She has been called the "strictest teacher in Britain" and Michaela, Britain's strictest school, but as she told Lynn Freeman, the school's military ethos works, especially for the disadvantaged inner-city pupils who go there. Birbalsingh shot to fame in at the ruling Conservative Party's annual conference where she declared Britain's state education system "broken because it keeps poor children poor. But any amount of hatred is worth tolerating in order to have our extraordinary school Michaela with our dedicated staff and delightful children.
Michaela is in Wembley Park, North West London, with what Birbalsingh calls "the kinds of inner city issues that you might find in Hollywood films. I think the reason they say that is because we really get human nature.
If you take a couple of toddlers and give them one toy, they will fight with each other in order to play with that toy. They need to be taught how to share. They need to be taught how to be kind, how to be grateful. And that is a big difference between our school and some other schools.
We actively teach this stuff. They have hundreds of schools across America, and have done an extraordinary job with lots of Black children in the inner city. We actually copied their motto. In some schools, if somebody drops a plate in the dining hall, all the children will start howling and screaming and banging on the tables, whereas with us, five or six other children will run to help them pick up the plate of food and sort themselves out.
People call us the strictest school in Britain. We have a very high standard of behavior; very high expectations, not just of the children, but also of ourselves. We are relatively old-fashioned. We stand at the front of the class and the desks are in rows. The children look at the teacher and the teacher leads the learning. Sixty, seventy years ago, that is what happened in all schools. But since then much has changed in education.
And we have seen a change from desks-in-rows, teacher-led learning to what is called child-centered learning, where the desks are in groups and the children are looking at each other. So two big areas of difference between Michaela and more normal schools is the kind of behavior we expect — discipline, kindness, and gratitude — and the way in which we teach.
Ian: You mentioned that people say Michaela is the strictest school in the country, and I think you do hold the line very tightly. How do you find the children respond to this? Katharine: They love it. They absolutely love it. I tell you, children want adults to hold the line. They want us to set the standards because they want to succeed.
And they know that if we help them, that they will do better in life. And they learn over time how to change those habits, and how to develop themselves into a way of being that means that they just are someone who turns up on time, who sits up straight, who always brings a pencil and pen to class, who always does their homework to the best of their ability. One school that certainly fits that description is Michaela Community School in Wembley.
We maintain a real belief in personal responsibility, duty and community. We see knowledge as being central in terms of our lessons, and hold extremely high standards of behaviour and expectations of our children. We believe very much that a child has agency; that they can decide whether to do the right or wrong thing. But once reminded, they manage to do it all again quite easily. Given the upset and mass absences that schools worldwide have had to contend with in , I have to ask — how have the students and teachers at MCS found the experience of returning to school after lockdown?
If anything, we were ideally placed for this situation. The child who comes to us from a chaotic home is able to find order here at the school. This commitment to instruction, order and consistency naturally extends to the classroom, where a traditional approach of explicit, knowledge-based teaching in front of the class holds firm.
As well as receiving frequent albeit pre-COVID visits by educators from around the country and abroad, the school has published two books, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers in and The Power of Culture earlier this year. This too seems like an extension of the importance the school places on imparting knowledge over student-led enquiry and exploration. What teacher wants to be horrible to a child?
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