The head teacher looked at her across the table and asked: "Are you a teacher?"
Kate was not. She was a parent, fighting for her daughter.
It started with a moment in the kitchen one day. Almost defeated, her primary school-aged daughter mustered the emotional strength to admit, “The teacher thinks I don’t know anything.”
Taking her daughter to one side, Kate assured her, “There's nothing in this world that should make you feel like this. You are so bright. And sometimes we have our own different way of learning things.”
Kate went into school where she made her case calmly, with detail, asking that her daughter stay in the main classroom rather than be pulled out. But the school couldn’t accommodate that. And then the Teaching Assistant was removed from beside her daughter. “I said, ‘Okay. No more TA. I'll do all the teaching,’” remembers Kate. And she did; at home, in the evenings, she rebuilt her daughter's confidence until she believed in herself again.
The issue eventually reached the head teacher. Kate sat across from her and made her case - and mid-conversation, the head teacher stopped asked the question that would stay with her for a long time.
"Are you a teacher?" she asked. "Are you in teaching?"
Something in the way Kate spoke - the way she understood the classroom, advocated for her child, pushed back with knowledge – had made a professional educator stop and ask the question. Yet Kate went home and did nothing, because she had five children and a demanding job and the idea of going back to study belonged to a different life; but the question stayed with her.
“Learning always interested me, but I never got the chance to pursue it when I was younger and by the time I had five children, it didn’t seem possible.” says Kate.
She didn't know that a different kind of degree existed.
Kate started working as a Teaching Assistant in a Jewish school in London, and she loved it. “When I had just started to work in the school, it was so fascinating to me – I felt that this was the one thing that I was sent to do.”
But she also saw the gaps: children struggling in ways that as a TA she couldn't fully address; how much the Jewish dimension of the school mattered to families, and the unmet potential it had to reach beyond curriculum and really improve children’s lives.
“English, maths, you can get that in any school, but Jewish identity, faith, and outlook – I wanted to be the person who could give them that.”
Kate believed that getting a degree would mean full-time study, a restructured life, almost certainly giving up work, and that wasn’t remotely a possibility.
Then someone introduced her to LSJS.
The London School of Jewish Studies offers a BA in Jewish Studies built specifically for people like Kate - people already working in Jewish education who want to go deeper, teach better, understand more, but cannot simply disappear from their lives for three years to do it. Classes are one afternoon a week, assessment is essay-based not exam-based, and the programme is designed around the reality of adult learners carrying full lives outside the classroom.
"I never imagined there was an option like this," Kate says. "I didn't even have time to research whether part-time existed. I had five children."
What she found when she arrived was not just flexibility, but focus. The subjects mapped directly onto the classroom challenges she was already navigating. The reading material was on point and useful. The small classes meant she was never anonymous, never left behind. And the structure meant she could take what she learned on a Tuesday and try it on a Wednesday.
"The degree taught me to experiment," she says. "To think about what I actually want from a lesson. The deeper understanding of lesson planning, the different perspectives on how different children learn - and I got to go into school and apply it all immediately."
Partway through her first year, the class teacher left. Kate was there, and stepped up to the role, ready in ways she hadn't quite realised yet.
Now, Jewish values thread through everything Kate teaches. She reaches each child in a way she couldn't have managed before. Not only Kate’s five children, but classes full of children have Kate as their advocate, their mouthpiece, their access point to education.
The head teacher who once asked if she was a teacher has her answer now.
Kate teaches at a Jewish primary school in London. She is midway through her BA. She goes into LSJS one afternoon a week, essays stacked alongside school runs and packed lunches and the ordinary chaos of a large family.
She is not the person she was when she walked in. And the children in her classroom - the ones whose parents chose a Jewish school for a reason - are getting something she couldn't have given them before.
If any of this sounds familiar, LSJS would like to hear from you.
Contact lsjsadmin@lsjs.ac.uk | Visit lsjs.ac.uk/ba | Call 020 8203 6427
