to make sure that these young men get the education they deserve, which they are not at the moment, and that their experience is properly safeguarded.

[Lord Marks of Hale (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support and compliment the amendments to Clause 36 in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman. The amendments seek to ensure that institutions that provide only religious instruction alongside guaranteed out-of-school education are not wrongly categorised as independent educational institutions under this Bill.

Education in this country has never been a one-size-fits-all, state-run system. Home-schooling remains every parent’s legal right. One community, however, has been singled out by Clause 36: the Haredi, or strictly Orthodox, Jewish community, whose boys attend yeshivas, which are supervised religious settings, alongside receiving home-schooling. As one professor remarked about the Bill’s intentions, which in its supplementary documents almost exclusively singled out that community, it is fine to be Jewish in the UK in 2025 as long as you are not too Jewish. That should not be.

Yeshivas are not schools and they cannot become schools. They are religious spaces operating alongside home-schooling with a wholly different purpose. They are settings where young men engage deeply with their heritage, to develop their spiritual and ethical character and absorb the wisdom and traditions of the Jewish rabbinic corpus. Inculcating a lived faith is fundamentally different from teaching subjects like geography or history. Those subjects are generally limited to one or two sessions a week. Inculcating one’s children into a lived faith must be an immersive experience. That is what yeshivas are all about and why they are so central to our faith community. Yeshivas operate as supervised spaces with robust safeguarding and health and safety arrangements in place. They allow sufficient and flexible breaks to enable attendees to continue their home-schooling alongside yeshiva.

Yeshivas are not illegal schools; they are not schools at all. They operate alongside home-schooling arrangements. The children there do not have access to television, smartphones, video games or social media. Their daily routine is geared towards study and productivity, making the days longer and more suitable for home-schooling.