Let’s Talk Schools: our new book shows where Jewish schools do work

In 1964, a television programme called Seven Up launched as a series which traced the changing lives of a group of British children from a variety of backgrounds and different areas of the UK, returning at seven-year intervals to document their lives.

As a trainee teacher, I was asked to watch Seven Up and Fourteen Up. The programme has continued to be made every seven years, the most recent episode being Sixty-Three Up.

Directed by Michael Apted, the project makes compelling viewing. How exciting to watch people mature before your eyes. How fascinating to see what incidents and interactions influence people to make decisions about their lives. How insightful to listen to people reflecting on why and how their lives have taken a particular path.

This ground-breaking series was an important inspiration for our longitudinal study, Jewish Lives. Alex Pomson and I, co-directors of the study and co-authors of the book, wanted to retain the intensity of close interaction with individuals alongside a broader look at a large number of children.

So, we have been following the cohort who in September 2011 entered year 7 at age 11 at one of seven UK Jewish secondary schools. Our research over the years has explored all the ways in which the family, school, synagogue and youth movements impact on young people’s lives. What follows is a glimpse into the huge amount of data gathered.

Three years after they graduated from secondary school both students and parents continued to be very satisfied with having spent seven years in a Jewish school.

Jewish schools make a significant contribution to the development of Jewish identity, enhancing their roles as incubators of Jewish social relationships by becoming sites for an extensive array of extracurricular activity. All of these offerings have meant that Jewish youth movements have had to work hard to attract participation from students in Jewish schools.

Schools are creative but have found it challenging to satisfy all of the religiously diverse families they recruit, especially in respect of the Jewish studies formal curriculum and teaching. Schools which cater to less diverse populations have fared somewhat better in this respect; the parents and children in these schools are more positive about the Jewish studies teaching in the school.

But we found three main areas of engagement in Jewish life where our data indicate a significant influence of Jewish schools: relating to Israel, friendships, and community involvement. All of these contribute to a strong emerging sense of Jewish identity and Jewish identification, a major finding of our research.

The great majority of students are very comfortable, and even proud, of who they are as Jews; they are not embarrassed to advertise their Jewishness. At the same time, with some exceptions, many are not generally interested in a strict Jewish religious observance. This was not an outcome that Jewish schools had inspired.

The next phase of the Jewish lives of these young people is the most uncertain. This will be the first time in their lives that most are not scaffolded by some Jewish educational organisation and readily reached by the Jewish community. We don’t yet know where they will be living, who their friends will be, who their partners will be, how Covid-19, Israel and world events will have affected their lives, their economic status and their Jewish connections and involvements.

Will they disconnect completely? Will they be living in Israel? Will they have Jewish partners?

We will not know the answers to those questions until we see what decisions our cohort are making as adults, and eventually, as parents. We find the prospect of continuing this project to be compelling. We have completed one volume of this story. We are hugely excited about the possibility of completing more.

Jewish Lives and Jewish Education in the UK: School, Family and Society, by Helena Miller and Alex Pomson, by Springer, and is out now in hard copy and as an e-book.