Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to ‘Britain’s Strictest Headmistress’, Katharine Birbalsingh. 22/02/2023
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about the people behind the positions in our very divided public conversations. Every episode, I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or platform. And rather than starting with issues on which we might disagree, I invite them to reflect on their own values, their vision of the good life, the principles that have led them to the conclusions that they have reached. I speak to people from all points on the political compass and a huge range of religious, non–religious positions. We’ve had people on from both sides of almost all of our most controversial topics. And we’re doing it because we think it’s important to build empathy across these tribes. We live in divided times, as the cliché now goes, and I am convinced after five years of doing this, that it helps. It helps to try and listen with curiosity, in a non–adversarial setting, to people who might be from different tribes from us, to people who might disagree with us on some very, very deep, things. I think it’s the only way this practice as citizens, as people, is the only way we’re going to hold together. And so if you’re new to the podcast, you can look back over our previous episodes, and you will find in that list people that you feel instinctively really warm to and think, “Oh, I’d love to hear what they think”. And people who you feel instinctively repelled by, really don’t want to listen to, because in our curated algorithm–driven media age, we are constantly fed content from people like us, or occasionally content from people not like us framed in a way designed to make us angry. So I would encourage you to listen to both types, people like you and people not like you, and just see what happens.
Before I introduce today’s guest, I have some very exciting news. For the first time since before the pandemic, we are hosting a Sacred live event. We haven’t done this since 2019, when we had Richard and Lydia Ayoade on in the Curzon Cinema in Central London. Many of you came and we had such a great, great time. I’m really looking forward to being in the same geographical space as many of you, curious, and thoughtful, and engaged, and very diverse listeners to The Sacred. And for this event, we are going to have an interview with Oliver Burkeman. Oliver is perhaps most famous for his long–running column in The Guardian, which was called “This Column Will Change Your Life”. And he is known for being this very human, very thoughtful, very sane voice on the kind of self–help universe and what actually does help us live wiser, more connected, more loving, more productive lives. His most recent book is – he’s written many, many books – but his most recent book is called “Four Thousand Weeks”, and it’s about how we use time really well and I would highly recommend it. So I’ll be interviewing him, and we will have opportunities for you to engage with other listeners, to have deeper conversations, to reflect on your values. We will have drinks available. I hope it will just be a really lovely, meaningful, but also fun night out. It’ll be in central London and that’s going to be on the 19th of April. Bookings will open quite soon, so do follow us on our social media channels because it’s quite a small venue – we want it to feel intimate and cosy, like people can really get to know each other. So don’t hesitate. If you want to come make sure you book quickly. And I would say it’s a great event to bring a friend to, someone who you want to invite into a deeper kind of conversation, who you’d love to be talking about values. with talking about what our beliefs are. Do bring them along to that, try and maybe book two tickets. 19th of April – look out for more details.
So this episode is with Katharine Birbalsingh. Katharine is a lifelong educator. She is a head teacher of Michaela Community School in West London. She is also known – and this is the title of the ITV documentary that was made about that school – as Britain’s strictest Headmistress. And she is certainly outspoken in her beliefs about what our kind of educational approach should be. We spoke about the philosophy of Michaela School, about the frameworks that they’ve put in place to bring it to a stage where it has Ofsted ‘outstanding’ rating, and what drives that. And I was really interested to hear, kind of, of a parenting philosophy from her dad, and then the journey she’s taken from being a kind of student Marxist and a lefty teacher to now, what she describes as a ‘small c’ conservative. We discussed her motivation around children who are from high–earning backgrounds and what she’s learned about engaging across divides. I really hope you enjoy listening. And there are some reflections from me at the end, as usual.
What is sacred to you? Katharine Birbalsingh’s answer
Katharine, I am appalling at small talk, so I’m going to give you no warm–up whatsoever, but invite you to join me in a little bit of a dive in the deep–end into depth. And I like to ask people what is sacred to them? And it doesn’t have to be in any particular religious frame. For most people it’s not, in fact. It’s a way of trying to get to the deep principles or the values that are precious to you, that you have tried to live by, that have informed your life. And it is one of those questions that I think we don’t often know. It sits with us and bubbles up over time. So almost everyone’s answer is a kind of grasping towards a sense of something. But having had very little time to ponder on what might be sacred to you, some sacred values that you’ve tried to live by, what bubbles up for you?
