24 The Times Magazineis such a thing”. This acknowledgment of the
problem but brutal refusal to be held back by it
is the core of her philosophy. Later she tells me
that she didn’t learn about the triangular slave
trade until she was at university and she was
shocked by her parents’ decision to shield her
from that, especially given that her mother was
from the Caribbean. “My parents took to an
extreme the position that I would take now:
don’t tell kids they’re oppressed all the time.”
The alarm goes for second lunch – space
is so tight, there are four sittings. I join the
year 8s. Our lunch topic is things we missed
out on in the past two years. We have ten
minutes to devour cheesy pasta and a brownie
and cover the topic. Two kids say they missed
going to their “home” countries, which are
Nigeria and Algeria. They are smart on world
geography and politics, even if they have no
idea, when they ask me where I am from,
how far Camden is from Wembley.
We sneak in a few exchanges about school
and I admit I went to a girls’ convent boarding
school aged seven. There is a signal and
everyone stops talking instantly and the whole
room puts their hands up. A boy is picked to
share an “appreciation”. “I am appreciative of
the fact that Miss Charlotte has come all the
way from Camden, and for the fact that she
shared with us that her school was stricter
than ours [he pauses for comic effect]... a
fact which surprised me.”
To understand Birbalsingh’s views on
education, perhaps you have to venture into
her world as a teenage girl trying to do well
in high school in Eighties Toronto. School was
where kids messed around and had fights in
the corridors. School was where Birbalsingh
was the only black girl in the top stream and
no one thought that was odd. “I was one of the
quiet kids that I suppose I feel sorry for now.
“Not here,” she says, because that doesn’t
happen at Michaela. “Elsewhere. You’re
wanting to get your question answered. But
the teacher doesn’t have control of the class,
so you’re not heard. You get bullied. Bullied
because [you] annoy [them] or because you
don’t have any friends.”
Her only after-school detention was
disrupted by boys charging in and leaving a
can of dog food for the female teacher. She
can’t remember the syllabus or particular texts.
What she can remember is a specific teacher:
Mr Dutcher. “I loved him. Why? Because Mr
Dutcher was superstrict. He had these ‘love
dots’ for when we were naughty – if you got
three, you got a detention. He said, ‘I call
them a love dot because I love you. And I’m
strict, because I love you.’ He was great.”Home was also superstrict. Her father,
Frank, set the rules for Katharine and her
sister, Christine, two years younger, and was
ready to enforce them with a wooden ruler,
something she laughs about now because
that’s just how Caribbean parents were.
“I must quickly add that I do not believe
in corporal punishment.”
Her mum, Norma, made Caribbean food
before going on the night shift at the local
hospital. Frank read them stories and set
limits on TV time. To ensure the TV stayed
off in his absence, Frank removed the cable
whenever he left the house, but Katharine
worked out how to use a different lead and
for a while the girls enjoyed an excess of TV
in secret. Then one day Frank touched the top
of the set and found it warm. And that was it.
He packed up the TV and gave it away.
It’s funny that these days she is begging
families to watch TV together, she says. “If
only they would watch Coronation Street. At
least there’s a narrative arc, as opposed to
TikTok videos, where it’s 20 seconds of a bald
man’s head being tapped.”
Frank was a first-generation immigrant,
she says, who believed in hard work. It was at
the University of West Indies in Kingston that
he first met Norma, from whose parents he
rented a room. Like many of their generation,
Frank and Norma headed to the UK in the
early Sixties before settling in Canada. She
says both adopted the British reserve of their
colonised countries and, though loving, were
not demonstrative.
Did she miss them when she was left to
finish her A-levels? “No.” But her father rang
her every night. She says the hardest thing
about England was the racism. “But I had
friends, boyfriends.” And she had school.
She says it was the sort of “Guardian leftie”
institution where pupils called teachers by
their first names. She excelled and won a place
at New College, Oxford, to read French and
philosophy. It was as an undergraduate visiting
inner-city schools on a scheme to encourage
children to apply to Oxford that she decided
that she wanted to teach “challenging” kids.
One of her recent controversies was a tweet
she wrote saying all children were born with
“original sin” and needed to be “habituated into
choosing good over evil” (for which she has
apologised). It was an attempt, she says, “to
make a simple point: that we are all flawed. I
didn’t know everybody was going to go crazy.”
It’s an odd word to choose, though: sin. She
says it is precisely because she is not religious
that she didn’t anticipate the impact. Growing
up she always thought church was “a bit silly”,although both her parents are Christians and
her mother is born-again. “She talks about
Jesus a lot,” and worries “that we’ll burn in
eternal Hell”.
Her bemusement over the sin episode is
not dissimilar to her bemusement over how
that 2010 conference speech could have
sparked such outrage. While charging full-
steam ahead she has the occasional blind spot,
which she describes as “naivety”. It may also
be – how can I put this? – an inability to
read certain cues. Her superfocus and lateral
thinking may contribute to her verbal
grenades. Take this morning: a male teacher
dropped by her office perplexed about “a joke”
she’d made in assembly about people having
breakdowns. “I wasn’t talking about a serious
breakdown,” she clarifies to me. “But he said,
‘Just don’t give them that vocabulary.’ ” Her
takeaway from this exchange is that teachers
feel comfortable giving her candid feedback.
Those who know her say she is tough but
kind. So her response to dyslexic children
struggling with reading might be, “I would
argue that they just haven’t been taught to
read properly and they haven’t gone back to
basics.” But she will also ensure that child is
taken back over those basics to slowly but
surely build them back up.
I ask about dyspraxia, ADD or ADHD:
does she make allowances for those pupils?
No, she says, she does not believe in making
allowances. “Some pupils find it difficult to do
maths. That doesn’t mean that you say, ‘OK,
you can have special treatment.’ ” She says of
herself that she has developed systems to deal
with her scattiness. She lifts up a pad of lists
to show me. “Had I grown up in the day of
ADHD, people would’ve said I had that. I am
a bit out there.”
She’s also “often late” and can’t drive or
cook. “But I can survive,” she says. The one
subject she doesn’t want me to write about
is her immediate family or her relationship,
because she doesn’t want the lives of those
close to her ruined by her “poor decisions”.
What I can say is that she was married,
briefly, in her twenties and wrote a raunchy
book called Singleholic under a pseudonym
(Katherine Bing). It’s about “a mixed-race girl
looking for a guy”, she says. “She dates a white
guy, she dates a black guy, she dates different
kinds of guys. It was all about dating in the
multicultural space in London.” When I flick
through I find lines like, “It’s bigger than
anything I’ve ever felt before. It’s HUGE.”
“It was a bit risqué,” she admits, and no,
she would not like the kids to get hold of it.
“Because I’m the headmistress. I’m in charge.
I’m not human to them. We’ve created this
aura around me.” So much so that when she is
crossing the street anywhere in London, “I’m
thinking, do not cross at a red light, just in
case one of the kids sees you.” n‘I DON’T THINK IT’S HELPFUL FOR BLACK OR BROWN
KIDS TO BE TOLD THEY’RE OPPRESSED ALL THE TIME’
HAIR AND MAKE-UP: CELINE NONON AT TERRI MANDUCA USING LANCÔME AND SISLEY HAIRCARE