Private faith schools run by religious conservatives are “deliberately resisting” British values and equalities law, according to the chief inspector of schools in England, who appealed for school inspectors to be given new powers to seize evidence during visits.
Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, listed a string of disturbing policies and literature used by private faith schools, detailed in the school inspectorate’s annual report published on Wednesday.
“We have found texts that encourage domestic violence and the subjugation of women. We have found schools in which there is a flat refusal to acknowledge the existence of people who are different, so for example lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
“We also find well-meaning school leaders and governors who naively turn to religious institutions of a particularly conservative bent for advice about religious practice, not realising when this advice does not reflect mainstream thinking,” Spielman said at the report’s launch.
The chief inspector – who took over running the watchdog from Sir Michael Wilshaw at the start of the year – said the discoveries made for uncomfortable reading, denying it amounted to criticism of faith schools in general.
“When I see books in schools entitled Women Who Deserve to Go to Hell; children being educated in dank, squalid, conditions; children being taught solely religious texts at the expense of learning basic English and mathematics, I cannot let it be ignored,” said Spielman, who argued that inspectors should be able to remove such texts from school libraries.
The Ofsted report detailed its recent inspections of private faith schools, with 26% rated inadequate and 22% as requiring improvement – Ofsted’s two lowest categories.
Of the 140 small Muslim private schools inspected by Ofsted in the year, 28% were graded as inadequate, along with 38% of Jewish private schools and 18% of Christian schools.
Spielman had praise for the bulk of state schools, noting that 90% of primaries and nearly 80% of secondaries were rated as good or outstanding.
“If this speech generates any headlines, I doubt they will be ‘English education is good’,” Spielman said.
But the report also focused on a group of schools that Spielman said remained “intractable” to improvement, including a group of nearly 130 that had failed to achieve a good rating in inspections this year or at any time since 2005.
Ofsted said a further 118 schools inspected last year had failed to be rated as good or better since 2005. The figures also do not include several hundred struggling schools whose ratings have been scrapped since being taken over by new management as academies. The inspectorate apologised for misidentifying 11 schools as in the group since 2005, when their first rating below “good” came in 2006.
Spielman said there were common factors stopping the schools improving, including high turnover of staff, unstable leadership and high levels of deprivation and special needs among pupils.
She said, however, that deprivation alone could not be used as an excuse by headteachers for failure to improve schools.
“I do find myself frustrated with the culture of ‘disadvantage one-upmanship’ that has emerged in some places,” Spielman told the audience.
“Indeed, listening to these conversations, I am sometimes reminded of the Monty Python sketch about the four Yorkshiremen.”
Of the 130 schools repeatedly rated as inadequate or requiring improvement, clusters were found in the Midlands, including nine in Northamptonshire and eight in Birmingham, the largest local authority in England.
The total of 80 primary and 50 secondary schools have been inspected four times since 2005. Ofsted said many had higher than average proportions of pupils with special needs or white British pupils from low-income backgrounds. Around 80% had high proportions of pupils from deprived areas.
Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, praised Spielman’s positive tone in recognising that the vast majority of schools performed well.
“It is no coincidence that the very small number of schools that have struggled over many years serve the most disadvantaged communities, despite the tireless efforts of teachers and school leaders to improve outcomes,” Whiteman said.