Katharine Birbalsingh
‘Truth’ is my first thought. I mean, when you say that about what’s sacred, I want to say ‘children’, really. Because, you know, children are the future. Many of us as adults don’t really understand that point, even though we sort of say it – or at least Whitney Houston said it – and truth about children and our roles that we should be playing, you know, our duty towards children, as adults, as their teachers, as their parents, as just adults in the community. And that truth matters. And I don’t think people understand that we have a role to play. I think sometimes children can be entertaining for us. We like them because they’re fun and they make us laugh, and they see things in different ways, and they’re cute and they make us feel needed and worthwhile… But actually, it shouldn’t be about how we feel. It should be about our job, our role in how we develop them and how we prepare them for the future. And how we prepare the future of our country, of our families, of our schools, of our communities. And that requires adults who get the job, who understand what they’re meant to be doing. And that’s when ‘truth’ comes into it. Because the fact is, it’s just not true, this idea – I mean, I’ve said it before and got into lots of trouble about it – it’s just not true that all children are good. You know, in fact, I’d say that all children need to be taught to be good. And that if you just let a child go, they’ll be naughty. And that doesn’t mean that they’re bad people. It just means that if you leave them to it, they’ll eat loads of chocolate, and they’ll go on social media and watch TV, and they’ll never do anything with their lives. Now, of course, those are older children, but even with younger children. You know, a toddler will hit other children to take the toy that he wants. He won’t say thank you, or please, and that sort of thing. Of course he won’t until you’ve taught him how. I got into big trouble for tweeting once about original sin. And I mean, I wasn’t even… I just said, “Yeah, original sin”. You know, it was just a two–second thing that I tweeted out and the whole world went mad. And the thing is, I’m not even a Christian. But I’m just saying, “Look, isn’t this obvious?” Isn’t it obvious that we’d all rather eat chocolate that broccoli? We’d all rather… Last night I thought, “I need to do my body pump”. And I should have done my body pump, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat down and I had some chocolate digestives. You can see the chocolate digestives here that I’ve got on my table here. You know, like, obviously! And that’s because my nature got the better of me, you know? And that doesn’t mean I’m a terrible person. It just means that I know I’m having to work against that nature all the time. And when we believe that children are just ‘naturally good’, it’s not true! It’s not true and it doesn’t help them. And it’s only by teaching them right from wrong and by teaching them a moral framework that they can then develop a moral core. So that, when they are my age and have to decide between doing their body pump or sitting down and eating some chocolate digestives, they will make the better choice. And that is how you determine the future of your country, the future of the people in your country: the values that you teach your children. So, I mean, in terms of what else is sacred, you know, teaching children personal responsibility, teaching them that they have a sense of duty towards others. That as you grow up, you have a duty as a brother or as a sister, as a son or a daughter. You have a duty towards your mother to behave in a particular way, to do what she asks you to do. You have a duty towards your teachers to do as they asked you to do. You have a duty to yourself to fulfil your talents. But you also have a duty to your parents and to the people in your lives, like your teachers and so on who have helped you, to do the best that you can. Because if you don’t do the best that you can, then you’re taking them for granted. And you’re taking what they’ve done for you for granted. So, there are lots of ‘small c’ conservative values is what I call them, that we teach our children here: having high expectations of yourself, seeking purpose in life. You know, we don’t teach our children to get great GCSEs so they can go out and be billionaires. I have no interest in them becoming billionaires, I want them to be able to fulfil their talents and to find purpose. And the only way in which you find purpose is identifying the sorts of things that you want to develop in yourself and that you find, you know, interesting. Something that you feel you could do for with your life. Some way of contributing to the world, so that you are engaging with the world and with your life. You’re not just like a paper bag being blown in the wind one way or the other way. You actually believe in something. So, um, those are the kinds of things that all of that is all about. It is to do with children, you know, and what we should be teaching them, and how we should be looking after them, and to point out to your audience that you’re not doing children any favours by indulging them in victimhood, by indulging them in complaining or feeling entitled. You want to be able to teach them gratitude for whatever little they have, so that they can live a life of meaning. That is what’s important to hear. And I think too often, people think that grades at school or getting your GCSEs, or whatever it is that teachers may be asking you to do is about getting a job. It’s not about getting a job. It’s about having purpose and real meaning in your life.
Elizabeth
Thank you. There’s so much I’d like to come back to there. Not least, it’s making me think about Rousseau and a kind of ‘tabula rasa’, this sort of very romantic idea of a child, and how contrasting that is with what you’ve said and how dominant it is.
Caribbean childhood and duty to family
But first, I want to talk about you as a child. I want to get an understanding of what your childhood was like. Can you paint me a little bit of a picture, particularly around any big ideas that were formative – political, philosophical, religious, anything – that helps shape the woman you are today, but just tell us a little bit of that story of Katharine as a child?
