by Judith Nemeth, TCW
YOU can’t police a moral vacuum. When a society stops teaching right from wrong, it ends up enforcing it after the fact. We keep using Band-Aids while neglecting the one place that shapes behaviour before it spills into the streets: the classroom — in Britain, right now, plainly.
As religious observance declines and religious literacy thins, schools have become Britain’s moral classrooms. What they permit, praise and punish teaches children what is normal. Yet too many are told to remain ‘neutral’, treating values as slogans and leaving moral formation undone.
The rise in attacks on Jewish places of worship, which has echoes of 1939 in Germany, should be a line in the sand. A country which won’t teach clear boundaries — don’t intimidate, vandalise or threaten people for their faith; don’t desecrate sacred spaces — will end up firefighting hatred after it has taken root. Policing is reactive. Moral education is preventative.
Evidence backs this. A meta‑analysis of 213 moral education school programmes (270,034 pupils) found better behaviour and an 11‑percentile‑point rise in attainment; another review found more than three‑quarters of universal programmes reduced anti-social behaviour.
Government is already putting millions into protective security, including up to £28.4million in 2026–27 through the Jewish Community Protective Security Grant. That money is necessary, but not sufficient: we must also fund social and moral education to prevent hatred forming in the first place.