The Times Magazine 21e are looking at the playground
from the windows in Katharine
Birbalsingh’s office and she is
explaining how it used to be
a car park, but there was no
other outdoor space for an
inner-city school like Michaela
in Wembley.
The gale of playground
screams has come to an abrupt
halt and kids form silent lines waiting to go
in. They are in dark blue blazers, ties knotted
high, a breeze rippling hems and headscarves.
They carry books in transparent pouches
bearing their names in Sharpie. The man who
is their head of year is shouting a pep talk
that will last two minutes exactly – because
everything here is timed to the second- and includes words like resilience and
perseverance. More than once his talk is
drowned by the sound of the Jubilee Line.
Birbalsingh tells me that she is worried about
the rats that run down the embankment
inches from her pupils’ black school shoes.
For those unaware, Katharine Birbalsingh
is Britain’s Strictest Head Teacher. She’s the
one who insists on silent corridors, timetabled
loo breaks, who operates a “no excuses”
behaviour policy. She’s at war with phones,
with Fortnite, with social media of every
description. Her pupils, some of the most
disadvantaged in Britain, sing God Save the
Queen and Jerusalem. They recite Rudyard
Kipling’s If and William Ernest Henley’s
Invictus and the periodic table. Almost every
Birbalsingh interview delivers a one-liner that
will send her critics into convulsions. Today,
she doesn’t disappoint: giving a child a
detention, she tells me, “is an act of love”.
Detractors have seized on the fierce
discipline, the “oppressive” silent corridors.
Birbalsingh explains the thinking: “It’s
efficient. It means children move [classes]
in a minute and a half; no disruption. You’re
not following up on fights in the corridors or
kids turning up late.”
Teachers oversee pupils going in and
out of the loo and, “There are set times so
that children never come out of lessons [to go
to the toilet].” This prevents meeting in the
loos to chat (common). “If you have a mum at
home who talks to you about the politics of
the day and so on, it doesn’t matter if you miss
a bit. But if you depend entirely on school to
succeed because you’re from a disadvantaged
background, you can’t afford to be coming out
of lessons to go to the loo.”
But she must be doing something right. The
last time full comparisons were made, exam
results at Michaela Community School were
some of the best in the country. In GCSEs,
50 per of papers were awarded grade 7 or
above. Last year, 82 per cent of A-level students
secured places at Russell Group universities,
including two at Cambridge. In October, Liz
Truss – minister for equalities, alongside her
role as foreign secretary – picked Birbalsingh
to chair the Social Mobility Commission. Boris
Johnson has praised Birbalsingh as “powerful
and visionary” and she acknowledges that the
prime minister is a fan.
When I ask what she thinks of lockdown
parties at No 10, wallpaper chaos and the
general dishevelment of the prime minister,
she frowns. “So, whatever it is they’re doing
in No 10, I’m really...” She trails off, as if she’s
literally lost for words. The PM is not a role
model for her students, she says. “I’m not
going around saying, ‘Be like him.’ I talk about
a variety of different people in assembly. I put
up [their photographs] and say, ‘These are the
people to be like.’ I’ve never said, ‘Be like Boris
Johnson,’ and I’m not saying it now.”
To recap: Birbalsingh was the state school
teacher who addressed the Conservative Party
conference back in 2010. The daughter of an
Indo-Guyanese academic and a Jamaican
nurse, she told the Birmingham audience that
the education system was broken because “it
keeps poor children poor”. She railed against
falling standards and leftist policies and said,
“Black children underachieve because of what
the well-meaning liberal does to them.” Well,
you can bury a rant like that in an anonymous
blog, as she had for three years, but deliver it
in a live broadcast and a shitshow will ensue.
Birbalsingh lost her job. When she tried to
open a free school in Brixton shortly after,it was mobbed with placards saying “Tory
teacher”. She was called a traitor, a Nazi;
she even received death threats.
It took three years to open Michaela
and consequently Birbalsingh sees herself as
revolutionary. She runs her Twitter feed like
a Gatling gun trained on liberals who dare to
rush at her with their opinions. Controversy,
of course, breeds publicity: she and her school
are the subject of a forthcoming documentary,
The Unspeakable Truth about Children (from
the makers of Come Dine with Me), and she
has published three books on education. In
The Power of Culture (2020), I read an essay
by her PA describing Birbalsingh as “scary”
and describing how she was advised to
maintain eye contact and shake hands firmly
on meeting her. She writes that Birbalsingh “is
sometimes referred to as the Dragon Lady”.
So it is not without trepidation that I arrive
at Michaela, passing the Union Jack at the
door, wiping my feet on a mat that says
“Knowledge is power”. The reception desk
is behind a glass partition – not because of
Covid, I later learn, but because of parents
who throw themselves over the counter and
wrestle staff to the floor.
I find Birbalsingh in her office, which is
where she’s been since 7am and “where I am
most of the time”, she points out. “Not walking
the corridors with whips and chains and
making children’s lives miserable like some
kind of weirdo.” She is tall, slim, with spiralling
Medusa hair and a trace of a Canadian accent
(she spent much of her childhood in Toronto).
She tells me what the government gets
wrong on social mobility. School is key, the
one surefire way of children “being able to
change their stars”. But the role of family
has been ignored for too long. She wants
politicians to stop being pussies when it
comes to telling parents what to do. “No
politician ever talks about it. They don’t
dare. They feel that it would cost them
votes.” She wants aggressive messaging, like
five-a-day for healthy eating, which made
widespread what until then had been the
preserve of the middle classes.
“I’d love to see billboards that are anti
giving phones to toddlers,” she says. “I’d love
to see adverts online so that it just becomes
normal. Because how are you meant to know
that you should talk to your toddler all the
time? How are you meant to know that you’re
meant to read to them? The reason you
know,” she says, “is that everyone around you
does it. And that’s the importance of culture.”
She’s been trying to impress the importance
of culture on the Social Mobility Commission,
but finds it frustrating because culture is
an amorphous notion and the commission
people will only deal in hard evidence. “What’s
the evidence? What’s the data?” they ask her.
“There is no data,” she tells them. “It’sW
‘I HAVE SPENT A LIFETIME
TELLING MIDDLE-CLASS
PARENTS THAT WHAT THEY
DO HURTS MY KIDS’
With Boris Johnson in a history lesson, 2015LNP