Katharine Birbalsingh
Yeah, well, I grew up in a Caribbean household. I mean, I grew up mainly in Toronto. My mother’s Jamaican, my father’s Indian–Guyanese. And so we grew up with Caribbean food, and Caribbean friends and family and all that kind of thing. And my father – I mean, my mother too – but he set the tone in terms of politics. So he’s very much very left wing. You know, the Conservatives were always evil. Everybody understood that. And I think they wonder what’s to happen to their daughter, because there’s no way I would be voting for Labour these days. Although, you know, I’m a floating vote, so if they were to change their values, and actually, if they were to change their values back to what the Left used to have as their values… Because the point is, people might think, “How come you grew up in this lefty household, and then you think the way that you do now?” That’s because my parents had very ‘small c’ conservative values. And that’s because, in the day, people on the Left had ‘small c’ conservative values. But those ‘small c’ conservative values have almost disappeared from the Left. So, it’s only people of my parents’ age, who are now in their 80s, who are still very much on the Left, but still traditional in their way of thinking. So we were always, you know, we always had to eat everything on our plates, because there were people who were starving in Africa or whatever it was. We had to eat everything. We had to be grateful for what little we had. My sister might have been wearing my hand–me–down clothes, but we were grateful for the fact that I had clothes in the first place. Everything was just… we were always scrimping and saving. And part of the reason why we were scrimping and saving was my father was always bringing his family over from Guyana. So, poor family, who – you know, brothers and sisters of his and so on. He was the one of the brothers and sisters who had kind of got out as it were. So he was the bright one, and he had got a scholarship to the local private school. And then he had gone off to university. And he was the major success. And the kind of understanding when that happens – because they’re all scrimping and saving at the time to buy his uniform, and they’re sacrificing in order to help him. So the idea is that when he gets wherever he gets to, he’s going to help them in return. So our whole lives, we were always filled in the house with various family who were being brought over. This is in Canada, they were being brought over from Guyana. And we were trying to find them jobs in McDonald’s or as a dental hygienist or whatever. You were just trying to get them various jobs, and various qualifications so that they can better themselves and get a better life. And so I would always watch them come and they would see snow for the first time, and it was always amazing. So there was a real sense in me of helping other people, helping family, sacrificing – because we sacrificed financially massively in order to help. You know, because my father would have to go out and rent an apartment, for instance, and he’d have to, you know, do all the stuff that we used to do. So yeah, that was me growing up. I mean, I went to normal state schools in Toronto, and then I came to a state school here. We moved here when I was 15. But I say we moved here: my parents were here for a year, and then went back to Canada. I then stayed on, and then I ended up just staying and staying. And the idea was I’d stay an extra year, and then another year, and then I just never left. So I’m still here.
Elizabeth
That’s quite young to be fully independent. Were you boarding or something? How did you make it work?
Katharine Birbalsingh
No. So when I was 15, of course, it was a year here with my parents. Then I turned 16. And I was halfway through my A levels at the time, and Canada has a different system so I wouldn’t have been able to go back and do my A levels. So the idea was, “Let me just stay here and finish the A levels”. And then, I used to babysit for this family, and they had a room they could rent out, and so I just rented that room and stayed with them for that year.
Elizabeth
How was it?
Katharine Birbalsingh
Oh, I’ve always been very independent. So, you know, when I was 10 – and this is a nice story in terms of, it tells you what my character is like. I mean, I was quite naughty child. My sister was always very quiet and well behaved. I was not. And, there were photographs of when I was little, when I was about four with baby powder all over me and all over the floor because I’ve gone and found the baby powder, and I’ve put it everywhere. And when I was 10, you see, my father – who was very strict, you know, he was a ‘small c’ conservative – and he found that we were watching too much television. And he used to take the wires out of the TV at the back. I mean, obviously, this is the 1980s, so it was a big fat TV with all these wires. And then I was quite clever and figured out how to, I don’t know, make it to get different wires or whatever. And when he’d go out, my sister and I would watch and then he’d come back in. Yeah, exactly. He’d come back in, and then we would quickly turn it off, and then sit there with a book. And then he’d go and feel the back of the TV, and it was warm, and so he knew. So, he called our cousin James and said, “James, you’re gonna get a TV for, you know, an early Christmas present.” And he took the TV away. But my father was a good man. And he took the TV to James’s house. We didn’t have a TV. Now, I used to deliver newspapers. At that time, just once a week, but then eventually I graduated to every day. And I had my own money, because I’d obviously earned from this paper round that I had. And I thought, “Right, well, I’m gonna go off and get my own TV.” So I went to the newspapers, the classified ads. Remember, I’m 10 years old, so I have no idea what I’m doing. I look in the newspaper, and I’m looking for the cheapest possible TV because I can’t afford any of these TVs.
Elizabeth
It’s paper round money!
Katharine Birbalsingh
Exactly. But I did have enough for $60 and there was a TV advertised $60. And I thought, “Well, I have enough for that. I can get this.” So rang up the guy. He said yes, but he was in Brampton. Brampton is an hour, or maybe an hour and a half or something outside of Toronto. And I thought, “Right, well, I need to find a way to get to Brampton.” So off I went to the Go Bus Station. In fact, this is the only time in my life I’ve ever taken a Go Bus in Canada. And, um, I got on this go bus. So it’s like getting on a bus to Oxford or something from London.
Elizabeth
10 year old!
Katharine Birbalsingh
I know, it was mad. And then, off I went to Brampton. I was quite lucky because I got off at the first stop in Brampton. And then, I remember going into this pizza joint and asking them for this address, and they said, “Oh, it’s just around there.” So it was actually next door, which was great. So I walked over, and knocked. And when the guy opened the door – obviously by this time, my father is in a panic because he can’t find me. And he’s found the newspaper classified ads, and he’s found me writing down numbers and all the rest of it. So he’s rung up the guy, found that his daughter is on the way. The guy says, “Look, you need to stay here until your dad get here.” So my dad arrives. And this is where the genius of my father… I’ll tell you, he never said a word, because I was terrified. I was thinking, “Oh, my goodness, I’m gonna be in so much trouble.” He doesn’t say anything. He allows me to pay my $60. He puts me in the car. He puts the TV in the car. Now you gotta understand: this TV is about, I don’t know, it’s no more than 10 centimetres by 10, maybe 20 centimetres. I mean, it’s tiny. And it’s this little black and white TV with this old fashioned aerial, I mean. And he lets me go home with it. And then of course, I plug it in and I’m trying to get it to work. And I get a couple of channels, which are all a little bit fuzzy, because there’s no cable or anything. You know, you can see some TV on it, but it really isn’t that great. And he doesn’t say a word. And then, well, three or four weeks later, I got bored of it and I stopped watching. So I always say that I won the battle, but my father won the war.
