The strictest school in England

The corridors are silent, the library is stocked with literary classics, and the pupils give thanks for the punishments they receive. Sian Griffiths went to visit the London state school hoping to overturn the liberal orthodoxies of the education system “

At 12.30pm sharp, a throng of 11-yearolds crowds into the lunch hall and starts to chant Kipling’s If: “If you can dream – and not make dreams your master…” Poem completed, they move silently to their tables, each named after a university – Imperial, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge. Pupils serve food, collect plates, wipe the tables and hand out water. Over lunch they will debate a set topic; for example, is Winston Churchill the most inspirational person you have read about in history? The food is always vegetarian and there is a brief time allocated for eating it.

My meat-free sausages are cleared away unfinished by a small, smiling girl, and I just manage to cram my chocolate brownie into my mouth before the pudding plates are also swept away. It will teach me to talk so much. Teachers patrol the tables. Deputy head Barry Smith points at a boy. He rises to his feet and gives thanks (the school calls it an “appreciation”). “I’d like to give an appreciation to my teacher for giving me a detention for failing to annotate my work,” he says smoothly. Everyone applauds, two staccato claps. The boy sits down and another stands up.

The Michaela Community School, in Brent, northwest London, is housed alongside a busy railway line in a run-down part of the capital. It opened a little more than two years ago, in September 2014, but already it is making waves. Some call it the strictest school in Britain: pupils can be given demerits for anything from slouching in their seat to having the wrong kind of haircut, leaving spaces that are too wide between the words in homework, or turning around in a lesson. Earlier this year a media storm ensued after a boy was made to eat a cold lunch on his own because his parents had not paid the termly dinner money. Jewellery and make-up are banned, as are logos on any bags, coats and even shoes. Two demerits result in a detention. For some infringements of the school rules – such as lying or fighting – pupils go straight to the isolation room to work in silence for an entire day. Mobile phones are confiscated and shoes have to be polished.

Lessons are highly academic; older (13 and 14-year-old) pupils are expected to do about 90 minutes of homework a night, and there are no comics or magazines in the library, which instead stocks classics of English literature such as Robinson Crusoe and Great Expectations. There are daily quizzes, and exams twice a year. Pupils walk in single file, and in silence, in the corridors and regularly write thank-you notes to teachers. Expectations are high: Katharine Birbalsingh, the headmistress, says that every child is treated as though they have the potential to get to Oxbridge, even though some enter the school with low attainment and poor behaviour records.

Michaela is named after a former colleague of Birbalsingh’s – “an extraordinary teacher” who died in 2011. The school at present is made up of 11 to 14-year-olds. Each autumn a new batch of children arrives, and by 2020, it will be full, with 840 on the roll. Although the students will not take GCSE exams for another two years, the school is collecting data about whether its methods are working – and claims that its students are, on average, making double the normal progress in both English and maths each year.

Joe Kirby, one of four deputy head teachers, is glad he works at Michaela. In other schools, he says, he saw children who were ignorant of even basic knowledge in many subjects. “One teacher told me her pupils thought the Romans came from Portugal,” he says. By contrast, one Michaela boy could spot the mistake when Boris Johnson suggested on a visit that Emperor Constantine signed the Edict of Milan, which ended the persecution of Christians, in AD312. “I believe it was AD313, sir,” the pupil said politely – and Boris admitted he was right. So is this the strictest school in Britain – and, more importantly, is it working? I put this to Birbalsingh as we sit down after lunch in her big airy office. She smiles. “I think it is likely to be the strictest school, yes,” she says. “I think all schools should be super strict. It is about believing that children do best in an ordered and structured environment.” Unsurprisingly, Birbalsingh has her critics. She was denounced as “the Tory teacher” after she appeared at the 2010 Conservative Party conference to deliver a barnstorming speech condemning the “culture of excuses and low standards” in inner-city schools. Now she is on a mission to subvert the progressive, liberal philosophies that she believes have corroded English schools since the 1960s and 1970s.

Michaela’s motto is “work hard, be kind”. Among the workingclass communities that surround the school, the philosophy is proving popular and Michaela, which selects pupils by means of a lottery, is oversubscribed. Pupils come from a wide range of backgrounds: 40% are Afro-caribbean. More than half live in families so poor that they qualify for the pupil premium grant, while one in five has special educational needs, and nearly half speak English as a second language. One-third start with a reading age below their chronological age. “We are more than just a school,” Birbalsingh tells me. “We are helping to question the prevailing orthodoxies of our British education system.” Later this month, a group of teachers at the school will publish a book setting out their philosophy. Its title, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers, is a deliberate echo of the memoir by the Chinese American Amy Chua, which explains how she brought up her own daughters according to the tough, ambitious parenting practices common in Southeast Asia.

A report by school inspectorate Ofsted in 2014 found that one hour of learning was being lost, on average, each day in schools in England because of bad behaviour – 38 days per pupil per year. Michaela harks back to an earlier age when teachers were respected and feared in equal measure. An astonishing one in three teachers at the school are not qualified; although some of them have Oxbridge degrees, they have not completed the certificate of teaching practice, which is still the standard way of becoming a teacher. Birbalsingh believes this to be an advantage, because it means the teachers have not been corrupted by being trained in what she regards as permissive teaching methods.

