Sir David Bell's antisemitism review: why students doubt reports change anything

A landmark review has detailed the scale of antisemitism in English schools and colleges, and the government is poised to accept its 27 recommendations in full.

The review was conducted by former schools inspector Sir David Bell. It calls for teacher training and resources to tackle antisemitism, strengthened guidance on political impartiality, and giving students the tools to recognise and confront online anti-Jewish hatred and conspiracy theories.

Bell said he was "very struck" by the evidence of rising antisemitism in schools, and by how much of it goes underreported.

The survey conducted for the review puts numbers on that underreporting. One in five students said they had witnessed antisemitism. Among Jewish students, three in five said they had experienced it. But fewer than half of students felt it would be addressed if they reported it.

That last figure is the one that should shape how the recommendations are judged. The gap between the scale of what students say they see and their confidence that speaking up will change anything is not primarily an awareness problem. It is an implementation and trust problem — and it is the harder of the two to fix.

Teacher training, political impartiality guidance and online-hatred literacy are all measures schools can adopt. Whether students believe a report will be acted on depends on what happens after a report is made: whether it is logged, whether anyone follows up, and whether students see consequences. None of that is settled by accepting a recommendation.

The government has signalled it will accept all 27 in full. The open questions are the ones the review cannot answer by itself: on what timeline, how schools will measure whether reporting antisemitism leads to action, and how the strengthened political impartiality guidance will be applied in practice.

The review's central finding is not that antisemitism exists in English schools. It is that the students most likely to encounter it have already concluded that telling anyone is unlikely to help.