Katharine’s parents’ faith and belief in the person of Jesus
Elizabeth
Yes, that makes complete sense. Now, that kind of perseverance is helping me understand how you just went and opened a free school by yourself. But before we get off your childhood, I wanted to ask you about your mom. You’ve said that you aren’t Christian. I gather that she was, is that right?
Katharine Birbalsingh
Yes, she still is. Well, my parents, we didn’t go to church. So we went to church till I was about 12 or so. And then I, typical kind of teenager, said “This is ridiculous.” And so I stopped going. They both still go to church. My father has always been a lot more conservative in his – and I don’t mean that politically, I just mean theologically. So, he’s always been to kind of a Presbyterian Church. We went to a Baptist Church for many years. And then we went to a Presbyterian Church. My father now, for instance, goes to a Presbyterian Church. My mother’s brothers sadly died. One of a heart attack, one of cancer in the early 90s. And her father died a very similar time. When that all happened, she became a born–again Christian. So she has always gone to more evangelical churches. Because my mother is one of those people who will stand on the street corner and hand out leaflets and talks about Jesus and so on. I mean, they’re both quite old now. So if they do go to church, it’s much more rare. But, you know, for many years, she would have her evangelical church that she went to.
Elizabeth
That makes sense. I heard one of your friends, just saying that you inherited a little bit of the ‘come to Jesus’ energy of your mom? In that sense of like being a very zealous person and wanting to share things. Do you mind me asking, do you remember having a faith in your childhood, and a point of losing it? Or was it always something that was just sort of you did with them, but didn’t feel like it was connected with you personally?
Katharine Birbalsingh
Yeah, there’s no question I believed in God, and so on when I was little, and Jesus and everything that I was told. It was just that when I got older, I started thinking, “I’m not sure this makes sense rationally. How can God be Jesus and Jesus be his Son? And how can it be that Jesus died and then he rose from the dead? That doesn’t make any sense!” You know, that sort of stuff was what I was asking. And if you would ask me now, I mean, I’m definitely not a Christian, but I do… You know, I always like to say, I believe very much in Jesus. So when I say I believe in him, I believe in his life, I believe in the values he taught, I believe in the person who he was. If you want to try and imitate somebody, well, imitating Jesus is pretty good option. So, you know, I really like him. And I just sort of then say, “I don’t necessarily believe in God.” Now, look. What’s interesting is that friends of mine who are religious and people who visit the school, for instance, will say, “But this is the most religious school we’ve seen, and it’s more religious than religious schools?” A friend of mine says that we do the ‘human nature bit’ really right. We just don’t do the ‘grace bit’. He’s Catholic. And he will say that in many Catholic schools, while they do the ‘grace bit’ right, they don’t do the ‘human nature bit’ right. And so, what does he mean by that? We understand what human nature is, so we address it properly. And that means children are able to grow up properly here.
Elizabeth
That makes sense. Often, when I write about sin, I try and write ‘sin–and–forgiveness’ with hyphens, so that we hold those concepts together. And the fact that I just think it’s a very generative thought that in society, sometimes, we’re embodying too much forgiveness, and sometimes we’re embodying too much sin. And, for me as a Christian, the truth requires that both be held together. Anyway, that’s a rabbit hole.
From Marxism to coming out as ‘small c’ conservative
You have painted a really helpful picture of your childhood. You went to you went to Oxford, and there’s this story that goes around about you that you joined the Socialist Society. I gather, you also joined the Conservative Society, right? What was going on with you?
Katharine Birbalsingh
You’ve heard a friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine, she said to me, “Are you joining?” I might have written to her and said I was going to join but I never joined the Conservative Party. I mean, whatever…
Elizabeth
So you really were a sort of socialist, or attempting to engage with it?
Katharine Birbalsingh
I was. I was totally engaged with it. So I used to go along to some of their meetings. I don’t know what it was. It might have been Marxist Meetings. I don’t know exactly what the name was. But definitely, there was a guy who used to sell ‘Living Marxism’ on the street, and I would meet up with him all the time, because he happened to be near where I live. And I would talk to him. And we’d get into various arguments about things. So you know, I was always open to these ideas. And remember, I was a lefty. So I was just talking to the more extreme Left, that’s all. And I wouldn’t have ‘not’ spoken to Conservatives. I suppose I would have spoken to them. But I wasn’t… The thing about Oxford, is that the people who are Conservative – and maybe this is the case in the world, generally – they’re sort of like Boris Johnson. And when I say Boris Johnson, I’m not even being critical of him. I just mean, more like David Cameron. You know, they go to these clubs where they have to drink gin out of a shoe. And it’s these boys clubs. Now, maybe they don’t exist anymore, but in the day when I was there, they wouldn’t…
Elizabeth
I think they do, sadly.
