Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School

Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School is a Jewish secondary school for girls, located in the Stamford Hill area of the London Borough of Hackney in England.The school was founded in 1942 as an independent school with separate sections for boys and girls, and with junior and senior departments. The girls' senior department became a voluntary aided school in September 2005. At this time the school moved into new accommodation. Several figures attended the formal opening of the new school building, including Tony Blair, Lord Levy, Gerald Ronson, and Richard Desmond. In 2007 the school was top of the Department for Education's school's "value added" scoring system for pupil progress. In October 2014 the school was downgraded from "Outstanding" to "Good" in its ratings by the Ofsted inspectorate following a no-notice inspection.The school primarily serves the Charedi Jewish community of Stamford Hill. The Charedi community do not have access to television, the internet or other media, and members of the community aim to lead modest lives governed by the codes of Torah observance. In 2008 it emerged that nine pupils had refused to sit a Key Stage 3 Shakespeare test on The Merchant of Venice because they felt the character of Shylock was antisemitic.