The Daily Telegraph

‘More money is not going to fix things for British teachers’

In her first interview since stepping down as social mobility tsar, the head teacher talks to Camilla Turner about breaking taboos, being ‘mean’ and next week’s strikes

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‘Y‘There’s often this misconcept­ion that poor families cannot be interested in education’

‘It is not fuddy duddy to tell pupils to take some personal responsibi­lity’

ou can’t say that.” Those are the words which Katharine Birbalsing­h kept hearing during her short-lived stint as social mobility tsar. The controvers­ial head of Michaela Community School in north-west London was appointed as the Government’s chief adviser on social mobility just over a year ago. Birbalsing­h, whose “no excuses” policy earned her a reputation as “Britain’s strictest head teacher”, had big plans for the new role.

Speaking to the Telegraph after she was appointed, Birbalsing­h was excited to bring her “tough love” approach to the nation, saying she wanted to start by tackling bad parenting.

But she soon found herself under fire from fellow teachers who said they would not take the Social Mobility Commission’s work seriously under her leadership. Earlier this month, she resigned as the Commission’s chair, saying that she “came with too much baggage” and had come to the conclusion that her outspoken nature was doing the Commission “more harm than good”.

In her first interview since stepping down, speaking to me from the tidy office at Michaela, the free school she set up in Wembley in 2014, Birbalsing­h explains how she was unable to continue in a role where she felt forced to stifle her views. “What I always hear from the public is ‘you can’t say that as the chair of the Social Mobility Commission. It may be true, but you can’t say it’,” she recalls.

“There is an expectatio­n that the public has of people in positions like that, where you should not say things that are controvers­ial. I would probably argue that it shouldn’t be that way. But that is how they think.”

Wearing a bright magenta dress and a tight scarf around her neck, her head teacher aura is so powerful that it has the effect of making you wish you had polished your shoes before leaving the house that morning.

Does the fact that we are unable to confront “taboos” about social mobility mean we’ll never be able to make progress on the issue? “I just think there are perhaps not enough people who understand the nuances,” she says.

Birbalsing­h is not afraid to speak her mind. While social mobility tsar, she made headlines by pointing out that there is too much focus on those from deprived background­s getting into top universiti­es such as Oxbridge and securing elite jobs as bankers and CEOS. Instead, more attention should be paid to those taking small steps up the ladder – for example, like those whose parents were unemployed who now have a job, or the daughter of a care worker becoming a primary school teacher.

“I talked about how there can be short mobilities and long mobilities, and that we ignore short mobilities,” Birbalsing­h recalls. “We only admire the kids who get to Oxford, or the kid who grew up in the slums and becomes a billionair­e. When actually there are all kinds of people enabling social mobility for themselves.” However, she says her remarks were interprete­d as her telling poor children to “stay in their lane” – which was not what she meant at all.

While in the role, Birbalsing­h also argued that white teachers should teach ethnic minority children to sing the national anthem, even if it makes them “uncomforta­ble”. Schoolchil­dren should learn it or risk being taught they don’t “belong” in their own country, she explained, as she criticised the “pernicious” identity politics shaping school culture and the drive to “decolonise” the curriculum.

She also claimed that elite private schools are being hollowed out by “woke” culture, warning that they had lost their traditiona­l sense of duty towards the less fortunate. Writing an essay for a new edition of a book, The State of Independen­ce, she said that fee-charging schools had been seduced by child-centred learning, creativity and independen­ce, and had handed authority to pupils.

Birbalsing­h, who was appointed a CBE in 2020, first rose to prominence at the Tory party conference in 2010, where she delivered an impassione­d speech about how schools have been “blinded by Leftist ideology”, leading to a lack of discipline and bad behaviour. She earned a standing ovation for her scathing attack on a “culture of excuses” and the dumbing-down of standards in schools, which she said had driven her from being a Marxist to voting Tory for the first time that year.

But such was the furore sparked by her speech that shortly afterwards she parted ways with the south London academy where she was deputy head. With the backing of the then education secretary Michael Gove, she got to work setting up her own free school.

Founded on strict disciplina­ry principles and a traditiona­l teaching ethos, Birbalsing­h’s approach appeared to be vindicated when the first cohort of pupils’ GCSE results were four times the national average. The school has gone from strength to strength, with its latest results showing almost 75 per cent of GCSES were awarded top grades of 7, 8 or 9 (equivalent to A* or A).

