Birbalsingh’s success is an affront to the cult of identity politics

The headmaster of one of Scotland’s highest achieving independent schools used to say to parents at open evenings: “You have entrusted your children to us so now please trust us to look after them.”

It was both a sort of thank you (the fees are exorbitant) and a polite warning, aimed at stopping outside interference in what were tried and tested educational and social practices.

This school flourishes because it has worked out how to get the best out of its pupils and allows little to deter it from that objective.

Much the same can be said of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, which made headlines this week after it won a High Court challenge over prayer rituals.

The big difference between the two institutions, of course, is that one educates some of the most privileged children in the land and the other caters to a largely disadvantaged demographic in inner city London.

And that is what makes the attacks, going back years, on Michaela – and particularly on “Britain’s strictest head teacher” Katharine Birbalsingh – so unfair and unfounded.

Since she set up her free school in 2014, Birbalsingh has been in the firing line of unreconstructed educationalists and their left-leaning cheerleaders.

In fact, even before then, she found herself on the wrong side of the progressive consensus, losing her job as a deputy head after telling the Conservative party conference in 2010 that state schools were “utterly chaotic”.

Her crusade in the years since has often been a lonely one, though she has a devoted network of supporters, but her mission always clear: to offer equal opportunities to children through an excellent education, no matter what their circumstances.

Despite the disparate intake, Michaela thrives on a similar ethos to that forged by the private sector over many generations, one that places great importance on discipline, individual responsibility, common courtesy, and the greater good of the school. 

It was a threat to these principles that led to the recent court case, which was brought by a Muslim student who had objected to the school’s ban on lunchtime praying in the yard.

Birbalsingh’s defence – upheld by the judge – was that one pupil’s demands should not undermine the rest of the school community which, in Michaela’s case, is built on “robust yet respectful secularism”.

“A school should be free to do what is right for the pupils it serves,” Birbalsingh wrote following her legal victory.

What Michaela believes is right includes embracing “small c” conservative values; a rejection of “identity-politics victimhood; love of country; hard work; kindness; a duty towards others; and self-sacrifice for the betterment of the whole”.

Sticking to such standards rigorously has produced results that rank among the best in the country, and Ofsted has rated Michaela “outstanding” in all categories. 

Its Progress 8 scores – which indicate how much a secondary school has helped pupils improve since primary school – were the top in the country for the second year running last year.

In the sixth form, nearly three-quarters of exams were graded either A* or A last year. And some 82 per cent of its first A-level cohort in 2021 secured a place at a Russell Group university, including Oxbridge, LSE and Imperial.

But the means to achieving Michaela’s impressive attainment have “long put some noses out of joint among the education establishment”, said Birbalsingh.

The events which landed the school in court, and saw staff abused, a bomb hoax and classrooms vandalised, were in a new league but the school has never been far from controversy.

Birbalsingh’s spell as the government’s Social Mobility tsar was short-lived because while she has done so much to promote social mobility in her own school, she acknowledged her notoriety made her too divisive a figurehead and the position untenable.

She upsets the left because she believes ethnic minorities should be able to identify as being British, because she sings God Save the King in assemblies, and because she has ties, shock horror, with Tory politicians – Suella Braverman was a co-founder of Michaela and the first chair of its board of governors.

For these crimes, Birbalsingh has been likened to a character from Dickens’s Hard Times, a parody on cruel Victorian teachers, her traditional values, silent corridors, rote learning and insistence on respect for staff an affront to those who would rather see disadvantaged children fail than be taught well by a brilliant maverick operating outside local authority control.

Naturally, those who dislike her methods are typically not from the free school meals milieu that fills her classrooms. It is not her critics that have the most to gain from her approach.

No wonder she rails against these detractors’ “patronising, paternalist, ‘we know what’s best for you’ progressive thinking”, which questions why ethnic minority families have chosen her school.

But there is a waiting list for Michaela, and even the family who took the school to court have not moved their daughters elsewhere because they want them to be on the receiving end of Michaela’s first-class education.

And who can blame them? What is there not to like about a school that works miracles through learning, raises aspirations and gives children from poor backgrounds access to a better future? 

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