Birbalsingh has won a victory for authority over segregation
Twenty-five years ago, a small group of us, including the former home secretary Suella Braverman, gathered in a room in south London with Katharine Birbalsingh, where she laid out her vision for a radically different secondary school. At the core of the idea was the importance of high standards for children from poor backgrounds in London, and we were early supporters. That’s how Michaela Community School was born.
It was designed to be secular, but with all the positive values of great religious schools. None of us could have imagined that, years later, Michaela would be taken to court because it didn’t allow a student to dictate their own religious practice within its walls. But that is exactly what happened, and it has taken months of legal wrangling to have the claim thrown out.
The judgment should deliver a warning to activist groups that schools will not be hounded into adjusting their policies on religious grounds. It should be a lesson, too, for all those who have criticised Birbalsingh from outside the courtroom. Several weeks ago, The Guardian published an article saying that the headteacher was “a symptom of a state that seeks to promote a version of Britishness that is monolithic and absolute”, with the headline stating emphatically that “this ban on Muslims praying in school is a dystopian, sinister vision of Britishness”. It must now, as usual, eat humble pie.
The fact is that schools are not some workers’ co-operative where the “student voice” dominates everything. In fact, school is rightly more akin to a prison when it comes to individual rights. There aren’t many institutions where occupants have to ask permission to go to the toilets, or to leave the gates.
Great schools, like great football teams, are driven by focused, alpha leaders. They are not democratic institutions where everyone’s voice counts, but nurturing pipelines based on hierarchy, with the headteacher at the top. And this is where the genius of Birbalsingh lies.
Her school may not be religious, but it does have spiritual and moral values. Students are taught about leadership, compassion and respect for others, the discipline of agency, and self-affirmation. These are all rooted in the religious underbelly of being British. What Michaela has done is give these values secular clothing. Children are confident in the school setting because, through its hierarchy, they get a sense of their own divine being.
There is also a panreligious ethos in seeking knowledge as a virtue. Students are made to understand that pure knowledge is perhaps more important than materialism, because it has its own intrinsic value. Again, this is rooted in religion, yet it does not discriminate on the basis of one faith or another.
Michaela’s success has been built on this common institutional culture, and it would have been undermined had it given in to religious fundamentalism and segregation. Indeed, other schools should now learn from Birbalsingh’s successful navigation of the secular and religious.
As for those Lefties who frown upon the school, we should ask why many of them do not practice what they preach, sending their own children to Church of England schools.