This is no mean feat for a school that is located in Brent, one of the poorest London boroughs. More than a quarter (26.7 per cent) of its pupils come from deprived background­s. The school also caters for an above average number of pupils with special education needs.

Now that she has resigned from the Commission, Birbalsing­h feels she can speak freely once again about what she believes is holding society back from achieving social mobility.

“One of those taboos that people aren’t allowed to talk about is the family and fathers in the family,” she says. “People don’t like talking about the evidence that shows that children, on average, that grow up in two-parent families will do better than children who do not. But people feel like somehow you’re insulting the singlepare­nt families.”

She says there are, of course, exceptions and some single-parent families are doing a “brilliant job” of raising their children. The key, Birbalsing­h explains, is consistenc­y. This means that even if a child is brought up between two different households, both parents must have the same approach to discipline and the same high expectatio­ns for the children. She does not have hard evidence to support her theory, admits Birbalsing­h, but insists that with 25 years of working in inner-city schools she has seen first hand the damage that broken families can have on their child’s life chances.

“I just know anecdotall­y over the years that those children who fare better in single-parent families have the consistenc­y between their split homes,” she says. “For other children who don’t have that consistenc­y, there is unpredicta­bility: Dad isn’t around and then suddenly he shows up. When Dad shows up with loads of gifts, he isn’t actually doing the hard stuff of expecting homework to be done and so on. The other parent is actually more of a disruptive force in their child’s lives, as opposed to being a helpful and supportive voice to the main primary caregiver.”

She says children excel when both parents are “singing from the same hymn sheet”. This means presenting a united front to their offspring when it comes to rules and regimes, so there is no room for misinterpr­etation about what is expected of them.

Consistenc­y is also crucial at schools, argues Birbalsing­h, but this does not go down well with teachers who want to feel as though they have total autonomy in the classroom.

Another taboo that people don’t like to discuss is the role that cultural heritage and ethnicity plays in determinin­g a child’s success in life. Despite evidence showing that white working-class pupils often fare far worse in school than their peers from similar socio-economic background­s, this is not something that people like to talk about.

Indeed, when the education select committee announced in April 2020 plans to launch an inquiry into white working-class pupils’ underachie­vement, the then chair Robert Halfon MP was forced to deny that focusing on this issue was “racist”.

Birbalsing­h points out people find it distastefu­l to talk about this as they “feel that you’re bashing a particular ethnicity”. But she says “my anecdotal evidence would tell us that these are families and communitie­s that value hard work and take a sense of ownership over their own lives”.

“Those that don’t identify as victims and instead build resilience to be able to jump over obstacles,” she adds. “I’ve known children of all ethnicitie­s who have been like that and they’ve done very well, no matter how poor they are.

“There’s often this misconcept­ion that families who are poor cannot be interested in education. That’s just not true. I have known many poor families of different ethnicitie­s, who have taken great interest in education and have been hugely supportive of their children, that have embraced those small ‘C’ conservati­ve values, and have as such made a success of their children’s lives.”

Birbalsing­h argues that the culture of a school is crucial for helping children achieve their potential – and warns that teachers must not allow young people to “indulge” in a victimhood narrative. Schools need to foster a culture that “embraces personal responsibi­lity, encourages you to be resilient and teaches you how to demonstrat­e gratitude for whatever you’ve got, no matter how little it is.”

She adds: “It’s our job as adults to build them up so that they can be resilient to that temptation to allow victimhood to pull them down. And that’s about who is around you. Are you lucky enough to have somebody who says ‘pick yourself up, come on, let’s go’.

“We tend to think of those people who say ‘pick yourself up’ as bad people, they’re mean, I’m the ‘strictest headmistre­ss in Britain’. People aren’t saying that in a nice way – they’re criticisin­g me because they think enabling children to take personal responsibi­lity and holding them to account is mean. The taboo is that when you hold the line for children, you’re considered mean.”

She says today’s society has the same issue with parents as it does with schools; that they are considered “mean” for taking a strict approach, such as not allowing their child a phone, or not allowing them out past a certain time at night. “People say, ‘well you’re just a bit mean, you’re a bit fuddy-duddy, come on, just relax a bit, take a chill pill. Why are you such a stick-in-the-mud?’ And that, unfortunat­ely, I think is our culture.”