Katharine Birbalsingh
Right. Well, they were these boys–only clubs and they’re drinking gin out of a shoe, and they’re just really obnoxious. And they are… they’re all full of themselves. And they’ve been to Eton and Harrow, and so on. And they’re all like, “Run, guys! Run!” And so, you just would never mix with… I mean, for someone like me, I’ve never… I mean, I stay educated. I would have nothing in common with any of these people. And they’re very much involved in the Oxford Union. And they all want to be future politicians. That’s the other thing. So they all get involved with the Union. We call them ‘union hacks’. And they’re like wandering around college, putting up posters, “Vote for me! Vote for me!”, and they’re trying to get your vote. And it’s all just so distasteful as far as I’m concerned. I was never gonna have anything to do… You know, people always say to me, “Oh, you’re gonna be a politician!” Like, you don’t understand. I hate that sort of thing, you know?
Elizabeth
Yeah. So you were kind of involved in Socialist ideas and avoiding the Conservatives. At what point did it dawn on you, or at what point did you start feeling that you might actually be the conservative person that you would now describe yourself as, right?
Katharine Birbalsingh
So that’s a really good question. Because of course, I grew up in a lefty household, I didn’t sort of realise that there were conservative values in there. ‘Small c’ conservative values – not ‘big C’. Because you don’t really think about that kind of thing. You’re just growing up, and then you go off and get a job. And I became a teacher because I was a lefty, and I wanted to change the world. You know, it tended to be the case – certainly in the day then – if you were more of a right winger, you were gonna go off and become a banker. You hung out with people in Oxford Union. You might have rode. There were just certain activities that you did that kind of… Yeah. And then there were the other types that just rejected all of that. And I was one of the ones that rejected it. And so I became a teacher. I was very much a lefty teacher. I believed all the stuff around “the reason why black kids are underachieving is because of white racist teachers, because the system is racist.” All this kind of stuff. And then, I just started watching and looking and learning. And I’d see these white teachers working really, really hard for their kids. And I’d think, “I don’t think they’re being racist. I think some of the kids have been rude to them, and they’re trying to deal with it.” And I think some of the behaviour is really poor that I’m seeing, and not necessarily just from black kids, just from all kids. And I just started questioning all of the truths – so called ‘truth’ – that I had been told. I would go along to these events that were set up by Diane Abbott at the time, called “Raising Black Achievement” and it would be a Saturday conference. And various people would talk about raising Black achievement. I remember taking along a friend of mine, well, a colleague of mine – white guy who had been a PE teacher for 30 years or whatever. Then I suppose it was 20 years, a long time. He was in his 50s. And there he was giving up his Saturday to go along and hear about raising black achievement, because I asked him to go. And he would sit there being told by all of these presenters that white teachers are racist, and that the reason why some of his black boys were failing was because of him. And I was so embarrassed. I was just mortified. Because I was thinking, “This guy, his kids, and countless kids from… You know, we worked in a boys school. It was in the inner city in South London, we were doing extraordinary things for the kids. And he in particular, because he was an excellent teacher. I mean, he was fantastic. And the kids loved him. I mean, loved him. And sometimes, I remember once we were in the car driving through Brixton, and the riots started happening. There were some riots that were happening, and there were a couple of his old kids who he once taught were there, and he had them jump in the car, because you want to get them away from this dangerous situation. Like, this is the kind of guy he was. And I was so embarrassed to have taken him there. And I just thought, “This is all so wrong.” We’re accusing all these white teachers, and it’s just not true. I mean, truth, remember what I said. You know, it’s not true. And so I started to change my mind about what works in education. And I started to realise that all the progressive nonsense that we’ve been told about Rousseau – as you mentioned earlier, all this ‘goodness inside’, they already think you just need to draw it out of the child, instead of putting it into the child – is just wrong. If you don’t tell the child, “this is a triangle, and this is a square”, they’re not going to know the difference. You cannot take it out of them, you got to put it in. And frankly, if you believe that you need to put it in all the time, because that is oppressive way of thinking, if you haven’t put it there, then somebody else has. And that means that little Amy at home, who has middle–class parents who talk about the politics of the day around the dinner table, and take you to the Maldives, and to various places on holiday, she’s learning all that stuff. But little Johnny, who comes from a working–class home, who doesn’t go on holidays like that, and doesn’t read books at home, and so on, he doesn’t know this stuff. And that means the only person that’s going to help Johnny overcome his circumstances, is his teacher. And if his teacher thinks that she’s to draw the knowledge out of the children, then what’s going to happen is Amy’s going to answer all the questions, the teacher is going to be convinced that she’s drawing the knowledge out of her because Amy is giving her the answers, and the teacher doesn’t think “Well, actually, it’s because her parents taught her this, because I didn’t actually teach her.” Johnny thinks he’s dumb. Johnny gets kicked out of the class all the time, Johnny falls further and further behind. And that’s the end of Johnny. And then we stamp him with something saying he’s ‘special needs’, etc. That is what happens to these children. And so, I started noticing