As you enter the head-mistress’s office in the Michaela Community School opposite Wembley Park station the first thing you see is a life-size cut-out of Russell Crowe as Maximus in Gladiator. As I smile, Katharine Birbalsingh — famously called the strictest teacher in the country but having met her, also quite possibly the best — recites the famous pre-battle speech: “Hold the line, stay with me, what we do in life echoes in eternity.”
It’s something she’s always saying to the staff.
“I hold the line all the time, because if you don’t, gradually things unravel.” So passionate is she that she helped organise a rally last Sunday, to protest about what she considers to be the “stupid” Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Hundreds of teachers, parents and children marched from Whitehall to Parliament Square, angry about the Government’s proposals to limit the number of branded school uniform items and introduce stronger restrictions on home education. She has also written a letter to the Lords explaining why the Government’s decision to alter their education strategy is wrong-headed. Because Birbalsingh doesn’t mince her words.
“The Government are trying to make small changes that will forever affect our children’s education for the worse forever. They want to alter the rules concerning the school uniform, only allowing three items to be branded, which means that girls can still sexualise their clothes, and boys can still push their trousers down and heighten their masculinity. When the national football teams walk onto the pitch together, they are all in uniform, and that’s what schools should be like. But Bridget Phillipson doesn’t understand that.”
“The working classes love me, and it doesn’t matter what colour they are”
But then, according to Birbalsingh, the Education Secretary doesn’t understand much. “She also wants us to agree to a change in the curriculum even though they haven’t announced what the changes are going to be. The two things that concern me the most are decolonisation and the lowering of standards, and I’ve heard they want to ban Shakespeare. Which is unacceptable as far as I’m concerned. They’re also trying to bring in mandatory certification for teachers, which will make it more difficult to attract people from the private sector. The people in the Cabinet have never run anything and don’t know anything about building something from the ground up.
“I would have preferred Wes Streeting as education secretary as he asks questions. He doesn’t think he knows how hospitals work because he once went to the doctor. She says she doesn’t need any lectures about education because she’s lived it. Just because you’ve been to school doesn’t mean you know how to run one. When I met her, she was patronising, you know, ‘Tell me about the lovely things going on in your school’, as though she was patting me on the head. She has never visited our school as apparently she only goes to schools which are failing. But she gave a very good impression of someone who knows more than I do about teaching. She didn’t and doesn’t ask questions. The only thing she asked me was why I thought she was a Marxist. I said, because of everything you’re doing. She believes in imposing quality from the central state. She is a cultural Marxist. She is trying to impose equality.”
Two years ago, Birbalsingh came under attack for banning Muslim prayers in her school, saying they were divisive and disruptive. Last year, the High Court agreed with her, shoving her into the media limelight while also drawing attention to her school’s amazing success. Birbalsingh is something of a miracle worker, getting solid academic results from children from often very disadvantaged backgrounds. Students leave, on average, with better grades than most private schools, even though a quarter qualify for free school meals. She has a strict policy of secularism, which she regards as “the glue that binds her multi-faith school together”.
She is tall, catwalk-thin and talks in perfect paragraphs, espousing her vision with the calmness and efficiency of someone who has had to deal with immature people all her life. Not children, but the civil servants, politicians and authoritarians who have continually stood in her way.
The school itself is unlike any I’ve seen before. It is fabulously quiet, like a library, or a private hospital. The pupils all say hello, and urgently walk from one classroom to the next. They are smart, all wear the same uniform, and look completely engaged. Phones are banned. You’re allowed to bring them to school, but if you turn them on, they will be confiscated immediately. Consequently, no one ever turns them on. In class, they work in pairs, supporting one another as the teacher barks another question. Each time they are asked to respond, each and every pupil puts their hand up, volunteering an answer, and keen to keep up. The school’s results are more than impressive, and you can see why. The discipline here is infectious and benign. I had imagined some kind of draconian atmosphere but it’s anything but. Honestly, why Birbalsingh isn’t Education Secretary is beyond me, but then she doesn’t have much time for politicians, and certainly not the current administration. You can see why.
