What happened. In late July 2026 the Department for Education awarded £100,000 from its Tackling Antisemitism in Education Innovation Fund to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, working with the Catholic Education Service and the Archdiocese of Birmingham, to produce antisemitism teaching resources for Catholic secondary schools: lesson guides and videos for RE, PSHE and citizenship lessons. The archdiocese has 241 Catholic schools and colleges, the most of any English diocese, and the project is positioned as a pilot for national roll-out.
The problem is the definition. None of the published announcements says which definition of antisemitism the resources will use. The Board of Deputies has campaigned for years for the IHRA working definition, demanding its 'full and unconditional adoption'. Seven of the eleven examples that accompany that definition concern the State of Israel. Kenneth Stern, its lead drafter, told the US Congress in 2017 that it is used to suppress lawful political speech, and more than two hundred scholars of antisemitism wrote the Jerusalem Declaration in 2021 as an alternative precisely because of that record.
The stakes are not abstract. In September 2025 the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. On 17 July 2025 an Israeli strike hit Holy Family church in Gaza City, killing Saad Salama, Foumia Ayyad and Najwa Abu Daoud and wounding the parish priest; the Holy See called it a military attack on the church. Under the IHRA definition as applied in practice, a teacher or pupil who states these facts could be labelled antisemitic in a Catholic classroom. Schools are also bound by sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996, which require balanced treatment of political issues.