If You Tickle Us...

To the Heads of our Town’s Boys’ and Girls’ Educational Institutions Who Educate our Sons and Daughters Tirelessly and Wonderfully in Torah, Fear of Heaven and Morals. May God help them succeed in their holy work and flatten the mountains in front of them to a plain to enable them to commit all their resources towards education and to the existence and widening of the institutions without having to worry every step of the way what the authorities will say. Let us express our gratitude to those who brought to our attention and alerted us that [institutions] must sign for the Hackney Learning Trust unwittingly and without understanding what they are signing and there is a great fear whether there isn’t in their signature a risk of heresy God forbid. The Beis Din considered this with great seriousness on Thursday B’shalach [25 January 2018] and carefully evaluated the contract and the guidelines and we found that they place great doubts, Heaven forfend, in the creation of...

In the lengthy posts setting out the backdrop to Yesodey Hatorah's proposals for a Middle School and dissecting the consultation document itself It may be difficult to see the wood of killing off a school for the trees of technicalities on PANs, SLTs, SENs and all the other jargon used to dress up a fundamentally mendacious plan to discard an entire primary school on to the streets. It is not difficult to rant about Pinter and his poodle governors when at almost every move they display their ability to turn anything they touch into slippery slime. When admissions are turned into exclusion, when overcapacity one day becomes undercapactiy on another, when a supposedly charitable wedding hall scheme is turned into a massive black hole for millions of pounds, when an advocate for education on the public stage abuses his power and when public funds are used to try and kill off a school not to his liking the problem is knowing where to start in calling out this thoroughly dishonest lot...

And so with the background aside it is time to move on to the actual Consultation with a paragraph by paragraph analysis of the proposals. This consultation sets out and explains the reasons why Yesodey Hatorah Girls School wishes to annex a Year 5 and Year 6 in September 2019 to its existing Secondary school and create a cross-phase school which would cater for students from Year 5 to Year 11. This consultation sets out nothing of the sort. The true reason for expanding the school to year 5 and 6 is to exclude Beis Yakov primary school pupils and the 'reasons' set out in the document are at best disingenuous and at worst outright lies. The primary reason behind this move would be to increase the number of students who attend the school in order to reach our Published Admission Number (PAN) of 455. If this was indeed the ‘primary reason’ the most logical step would would be to set up a 6 th form, especially as Be'er Miriam is already on the premises. Inde...

Taking a step back now it was in light of YH Primary's restrictive admissions that Beis Yaakov primary was born. An increasing number of parents were left without schools or were unwilling to conform to the demands of the existing schools and were also unwilling to move to Golders Green or even to Manchester. It was to accommodate the increasing number of these children that parents grouped together to form Beis Yakov. Its first cohort, now in Year 6, is of 7 girls and there are currently about 90 girls in the entire school. Its policies are generally more tolerant than the other schools though they too had to tighten up so as not to be seen as a 'dumping ground' for rejects from other schools. Since Beis Yaakov has no secondary school the 'danger' to YHS is obvious. Here is Pinter like a centurion at the gate guarding the 'purity' of 'his' school virtually from cradle to the wedding bed and here in one fell swoop his life's work risks being ...

Before turning to the specifics of the consultation something must also be said about the Yesodey Hatorah Schools and its admission procedure as well as its relationship, if that's the right word, with Beis Yaakov (BY). BY, it will be recalled, was recently established and has only a primary school. The Yesodey Hatorah girls school was established towards the end of the 1940s or thereabout. They were the first frum girls' school in the area and served the local 'frum' community as the term was understood at that time. For e.g. initially classes were co-ed even for 12 years olds which would be unheard of today. The background of the parent body was also not necessarily what would nowadays be classed frum. As the community grew in number and as the frum world became frummer Yesodey Hatorah moved with the times. Yet despite this it has always been the school which traditionally served the middle ground of the community and remains so to this day. During the 1960s and ...

As first reported on the linked Twitter account , the state funded Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School (YHS) is consulting on 'annexing' a Year 5 and Year 6 to its existing school and creating a Middle School for those classes. As it currently stands YHS consists of Years 7-11 which is the norm for secondary schools. It also has a notional 6th form (known locally as a 'sem') on its premises called Be'er Miriam Seminary with two years which are the equivalent of Years 12-13. This is a private fee-paying institution of which Abraham Pinter is a trustee . Its charitable income in its last financial report was £362,052 . It pays no rent to YHS for its use of the school premises. YHS has now published a consultation document on this annexation but to understand the issues and the possible motives for YHS's proposals it is important to set out the background of girls' schools in Stamford Hill's Chareidi community. Just one disclaimer before I proce...

UOHC-Thames Water Powerpoint by ifyoutickleus on Scribd So UOHC brought to the meeting a Dayan, a lawyer, indeed a technician, a handful of arsekonim and a token woman. Truly eye watering stuff.