You need money to buy stuff 
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There is a show on C4 at the moment called the Secret teacher
Britain is broken. Teachers deserting in droves. Talk of 40/50 students per class. Broken britain
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Is this a revelation mate?
You need to get out more.
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SATURDAY INTERVIEW
Katharine Birbalsingh: No pupil would fight in class here. It’s absurd, inconceivable
A notoriously strict free school is about much more than its fantastic GCSE results this week, its controversial head teacher tells Damian Whitworth
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The Times, August 23 2019, 5:00pm
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After death threats, protests and criticism of her tough methods of discipline, Katharine Birbalsingh, the head teacher of a free school dubbed the country’s strictest, saw her first cohort of pupils pick up their GCSE results this week.
For those wondering if her approach could deliver academic success, here were the answers, a lot of them starting with the number 9. More than half (54 per cent) of all exams taken by Michaela School pupils were graded 9-7 (the equivalent of an A or above.) Nationally, 20.8 per cent of grades were in that bracket. Almost one in four Michaela children obtained a 9 (the equivalent of a very high A*) in maths. Across England, 3.7 per cent of pupils got a 9 in maths.
The school sits in the shadow of Wembley Stadium and has an above-average number of pupils classified as “disadvantaged”. Ms Birbalsingh posted a video showing a girl opening her results envelope to find she had a clean sweep of nine 9 grades. “I’m actually shaking,” she says while her friends scream with excitement.
Their head teacher is less excitable. “The GCSE results didn’t make me go, ‘Oh my goodness, look: we’ve got a fantastic school.’ I already knew we had a fantastic school,” she says.
“I’m really excited that the kids have got the results they got but the most important thing we do here is develop them into young adults. I already knew that we transformed these kids because I can see what they’re like when they arrive and how they change. The school is so much more than its results.”
But after all she has been through does she feel vindicated? “That’s not my ambition. I don’t think that there’s anyone who dislikes Michaela who today is going to say, ‘Oh, look at their results. I’ve now changed my mind.’”
I first met Ms Birbalsingh nine years ago when she was unemployed after a storm blew up over a speech she gave at the Conservative Party conference. She was a vice-principal at an academy who blogged anonymously about teaching in inner London. When she broke cover to deliver an onslaught on the chaos she saw in state schools, she brought the Tory faithful to their feet, and then parted company with her employer.
She turned the blog into a book that was serialised on Radio 4 and began working to set up a free school. Michaela, named after a friend and colleague who died of cancer, faced some fierce opposition. Having people shout “Tory teacher” at her in the street was the least of it. “I had all sorts of threats of all types of violence. I would leave school and I’d be looking over my back. I was genuinely worried for my life,” she says.
After the school opened in 2014 early parents’ evenings were infiltrated and obscenities shouted at her. “We had to hire bouncers because we were so frightened of the possible violence. I used to think, ‘We’re not building nuclear arms. We’re just trying to open a school.’”
Today the attempts at intimidation are online. “All sorts of things are invented about me — about my background, about my mental state, about how I’m being cruel to children. I think it’s because I’m black and because black people like me are not allowed to side with the right. The fact that I think for myself and I don’t agree with them is not allowed and they hate me for it.”
The school was championed by Michael Gove when he was education secretary and began to attract interest from around the world, with visitors roaming the corridors every day.
Michaela Community School sits in the shadow of Wembley StadiumGUILHEM BAKER FOR THE TIMES
Visitors report that those term-time corridors are very quiet. Students are expected to walk between lessons in silence, in single file. During lessons their eyes must be on their book, the board or the teacher and at the command “slant!” all must sit up straight, arms folded, looking at the teacher. Detentions are handed out for mild transgressions.
Ms Birbalsingh claims that most state education is child-centred when it should be teacher-centred, with “the adult the authority in the classroom”. Many state schools would agree that teachers have this authority, but Ms Birbalsingh has a tendency to claim that her school is unique. At one stage she makes the grand assertion that “we are changing teaching in this country and across the western world” and only later acknowledges: “Obviously there are other schools doing this sort of thing.”
Her focus, outlined in her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way , is focused on packing children with knowledge. She says that modern methods lean towards asking children questions about things they don’t know yet. She says it is a caricature of the school that there is endless rote learning, although children are certainly expected to learn poetry off by heart.
The school achieved its excellent results in maths because of consistency in teaching, she says. Teachers are retrained in her methods when they arrive and textbooks are eschewed in favour of materials the school produces itself.
On the way to meet her in the swish new sixth-form centre, it is impossible to miss the big inspirational posters in the playground: “I am the CAPTAIN of my soul”; “Do your DUTY.”
The school was rated outstanding in all areas by Ofsted in 2017 and Ms Birbalsingh was ranked one of the ten most influential figures in education by T.E.S (the Times Educational Supplement ). When I first interviewed her Ms Birbalsingh talked about seeing children turn up to exams without a pen. “Do you think any of our children turned up without a pen?” she says now. “Of course not.”
Teachers who visit the school ask her what to do when there is a fight in the classroom. “Nobody would get into a fight in the middle of the classroom here. It’s absurd, in the same way stripping off your clothes in the middle of the classroom would be absurd. Inconceivable.”
