‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ is transforming lives by defying the educational blob
With her traditional principles and high expectations, Katharine Birbalsingh is helping to lift kids out of poverty
Do watch Britain’s Strictest Headmistress tonight on ITV – especially if you are a teacher. It will cheer you up. The documentary about Michaela Community School in Brent shows kids who begin life with few advantages leaving school confident, ambitious and qualified.
But it may do more than cheer you up. It may restore some old truths that, deep down, we always recognised, however unfashionable they became among educationalists.
Katharine Birbalsingh, the headmistress in question, did not start out as a traditionalist. At Oxford, she joined the Socialist Workers Party. When she began her teaching career, she went in with all the usual assumptions: schools were underfunded, structural racism was the biggest disadvantage facing non-white kids. But she found that her classroom experiences could not sustain those preconceptions. The real problem, she came to realise, lay in the attitude of the people who oversaw our schools.
Instead of imparting knowledge, teachers were overseeing child-led discussions. Instead of promoting confidence, they were encouraging victimhood. Instead of upholding the canon, they were seeking out obscure texts on grounds of identity politics. Instead of expecting high standards, they were indulging pupils from under-privileged backgrounds, and thus unintentionally condemning them.
Birbalsingh began to dream of a different kind of school – a school with houses and uniforms and discipline and classics. Why, she wondered, should these things be the preserve of the rich? Didn’t children in deprived boroughs need them more?
Not in the view of the Labour councillors who ran those deprived boroughs. The last thing they wanted was a traditionalist school showing up its neighbours. Again and again, Birbalsingh was rebuffed before, in 2014, finally being allowed to take over an old office block by Wembley Park Tube.
In these unpropitious surroundings, she has pulled off what I can only call a secular miracle. Many of Michaela’s children come from estates poisoned by drugs and gangs. Perhaps nine in 10 are from ethnic minorities, with dozens of different home languages. Forty-one per cent of her first intake were officially classed as disadvantaged, meaning they had qualified for free school meals.
Yet in 2019, that cohort, the first to sit GCSEs, secured some of the best grades in the country: 54 per cent got 7, 8 or 9 (the top grades, equivalent to A or A* under the old system) as against a national average of 22 per cent.
What is Michaela’s secret? A set of principles that could be made to work in any school: gratitude must be taught; phones banned; competition encouraged; learning teacher-led; national cohesion promoted; high standards expected; adult authority upheld.
When you read those precepts on the page, they seem obvious. I suspect that even some Leftie teachers feel a distant memory tolling upwards, like the bell of a sea-drowned village – a recollection of their own school days when they knew damn well who the best teachers were. But seeing them in action is properly awe-inspiring.
When I met Katharine for the first time a couple of months ago, she told me bluntly that I was wasting money on my children’s education. Her staff did a better job. I gurgled some very English reply along the lines that I was sure there were good and bad teachers in private as well as in state schools, but she was having none of it. “Come and visit, and you’ll see what I mean.”
I did; and I did. I have never met more impressive teachers. They engaged their students through dozens of techniques that would work in any classroom. For example, when questions are posed in class, instead of responding immediately, pupils are encouraged to pair up and explain their answer to their partners, so that everyone has to formulate it.
As they walk into lunch, the kids belt out verses that they have memorised – Kipling’s If, Henley’s Invictus, passages from Shakespeare. This is the only time they make a noise inside; there is usually no talking in the corridors – which means no misbehaviour and no bullying.
Over lunch, they are given a topic to talk about. Afterwards, they express their appreciation for someone – a teacher for helping them, another student for making them feel welcome, their mother for always having their uniform ready.
Gratitude is a happier emotion than grievance, and perhaps the most striking feature of Michaela is how cheerful its children are. The school’s detractors imagine it as a Dickensian poorhouse; in fact, children like order and respond to being stretched. The listlessness, anxiety and rudeness that I have seen in schools that pride themselves on their liberalism are unimaginable here.
Not everything Michaela does has universal application. Middle-class white kids might not need to be denied grime music: it offers them a frisson of edginess rather than a potential route to crime. They might likewise raise a sardonic eyebrow at the daily singing of the national anthem. But their identity is secure – they are not part of a diverse community, drawn from every continent, seeking a new sense of belonging. In general, though, the principles applied by Michaela are both intuitively obvious and empirically successful. You’d expect them to work and they do. So why are they not more widely practised?
Birbalsingh puts much of the blame on teacher training colleges. She talks of having to deprogram her staff, to rid them of the obsession with oppression and identity politics with which they have been inculcated, to prepare them to be unpopular.
Holding kids to high standards is not easy. A teacher who knows that a student is, say, being given a hard time by his mother’s latest lover might long to let him off his homework, but every time she does so, she is wrecking his life chances.
Tomas Masaryk, the philosopher who became the first president of Czechoslovakia, complained of what he called “half-education” ( halbbildung). Having risen from poverty to become a professor, Masaryk was acutely aware of the danger of receiving just enough learning to feel that you were set above the run of humanity.
The idea that we should give children a pass because they are poor or black or troubled is a textbook example of half-education. Any good psychologist knows that telling youngsters that the world is stacked against them is likely to lead to low self-esteem and mental-health problems. Any serious expert in child development knows that kids need to be given fixed boundaries. Parents also know these things. But, between the experts and the parents, there is a caste of half-educated officials who are determined to defy what they see as popular prejudices.
This caste naturally detests Birbalsingh because she falsifies their theories. Her school proves that kids do not fail because of poverty, but because of indifferent teaching. Her infectious enthusiasm and obvious pride in her pupils defy her critics’ caricature of heartless conservatism. As a London state school teacher of black and Asian heritage, she is seen as a class traitor.
Hence her critics’ determination to pounce on whatever she says. When she recently told a parliamentary committee that it would be wrong to expect every subject to attract 50 per cent boys and 50 per cent girls, and that some girls might be put off by hard maths, teachers lined up to denounce her. In fact, she was saying something that is uncontroversial among neuroscientists and parents, but unconscionable among the halfeducated, who insist, against all the evidence, that boys and girls will turn out identically if treated the same way.
On some level, Birbalsingh’s detractors sense that she is right. They see it in her results, of course. But, frankly, they knew it all along, even if they didn’t verbalise the thought.
One assistant head, watching a preview of tonight’s programme, remarked that, although he was a Leftist, and familiar with all manner of fancy arguments for progressive schools, he became uneasily aware as the documentary progressed that Birbalsingh’s approach to teaching mirrored his own approach to parenting.
There is a moment in the film when a woman, who was on the point of sending her son to school in Africa so as to avoid the local comprehensives, hears that he has won a place at Michaela, and is so overcome with sobs of relief that she cannot speak. Watching that mother, you know in your bones that Birbalsingh is doing more to lift people out of poverty than the whole of the Education Blob put together. That, I think, is what they find hardest to forgive.
Her school proves that kids do not fail because of poverty, but because of indifferent teaching