Religious School Fails Inspection for Refusing to Endorse LGBT Agenda
Refusal to teach lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues could fail an Orthodox Jewish school in Britain. This was what Vizhnitz girls' school in north London learned after it failed three inspections conducted by the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted).
Vizhnitz is a private girls' school in north London catering to 212 students. Ofsted inspected the school three times in less than a year and found that it wasn't teaching LGBT values as it doesn't conform to its religious beliefs. This is despite the fact that the school performed well in other areas.
The regulator noted that Vizhnitz refused to give its pupils aged up to 8 a full understanding of "British values." Since 2014, schools were graded based on this set of values that consist of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.
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A Christian school — Durham Free School — was closed down on April 2015 for failing the three inspections. Grindon Hall, also a Christian school, was rated inadequate even if it is one of the best performing schools in the northeast. Both schools declined to endorse homosexuality and transsexualism.
Christian and Jewish schools refuse to teach about sexual orientation and LGBT issues as a matter of faith. David Kurten, the education spokesman for U.K. Independence Party, decried the school monitor for its sustained, coordinated agenda to force its opinions on young children.
"Primary school children are far too young to be exposed to ideas such as the details of non-reproductive sexual acts and gender fluidity," he said. "Children deserve a childhood and the guise of 'inclusion' and 'anti-bullying' is being used to expose them to damaging ideas far too early, and to undermine and close down faith schools in favor of secularism," Kurten added.
