Teacher has record of making headlines
KATHARINE Birbalsingh is no stranger to controversy.
The high-profile school leader has attracted a lot of attention over the years for her outspoken views on education and “woke” culture.
She made headlines at the Tory conference in 2010 with a damning speech on England’s schools, saying standards were “so dumbed down that even the teachers know it” and the education system was broken “as it keeps poor children poor”.
Weeks later she left her job as deputy head of St Michael and All Angels CofE Academy in South London and in 2014 she founded Michaela Community free school.
Its Year 7 pupils go to behaviour “boot camp” which teaches them how to walk to lessons quickly in single file, to sit properly on a chair and how to concentrate in class.
Students receive detentions if they talk in the corridor or forget a pencil case or ruler.
The high-achieving school, rated “outstanding” by Ofsted, has been praised by Tory ministers for its
academic success. In 2020 Ms Birbalsingh was made a CBE and the next year was appointed chair of the Government’s Social Mobility Commission. Liz Truss, the then-equalities minister, praised her for “expecting high standards and not indulging the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
Ms Birbalsingh, who says she has“small-c conservative values”, faced criticism for comments to a government committee implying girls do not choose to study A-level physics because they dislike “hard maths”.
She quit as social mobility tsar in January 2023, saying that she had “too much baggage” and was doing “more harm than good”, while some of her “controversial” statements had put the commission in “jeopardy”.
Just four months later Ms Birbalsingh told a National Conservatism conference that parents should be willing to take their children out of schools if they are “too woke”.