For The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers, 20 members of the school’s staff have each written a chapter on different aspects of the Michaela way. One particularly eye-catching one by Joe Kirby explains how 11-year-olds are taught the Michaela ethos in a seven-day “boot camp” before school begins each September. “We love mnemonics! We teach them explicitly how to be polite using Steps, saying ‘sir’ (or ‘miss’), ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’, ‘please’ and smiling,” he writes. They are drilled in the school rules. “We explain in minute detail what we give demerits for and what we give detentions for… We teach pupils how best to respond to a demerit: not by arguing, sulking, protesting or grumbling in the moment, but by staying calm, practising patience, keeping their self-control.” He goes on to explain why the bar is set so high. “Many arrive not knowing how to read, how to multiply and divide single-digit numbers, how to tell the time or how to use a knife and fork,” he writes. “Many struggle to make eye contact or have a conversation with an adult… Blame and excuses are default reactions to reprimands: ‘It’s not my fault!’ ‘He made me do it!’”

Can a stint at Michaela really solve all these issues? And how on earth do they get new pupils to accept the structure and discipline? Karen, 14, and Cathy, 13, the two Michaela pupils who have been charged with giving me a tour of their school, seem to accept punishments for misdemeanours without protest. “Some pupils have been excluded,” one tells me. “You get a spell in isolation if you go on Whatsapp and send messages. Lying about someone doing something means isolation too. Isolation runs from 7.30am to 5.30pm. You study on your own and teachers check on you every hour. I have been in isolation once. The discipline is strict, but it helps us to improve.” The other girl chips in: “I had a detention after my pencil case fell from a windowsill into the playground.” I assume she means she dropped the pencil case into the playground on purpose, but no, it was an accident, she says. What? I splutter. Didn’t she think it was a bit harsh? “I did at first, but then I realised that it was my responsibility to make sure I didn’t put my pencil case somewhere like that. I won’t do that again,” she answers.

Some parents, however, find accepting responsibility more difficult. Birbalsingh’s own chapter in Battle Hymn is about the role she expects parents to play in supporting the school’s approach. They are asked to sign a detailed contract when their child is admitted, promising to uphold the school’s policies, help their children complete their homework and ensure they attend detentions. She demands “100% support”, even when the school’s policies don’t seem to make sense. “I say: ‘You would not tell a doctor how to cut you open, move your organs around and then sew you back up.’ This is when parents normally laugh, which is my cue to say: ‘Ah… you laugh now, but I promise you, the day will come when you won’t like something at the school and you will tell me how 99 of the rules are fine but that you want me to change this one rule. And I will tell you no. It is not your place to tell me how to run the school.’”

This summer the school featured in the national press after a mother received a letter stating that her child would be put into “lunch isolation” and be given only a sandwich and piece of fruit unless payment was made within a week for the term’s school dinners. In the face of the family’s protests, Birbalsingh stood her ground. The boy’s parents withdrew him from the school. Today she is unrepentant. With many of the pupils already receiving free school dinners because they come from poor homes, she argues, the school cannot afford to continue its nutritious and healthy meal service if families that can afford to pay refuse to do so.

The fact that Michaela exists at all is a miracle. Birbalsingh, 43, a single mother with a cloud of black curls, battled for years to open the free school. After her appearance at the Tory party conference six years ago, she was branded “Michael Gove’s pet”. When she returned to the school she then worked at, she faced so much criticism that she resigned within weeks. In 2012 she won Government approval to start up her free school in Lambeth, but it never materialised. Sources suggest that the project was forced out of the borough when it met “massive” local council and teaching union opposition. Even when she finally secured her current site in Brent, the opposition did not cease. “We have had people picket our school,” she tells me. “They gave out fliers saying the children were in danger here. Really awful stuff.”

Born in New Zealand, Birbalsingh spent her childhood in Toronto, Canada, where her father, a Guyanese academic, was a university professor, and her Jamaican-born mother a nurse. The family moved to Britain when her father accepted a post at the University of Warwick. Birbalsingh, then 15, attended a comprehensive “which was so modern we called teachers by their first names”, and won a place at New College, Oxford, to read French and philosophy. She was motivated by her father’s story to create Michaela. “He came from one of the poorest backgrounds, but still managed to make it. When I show my dad the books we are using at Michaela, he says: ‘They are the classics I read as a boy.’ The old-fashioned British education in British Guyana that helped my dad rise out of poverty is being denied to children in schools in this country. Twenty per cent of kids leave school illiterate and innumerate.”

She deliberately located her school in one of the poorest boroughs in the UK. Birbalsingh says that her parents are overwhelmingly working class and from ethnic minorities, and that they understand, as do many immigrant families, the importance of working hard. Middle-class families, by contrast, would balk at the level of discipline at Michaela, she suggests. She is bracing herself for another backlash when Battle Hymn is published, yet remains determined to shake up the lazy culture she believes riddles too many schools in England. Fittingly, on the wall of her office is a framed quotation from Gandhi. “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

The children’s names have been changed. A longer version of this article first appeared in The Times. © The Times/ News Syndication.

“You would not tell a doctor how to cut you open and move your organs around. It is not your place to tell me how to run the school”