Revealed: Number of Charedi boys not in school triples in last 15 years

The number of Charedi Jewish boys missing from the education system in England has tripled in the last 15 years, new research from Humanists UK has today revealed – suggesting an explosion in the problem of illegal schools in the community. The research works by measuring the gap between the number of girls and boys in legally registered Charedi secondary schools. This works because most Charedi children in illegal schools are boys, particularly (although increasingly not exclusively) those aged over 13. In the early 2000s, the gap between the number of boys and girls in such schools hovered below 700. By 2010, it stood at 1,133. But this year, it has grown to 3,545. Humanists UK has said that the figures underline the need for urgent government action to shut down the illegal schools.

Illegal schools in the Charedi community

Many in the Charedi community believe that after their bar mitzvah, boys must spend all their time studying the Talmud and the Torah, leaving them no time to learn any ‘secular’ subjects such as English, maths, and science. As a result, boys are taken out of legal schools – which must by law teach these subjects in order to prepare children for life in modern Britain – and are sent to illegal schools instead. A small number of girls also attend such schools, as do younger boys. In the last couple of years, this has been a growing problem due to the lack of suitable classroom facilities – driving more and more younger boys to illegal schools as well.

The illegal schools have been able to continue to operate due to loopholes in the law, including no regulations to capture settings that don’t teach secular subjects; insufficient powers for Ofsted to tackle such settings; and no register of children not in school. The result is that children are left trapped in settings where they are seriously unsafe. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found widespread evidence of sexual abuse in such settings.

Humanists UK has been campaigning since 2014 for government legislation to close these loopholes and shut the schools down. It has supported measures to close loopholes through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which received Royal Assent in April this year. 

ITV investigation

A new major ITV investigation into the scale of illegal religious schools in England identified more than 20 suspected illegal schools in London, Leicester, and Manchester. The investigation, which was supported by Humanists UK, heard from former pupils who described children leaving these settings unable to properly read, write, or do basic maths. ITV reported that Ofsted has carried out 1,839 investigations into suspected illegal schools over the last decade, but has secured only a small number of prosecutions. Former Ofsted officials warned that the problem remains far larger than the authorities have been able to uncover, with estimates ranging from 6,000 children in illegal schools to tens of thousands.

The growth of Charedi boys not in school

The Department for Education (DfE) conducts an annual School Census. Since 2002, it has published annual data providing the number of pupils in each legally registered school, broken down by age and gender. Using this, it’s possible to analyse how many boys and girls there are in registered Charedi schools. In each year, it’s possible to see that the number of girls in school stays fairly constant from ages 4 to 16. But over each year of the data, it’s also been possible to see that the number of boys drops off after age 11. This could be because boys are moving abroad, or are more likely to be lawfully homeschooled. But given the known widespread problem with Charedi boys being in unregistered schools, it is likely that this is because many are being sent to such settings. (And when children are sent abroad at this age, this is typically for the same reason as they are sent to illegal schools – i.e. so the children can just study religious texts.) The gap remains at ages 17 and 18, although by then of course school is not compulsory at these ages, so it gets much smaller.

In 2023, the gap between the number of boys and girls of secondary school age was 2,365 pupils.

More recently, a gap has also grown among those aged 3 to 6. This gap is entirely within Hackney. By this year, the gap among secondary school-age pupils has grown to 2,476. But the gap, including primary-age, is now 3,545. Giving evidence for the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, community insiders told MPs that this has happened because the community has been unable to find enough suitable premises for the number of pupils. So unregistered primary schools have been growing in number too:

Research demonstrating the secondary school gap has also been conducted in the past. But what Humanists UK has now done for the first time is work out this gap for every year from 2002 to 2025. (Data is unreliable for 2019, because for unknown reasons, around 20 Charedi schools, about a third of the total, are missing from the annual statistics. Two schools are also missing in 2020; we have estimated their figures for that year by taking them from 2018.) The result is that it’s possible to see how the problem has grown over time. In 2002, the gap stood at 555. By the time Ofsted set up its unregistered schools team in 2016, the gap had more than doubled, to 1,311 pupils. In spite of this new team existing to tackle the problem, it continued to rise, reaching 3,545 in 2025.

The most likely cause of the growth is that the size of the Charedi community has also grown rapidly. In 2002, there were 8,700 pupils in legally registered Charedi schools. By 2025, that had grown to around 19,000.

It is also known that some girls are in illegal schools, albeit a relatively small number. The data does not make it possible to work out how many Charedi girls are not in school. The fact that some are means that the problem is even bigger than these numbers suggest. It also means that the number of boys not in school will be an underestimate.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act

The problem of unregistered religious schools exploiting loopholes in the law should be reduced through measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act. The Act will require every local authority to keep a Children Not in School register, making it mandatory for parents to provide core details when a child of compulsory school age is being educated outside school (including where a child is on roll but not attending full-time), which directly addresses the loophole around there being no comprehensive way to identify children missing from the system.

Crucially, the Act also tightens the definition of what must be regulated as a full-time independent educational setting, extending the existing independent school registration regime so that more settings that can be expected to provide all or the majority of a child’s education, even if they offer a narrow curriculum, must register and face regular inspection; continuing to operate full-time without registering would be a criminal offence. This is designed to capture precisely the kind of ‘education-only-religious-texts’ provision falling through regulatory cracks.

Alongside this, the Act strengthens Ofsted’s powers of entry and investigation in relation to suspected offences under the independent education regulatory regime, responding to the enforcement limitations referenced earlier in the document.

Lewis Young, Humanists UK’s Policy and Campaigns Manager said:

‘The problem of unregistered religious schools exploiting loopholes in the law to continue to operate has been known about for years. What this research demonstrates for the first time is how the number of children in unregistered schools being denied a suitable education has grown and grown. With the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act now law, we look forward to these new measures closing illegal schools and protecting children.’