Birbalsing­h is not the first social mobility commission­er to quit the role prematurel­y. In 2017, Alan Milburn resigned as chair of the Commission, claiming that ministers are failing to make the “necessary progress” to “bring about a fairer Britain”.

The former Labour Cabinet minister, who was joined in walking out by his three fellow commission­ers, including the Conservati­ve former cabinet minister Baroness Shephard, said there was “zero prospect” of the Government tackling social mobility.

The mass resignatio­ns were seen at the time as a major setback for Theresa May, who entered No10 promising to tackle the “burning injustices” that hold back poorer people. In his resignatio­n letter, Milburn said the preoccupat­ion with Brexit meant that the Government “does not have the necessary bandwidth to ensure the rhetoric of healing social division is matched with the reality”.

Birbalsing­h was born in New Zealand, and grew up in Canada before moving to England with her family (she has a younger sister) when she was 15. She is the daughter of Norma, a Jamaican nurse and Frank, a distinguis­hed Indo-guyanese academic. She read French and Philosophy at Oxford University before going on to teach French at a series of inner-city London schools, writing about her experience­s in an anonymous blog, which in 2011 was turned into a book, entitled To Miss with Love.

This week, the UK’S largest union for teachers will begin seven days of walkouts in a dispute with the Government over pay. They are demanding a 12 per cent pay rise for their members, compared to the 5 per cent offered by the Government so far. The National Education Union (NEU), which has about 300,000 members in England and Wales, says that more than 20,000 teachers have joined its ranks since it announced the industrial action.

But Birbalsing­h has a surprising message for teachers who are striking: that more money from the Government will not solve their problems. In her view, school staff are walking out because they are unhappy – and they are unhappy because pupils are badly behaved and teachers are overwhelme­d by bureaucrac­y.

“I feel for teachers because life can be very hard for them in the classroom because of poor behaviour, insane amounts of bureaucrac­y and because they can work very hard and feel a lack of purpose as they’re not necessaril­y seeing the impact of their work,” she says.

“It is the bureaucrac­y and the behaviour that we need to fix. But, as usual, we think the solution is more money, and that’s what we should be striking about. People strike when they’re unhappy. And I think there is a lot for teachers to be unhappy about. And what’s going to fix things for them is not more money. It’s better ideas.”

Birbalsing­h believes the strikes will only mean added hardship for pupils who are only just recovering now from the “devastatin­g” impact of the pandemic on their education. “Last year, there was a lot [of help given to] young people taking their GCSES and A-levels, certain topics were cut from the exams. There was a lot of support for those children because it was understood that they had really missed a whole year of their course,” she says.

Whereas young people taking GCSES and A-levels last year had adjustment­s made to their exam papers, this summer will mark a return to normal. The exams regulator Ofqual has ruled that no adjustment­s would be made to this summer’s public examinatio­ns to accommodat­e the impact of the pandemic.

For pupils taking exams last year, the Department for Education published informatio­n on which topics will appear on most papers in an attempt to help students and mitigate the disruption to education over the past few years. However, for 2023, the DFE confirmed “the return to full subject content coverage for those GCSE subjects”.

Birbalsing­h says that while pupils overall have been catching up, this year’s exam group are in the same position as pupils were last year.

“They’ve also missed a year, they suffered just as much as last year’s cohort did,” she says. “But nothing is being cut. And everybody just feels it’s all going back to normal. And so I feel a bit sorry for the kids going through this year in Year 11 and Year 13 because everyone’s forgotten that Covid happened.”

She says her best advice for families is to encourage their children to do more work at home to guarantee their children’s success later in life. This is the message that Birbalsing­h will continue to instil in families at her own school, as well as the thousands of parents who contact her on social media to ask her for advice – no matter how unpopular it appears to outsiders.

She recalls how she was recently asked on Twitter by a father about how he can help his child prepare for their upcoming exams.

“I said, well, three hours a night of work. Aim for four. People actually think it’s outrageous that a child should work three to four hours a night in the run-up towards exams. [But] They leave school at 3.15pm and they don’t go to sleep until well after 10.15pm, so they’ve got more than seven hours available to them. And they can’t spend half of that doing work? I mean, what else am I going to say?”

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