The school hit the headlines when she made children whose parents had not paid the school lunch bill eat their meal in isolation. Does that not humiliate kids for something the parents did not do? “What else are you going to do? There’s no other solution. The parents then just pay it. It’s not humiliating,” she insists.
Ms Birbalsingh’s school hit the headlines when she made children whose parents had not paid the school lunch bill eat their meal in isolationGUILHEM BAKER FOR THE TIMES
She’s braced for fresh attacks. “The critics will say, ‘They’re just an exam factory.’ It’s exactly the opposite. They have got great exam results, but they also have got great character. There’s a respect for authority. There is respect for ambition. Nowadays, children can feel pressure to be bad boys; to be as ‘street’ as possible and talk about joining a gang. You don’t want to admit that it would be quite nice to be a lawyer or a doctor. We have an environment here where the children can celebrate real success. I’m proud of that ethos.”
Of the discipline she says: “Our critics think that we’re like prison guards. You can’t run a successful school like that.” The school works because “the majority of kids buy-in. Their brains are filled with knowledge and that boosts their self-esteem. They want to be here.”
Next month the new sixth-form will open with about 60 students who will be aiming for Oxbridge and Russell Group universities. Ms Birbalsingh, the daughter of a Jamaican nurse and a Guyanese academic, came to England from Canada as a teenager and read French and philosophy at the University of Oxford. “You can imagine when I went to Cambridge and to Oxford and met the admissions tutors, they were saying: ‘Send us your kids.’” The recent criticism of Oxford and Cambridge for their failure to offer places to black students is misplaced, she says. “It’s the schools’ fault. It is not that Oxbridge are racist or classist. They need kids at a certain level.”
She accuses teachers of failing black students by not disciplining them. “You just don’t send that black boy to detention because you don’t want Ofsted or the senior team to think you’re racist. And that means you let your standards drop for that boy. Or worse still, you think, ‘He’s a black boy. So I need to make sure that I make his school experience relevant to him. So it would be better for him to learn about Stormzy in music lessons as opposed to Mozart. Or in his English lessons, he’s going to prefer Benjamin Zephaniah to Shakespeare.’
“Even me saying that is [regarded as] really controversial. I have all the respect in the world for Stormzy and I’m really pleased he’s so successful and I’m glad that they all listen to his music. But he’s not Mozart. I do think ethnic-minority kids are prevented from accessing much of the best of what’s been thought and said because people wrongly believe that they should be taught what’s relevant to them and what they think will be more engaging.”
Knife crime is a constant source of anxiety for staff and students and “a couple” of pupils have been excluded for carrying knives. “We are in the inner city. Children will carry knives. One of our year 11s took his exam, went outside the gates, a bunch of kids from another school stormed him and stabbed him with a compass. We’ve had boys on bikes, masked, turn up carrying knives, waiting for our boys. This is hardcore. They get robbed on the way home.” If a student is caught with a mobile phone in school it will be confiscated until the next holiday. She gives digital detox talks to parents and advocates that children do not have smartphones until they are 16. The school offers parents the chance to buy discounted old-fashioned “brick” phones for their kids that don’t have internet access.
“One boy could easily have been permanently excluded in another environment. His whole life would be a total disaster. His mother listened to me and at the beginning of year 10 she took away all his devices, X-box, smartphone, everything. He said he could feel that his brain could breathe again and came out with a string of 8s and 9s.”
The school is housed in a former office block and is “an awful building in comparison to most schools”. There are no on-site sports facilities and while music and art are taught there is no drama. Ms Birbalsingh is dismissive of the quality of state drama teachers. There is no Latin on the curriculum because she says she would be unable to find staff to teach lessons. The free school movement has lost its momentum since Mr Gove moved on, she believes. But permission has been given to start a second Michaela school in Stevenage and she plans a chain of schools.
Ms Birbalsingh expects that she is embarked on a “fight” to see “small c conservative values the norm in our schools”. She envisages this lasting decades, “like all good fights: the Berlin Wall coming down, women getting the vote, ending slavery.”
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Have you a link for that mate?
Thats the job. Shes basically running a prison. Hard to blame her after seeing that show last nt
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Probably behind the paywall though
Gradgrind’s Academy. Sounds like a horrible place with no sports or drama activities…
Are the kids that go there looking to be high achievers and get away from the time stealing riff-raff? If so the success is somewhat self-baked. Applying it across the board is going to fail miserably when you start hitting a bunch of kids that have no interest in doing anything academically. But they never will and claim this is the future of education when in reality it’s a niche market for a niche set of kids (parents) who actually want to play the education game to its fullest.
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You need to bear in mind that in the UK, state schooling is absolutely locality based. There are no kids from outside the area unless it’s not full, which never happens. This is a rough enough area, hence rough enough kids. Expelling is very very difficult, so you’re stuck with what you have. It’s a remarkable achievement.
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Chalkhill Farm?
Like this comment on the BBC website
“If we have a second referendum (I hope we don’t) and the outcome is still leave, can we have a “no deal” Brexit then?
And, can we offer Ireland to be united and part of UK for say, 15 years, then the Irish can decide to be Indy, EU or UK? “
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Belle and Sebastian, The Wedding Present, the Jesus and Mary Chain and anybody on the C86 tape