this, I changed my teaching methods. And I started to change my mind about my politics. I started listening a little bit more to what the Labour Party had to say about education and what the Conservatives had to say about education. And I began to realise that I was agreeing more with what the Conservatives were saying than what Labour was saying. I was also writing a blog called To Miss With Love. After To Serve With Love, you know, the book and then the Sidney Poitier film. And in the day, there was no Twitter. There was hardly any social media, there was just blogging. And people would go on the blogs and comment in the comment section, and that’s how they had conversations. And I would realise that I kept on agreeing with all the conservative people on there, and I wasn’t agreeing with the Labour–supporting people. And they kept telling me I was a conservative, and I kept saying, “No, I’m not. No, I’m not. I’m a good person! I’m just like you!” Because I was convinced that if you were a right winger, you were a bad person. And then slowly, over years, I came to realise that I just didn’t think like any of these lefties on there. That they would come on and make all these excuses for the kids, they would say, “It’s because they’re poor. Poor people can’t behave, so that’s why the kids are misbehaving. You’re expecting too much of them. I’m being too harsh.” The conservatives would come on and hold my values. And then I thought, “Well, I suppose I’m a conservative.” So then in 2010, I gave that speech that got me into a whole load of trouble. That was like my coming out speech, really. I admitted to the world that I had voted Conservative. You know, some weeks later, I met up with a friend of mine, who – she’d obviously heard my speech – and she leaned in across the table, and she said, “Katharine, I have something to tell you. I voted Conservative too.” And that was a thing. I thought, “Oh my goodness, we’re all like living in shame here.” This is crazy. So…
Speech at the Party Conference and losing her job in public school
Elizabeth
Yeah, how was that experience building up to it? Were you nervous? Because it was so seismic in your life, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute. But did you… Were you scared about getting up there and saying what you said or did you just feel very fired up?
Katharine Birbalsingh
Oh, no, I was scared. But I have to say I didn’t think I was going to lose my whole career. I mean, I didn’t realise that. I was a bit naïve, I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I mean, I did know that what I was doing was naughty, and I knew I shouldn’t be saying this sort of thing out loud. I did know that. But I didn’t think that I would be ‘cancelled’, because ‘cancellation’ didn’t exist, then. Now people are much more aware of the idea being cancelled. But then, remember, Twitter’s only just started, the whole concept around cancellation hasn’t really, you know, become a thing. So the idea that not only would I lose my job, but I would end up not being able to work in state education ever again, was simply absurd, right? So, I figured what I would do is I would go, I would speak – and then this will sound a bit idiotic, but remember, everything wasn’t online then, right? So, I thought, you know what, I’ll go. I’ll give my speech. And then I’ll go back to school and nobody will know I gave it.
Elizabeth
Yeah, they weren’t in the room.
Katharine Birbalsingh
That’s it. And I had been warned that it would go out on BBC Parliament?
Elizabeth
Parliament.
Katharine Birbalsingh
Yes, and I thought, “Who watches BBC Parliament?” So I thought, “Right, well, it’ll go out, nobody will see it, and then I’ll get on with my life.” Because I hadn’t thought about the fact that once it’s been recorded, it can be put up on YouTube and you can be seen over and over again. Now, there’s lots of journalists in that room. Of course, I didn’t have any idea about that. Because I don’t know anything about…
Elizabeth
Because you’re a teacher!
Katharine Birbalsingh
I’m a teacher. All I ever did was mock. I didn’t even know that there were… I didn’t really understand that there were these political conferences. I didn’t know. So, when Michael Gove asked me to come along to the to the conference, I was kind of like, “Well, what conference? Oh, I don’t know. Okay, I’ll go along with this conference.” I didn’t really know. So, I knew it was bad, but I figured it will just go out once, nobody will see it, I’ll go back to school tomorrow, and it’ll all be fine. I did not occur to me that in the end, my speech was watched more than then Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech was watched, you know? So I didn’t realise. And then the other thing is that the main reason why it was watched. That’s the other thing. I do think if I’d just gone back to school, and just gone back to school, it would have been fine. Like, there were two articles the next day in the newspaper, and then it would have been the end. The reason why it all became a big deal is because, stupidly, the school sent me home, right? It was just a bad decision on their part. And that’s fine. We all make bad decisions. They made a bad decision, and because they sent me home, that’s when the press went crazy. So, they didn’t go crazy initially. Because at the end of the day, well it was just a speech from some teacher. I mean, yes, it was enough to get the attention of two newspapers the next day, right? And they wrote about it. But then that would have been the end. It didn’t end because they sent me home. So, then the Daily Mail and the various right–wing newspapers, whatnot, “Teacher comes out, speaks to the Conservative Party Conference, tells the truth, and she gets suspended.” And then that was the thing that then brought the energy. And there were tons of journalists wanting to talk to me, and they were at the school, and they were outside my house and blah, blah, blah. And it then became untenable for me to return. So, I then had to resign. And that’s just because the way the press handled it, it just became insane. But it was after that, that it then became clear that no school was ever going to hire me because I had done the unthinkable: I had spoken at the Conservative Party Conference.