One of the things she is extremely vocal about is banning smartphones for under-16s, “and I don’t just mean schools, I mean in general. Because there is such a strict environment here, you will never see a phone here. We strongly encourage families not to give them smartphones at all. There is no unsupervised access to the internet, and we don’t use iPads. All those private schools that guarantee you can have an iPad in lessons, they are destroying your children.”
Doing what the parents don’t
What does she do when it’s the parents who are an issue, and who aren’t teaching their children how to use a knife and fork, or wipe their bottoms properly?
“We teach them ourselves. We teach the kids how to hold the cutlery. It’s one of the first lessons we teach them. Wherever the child is, we meet the child at that position. The key thing is to have an environment which the children love, and that the children buy into, that the children feel proud of.”
And what are her strategies for trans children? “We haven’t had any trans children in the school, but I think it’s unlikely as we have a very heavy ethnic minority intake from the inner city, and that plays a huge part. Half of them are Muslim. I think they’d be less inclined … I think if one actually did a survey on this sort of thing nationally, I think you would find that white privileged kids would be more likely to be doing that.
“No question. Our society is such that victimhood is admired. And if you feel that you’re white and privileged, then you don’t have much of a victimhood narrative to embrace. So then you need to find something to embrace to be respected by your peers.
“If we had a trans child I would want to support that child properly and also make sure they weren’t just participating in a fad. I think our school discourages children from doing anything performative as we are very much about what’s true. Our values encourage the kids to seek the truth. Performance is very much looked down upon. We seek out people who jump over obstacles. Of course there are obstacles — racism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, all that exists clearly. But how you react to that obstacle is up to you. We reject victimhood and embrace agency and personal responsibility.”
KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH BY NUMBERS
2014 - The year Birbalsingh established the Michaela Community School
95.7% - pupils at Michaela Community School who received a 5 or more in English and Maths GCSE last year
29.5% -proportion of children who qualify for free school meals at Birbalsingh’s school
2020 - The year Birbalsingh received her CBE
At Michaela, there is “no form of separation or segregation”. For instance, meat used to be served at lunchtime, but Muslims avoided the pork, Hindus avoided the beef, and then pupils started to segregate. So, meat was taken off the menu entirely, ensuring everyone now eats together as one. Similarly, when one Muslim student started praying in the playground at lunchtime, then was eventually joined by others, in Birbalsingh’s words, this became a “serious challenge to school culture”.
The governors voted 11 to one to ban all prayer — and one student took legal action, claiming its approach to prayer is discriminatory.
Lunch itself is an extraordinary experience, as they have a topic of conversation they have to discuss, they serve each other food, they
wipe up after each other, they look after each other. You’ll never see anything like it anywhere other than here.
The daughter of an Indo-Guyanese academic and a Jamaican nurse, Birbalsingh was born in New Zealand and raised in Canada until she was 15, when she moved to England. She developed an interest in education when reading French and philosophy at Oxford, and after teaching at state schools in south London, in 2014 established the Michaela Community School, a free school opposite Wembley Stadium.
She is an incredibly positive person. She doesn’t advocate discussing the likes of Andrew Tate or the TV drama Adolescence as she thinks it’s unnecessary. “I wouldn’t do an assembly on Tate because it would draw attention to him. The same with Adolescence. Keir Starmer said we should show this to the kids, but the kids already know! They’re in this world. It’s only him who didn’t.
“Instead, we should be teaching kindness, gratitude, decency, belonging to something bigger than yourself, a sense of reputation, honour, strength — these are words which have literally disappeared from our language.”
What does she think about Labour putting VAT on private schools? “I guess it will mean more kids from the private sector coming into the state sector, which means we will have to accommodate them. But I think our building actually puts off middle-class parents, so we’re fine. They would want their children to have more freedom than they’d get here. The working classes love me, and it doesn’t matter what colour they are. In the worlds of the middle class, it’s much more mixed.”
Birbalsingh has been verbally attacked by Left-wing journalists at The Guardian, and jeered by Labour MPs, many of whom think she is some kind of zealot or ideologue. She is neither, although it’s clear the myopic Education Secretary is obviously not a fan. Possibly because she knows that Birbalsingh would do her job a lot better than she’s doing it at the moment.
