UK Edition
Inside an illegal school: I was hit by a spoon or stick daily, former student says
Izzy Posen, 22, spent most of his childhood at illegal Jewish schools in the Charedi community of Stamford Hill in north London.
He attended Talmud Torah Tashbar school from age seven, where he remembers being hit with a wooden spoon or a stick almost every day.
“I would regard my time there as child abuse,” he said. “The worst aspect was definitely the hitting. I was cheeky so I was hit a lot. A wooden cooking spoon was always on the table and it was used daily.”
Mr Posen said the school was housed in a disused synagogue which was “very run down”, and his classroom for five years was the cloakroom which had blacked out windows.
“Sitting for five years in the same classroom that is tiny and cramped - that is like sitting in a prison cell,” he said.
“The method of teaching and lack of emotional and creative development, that scarred me for life. It definitely gave me a lot of psychological issues. I don’t think it is healthy for kids to be in that kind of environment."
Teachers at the school only spoke in Yiddish and children were educated solely in Jewish studies.
Mr Posen taught himself how to speak English when he was 18, after buying an English dictionary and borrowing some other books from a local library.
“The sanitary requirements were awful, the toilets were never cleaned. At lunch time the tables, dishes and cutlery were dirty, and it stank” he said. He said that students knew at the time that the school - which was ordered to close last year by the Department for Education - was operating illegally.
“Our school was very close to another ultra-Orthadox school that was registered,” he said. “When the inspectors came to that school we had to evacuate. We we would disperse, every class would go to a different location and learn there for a few days.”
After leaving the Charedi community two years ago, Mr Posen enrolled at Barnet College, where he took GCSEs and a course equivalent to A levels. He is now reading Physics and Philosophy at Bristol University.
His disclosure comes as an Ofsted chief has demanded that inspectors are given the powers to break into suspected illegal schools, as he warns that “flimsy” laws mean that children are left in “shocking” conditions.
Matthew Coffey, the chief operating officer at Ofsted, said that the individuals running unregistered schools are escaping prosecution, despite inspectors identifying hundreds of suspected illegal premises.
A spokesman for Ofsted said: "We don't comment on individual cases."