Elizabeth
Yeah, that… before I forget the thought, I just want to note to you that I think you just use the word ‘naughty’ in a way that makes me think you have a little soft spot sometimes for naughtiness. You used it to mean like, “a little bit scrappy, a little bit provocative.”
Katharine Birbalsingh
Whenever the kids get… but I always say, “They push, we push back, it’s a game.” So, when they figure out some way around us holding them to account for their homework, they do something and I go, “Damn, they’re clever! Okay, well, we gotta move now!” We have to get one step ahead of them. It’s a game! It’s like my father, he won the war, you know? It was a strategy of his. He thought, “Right, you know what, I’m gonna let her have his TV because look at that TV. It’s so rubbish, there’s no way she’s gonna like watching that TV.” He played a game, that’s what you do as adults. You’re constantly playing with them, and you’re trying to get one over on them, and then instead of allowing them to get one over on you.
The need for strictness and opposing the Left’s levelling down of education
Elizabeth
Yeah, it’s funny. I would just love you to say… so what’s become really clear to me kind of reading your voice and listening to your voice is, I think when people hear the phrase, ‘Britain’s Strictest Headmistress’, and that you have kind of a traditionalist philosophy of education, they can’t help but associate it with kind of, inter–war boarding schools, right? That strictness as an approach. And it isn’t helped by the kind of Conservative Ministers who have been the face of it, just like association–wise, is associated with basically posh schools. That’s what it’s associated with. But what’s become clear, and I think in that speech was clear and elsewhere, is you are primarily motivated by children who are more likely to struggle at school. Can you just say a little bit more? You’ve alluded to it.
Katharine Birbalsingh
Well, I mean, it’s, as you said. You know, they are kids. There are poor kids, there are ordinary kids here, there are inner city kids, you know. I mean, they’re just normal inner city kids, just like any inner city kid at any school that I’ve worked at, you know. And yet, you come here, and it doesn’t feel like an inner city school at all. The kids are so polite. Frankly, I’ve had Head Teachers and Deputy Head Teachers from top private schools who would come here, and they say, “Oh, my goodness, your children would put ours to shame.” They cannot believe how polite and how engaged they are, and how interested in conversation they are, and so on. So, the thing is, why is it… You know, you say about the kids at Eton or whatever, for instance, that they might get this type of education. So why should they be the only ones who should get this kind of education? You know, the assumption is that because you come from some rich family, therefore, you’re going to do well in life. You won’t do well if you haven’t had a good education. And those kids who go to those more traditional schools get a good education, or at least they did get a good education. I don’t know if those schools are still this way, to be honest. I think the modern way and progressive way of teaching has infiltrated everywhere, to be honest. And I think a number of those private schools that we might imagine, used to have a more traditional outlook no longer have a traditional outlook. Now, what does that traditional outlook look like? It just means not allowing kids to shout out in class and be rude to the teacher. You know, do you really want your child to be in a classroom where the teacher is being told to F–off regularly? Do you really want other children throwing chairs around and running around the corridors screaming, punching each other, getting into fights, slamming doors, turning up to the lesson 15 minutes late? Is that what we want? Or do we want children who are polite and engaged and really excited to learn. You come see our lessons, all the hands are up. They absolutely love learning. They also learn so much. And obviously, if they’re from disadvantaged backgrounds, the children, well, the only way they’re going to change their stars is by gaining lots of knowledge and skills, right? It’s kind of like a little goodie bag. In that goodie bag is all the knowledge and skills that children need to succeed in life. Why wouldn’t you want disadvantaged children to have that? And I’ll tell you why. There are a larger group of people who have been convinced by the narrative that allowing some children to have those opportunities is wrong if all children don’t have those opportunities. So they feel uncomfortable with the idea of some schools being excellent, whereas not all schools are excellent. So you know, John Prescott famously said – the Labour MP, Deputy Prime Minister or whatever he was at some point – said, he famously said, “The problem with a good school is that everyone wants to go there.” You know, he was expressing in that moment, the sense of, “Well, everybody can’t get to that good school. So it’s not fair.” And because the Left values fairness and equality above all other values, they can only see everything through the prism of fairness and equality. And if everybody doesn’t have it, then they really just want to stop some people from having it. It makes them feel deeply uncomfortable. And of course, the thing is, I would say that everything is always going to be unfair. Like, that’s life, life is unfair. There are always going to be some kids who have great parents and other kids who don’t have such great parents. Some kids who get to go to a great school, some kids who don’t. That doesn’t mean that we want to stop everyone from having good things, we want to increase the number of good schools. And the only way you do that is by spreading good ideas, because the power of bad ideas is huge within education. And I think people underestimate that, people on the Left tend to just see it as, “Well, we need more funding, and if we got more money, then it would be much better.” But that has been proved incorrect over the Labour years, from 1997 to 2010. They more than doubled the education budget from under £40 billion to over £90 billion. And it appears the results didn’t change in that time. The schools were exactly the same. So the fact is… Look, I’m very grateful for that extra money. I’m very grateful because obviously more money does make a difference when you’re doing the right things. So, I’m not going to argue against any more money. But what Labour then never addressed was the power of bad ideas. What I would say is that the Conservative Party as it has been, not necessarily now, but under Michael Gove, he did very much – as education secretary, I mean – he very much did address a number of bad ideas in education. And that transformed the education system in this country for the better. Since Michael Gove, I wouldn’t necessarily say this case. Nick Gibb also played a huge part in this. He got phonics happening across the country. The problem is people have short memories. So, they forget that before 2010 phonics was not being taught in all schools. Like, some schools did, some schools didn’t. It really wasn’t… Now, because it’s so normal, everybody thinks, “Well, of course, you teach phonics.” Yeah, it was a battle for 20 years to get phonics taught in classes. And there were serious lefties who were absolutely 100% opposed to it, despite the fact that teaching phonics helped disadvantaged children to read, you know. And then you have to say, “Well, you say you’re a lefty and you care about kids, disadvantaged kids, and yet you’re trying to prevent the things that help disadvantaged kids succeed from happening? How does that work?” And that’s what I always say to people is: just look at people’s actions, and look at what they do.
