The High Court of Justice ordered the Education Ministry on Monday to launch a speedy investigation into the division of funds between secular and religious educational institutions, after hearing a petition alleging that secular schools were being financially discriminated against in favor of religious ones.

Israel’s public education system includes four categories of state schools: secular, religious, ultra-Orthodox, and Arab sector. The petition, filed by several educational and social organizations and lawmakers Gilad Kariv (The Democrats) and Vladimir Beliak (Yesh Atid), alleged that the Education Ministry has allocated a significantly higher budget to religious state schools in comparison to secular and Arab state schools.

The Education Ministry, for its part, acknowledged the funding gap in its preliminary response to the High Court last week, according to the Haaretz daily, and said that the matter required examining “in light of the needs and characteristics” of all state-funded institutions.

According to Haaretz, the state claimed that the funding gaps were partially due to the need for religious schools to employ teachers for both religious and secular studies.

Religious state schools receive around 28 percent more money annually than secular schools, and around 37% more than Arab schools, the report noted.

The state said, however, that its investigation would take some time, and asked the High Court to grant it until the end of December 2026 to conduct the review and then implement its findings for the start........

© The Times of Israel