The success of Michaela Community School
Elizabeth
I was thinking about, you know, you have these very kind of wilderness years of not being able to get a job and I gather receiving a lot of abuse, and losing friends, between kind of the Conservative Party Conference speech and setting up Michaela. And then you set up this free school to kind of go, “Here’s a laboratory. You know, I’m gonna see if these ideas work. If I’ve got full control, can I pursue this kind of vision of education?” Before you got your first Ofsted “outstanding” result, did you have a moment of like, “Oh no, what if it doesn’t work?” Or was it so clear to you from very early on that the school was running how you wanted it to be running?
Katharine Birbalsingh
I don’t care about Ofsted. Ofsted didn’t tell me that the school was good. It was just obvious. It’s obvious within the first week of the school starting. I mean, now obviously, you want to keep that up. So you don’t know how it’s gonna go. So you’re very keen on keeping the school moving in the direction that you want it to move. But no, I mean, I kept being told by the Department of Education that anything could happen with our Ofsted. We could get the top score of a one or a four, which is the bottom score. “You could get anywhere from a one to four, Katharine.” And I said, “Well, there’s obviously something wrong with the system of the inspectorate, isn’t it?” I mean, how could it be that you get from one, two or four? In any case, I completely ignore it. I don’t care. I know what we need to do for these kids, and we just get on with it. So that’s part of the reason why we are actually successful, because I’m not scared.
Elizabeth
You’re not second–guessing it.
Katharine Birbalsingh
Exactly! Just think, “what do we need to do?” And it’s still coming from my head. Lots of the things we do over here are ideas that were taken from other schools. My staff participate very much in developing the school into what it is. We read books and findings from that. The woman, Ruth Miskin, who helped get phonics across the country with her ‘Read Write Inc.’ programme, she came here, she gave me some advice and said she wanted us to do more ‘Turn to your partner’. That is something that happens across the school now and it’s just embedded in our culture. So even guests that came would give me advice and we would change things. We’ve changed so much since we started. But I would still say that within the first few weeks, it was a completely different feel in the school than you might have in a more normal place. So, yeah. And we’ve just got better and better and better. And now we’re at a level where we look around… I mean, it really is… You know, when I go around, every time I go around the school and look in the classrooms, I always think, “This place is some kind of miracle. It’s amazing.”
How values matter and the role of parents in their children’s education
Elizabeth
Well, it must be a lovely feeling. I wanted to ask about… I’ve heard you say several times: “Strictness isn’t mean.” Being strict is not being mean, it’s not being unkind. It’s not being kind of completely devoid of compassion and empathy. And as I’ve been listening and reading about your work and listening to your voice, it feels to me like you almost have two modes: you have the kind of Joan of Arc scrappy, you know, ‘fight for the truth’ mode. But you also – I’ve heard you be incredibly empathetic to why it’s hard to change your mind on these things, why it’s hard for teachers who are in progressive environments to teach differently. Why a lot of a lot of the kinds of responses to impoverished students seem to make emotional sense. Could you just unpack a little bit when you use those two modes, and which you think is most helpful actually, for engaging across divides and for persuading people?
Katharine Birbalsingh
Well, it depends on whether the person can be persuaded. I do think there’s a very small minority of people who have a vested interest in the system remaining the way that it is. They get something out of it, emotionally. And they like the fact that there are kids who are disadvantaged, who are failing, but they’re a small minority. I think the majority of teachers just don’t really know. So they don’t know what’s possible. So, I was one of those teachers to a certain extent. I just believed the rhetoric that poor kids cannot behave, black kids cannot behave, ‘special needs’ kids cannot behave. It’s a kind of prejudice against these kids to suggest that, well, it’s just impossible to get good behaviour from them. And not only good behaviour, because I know people call me the strictest headmistress and all that, because they concentrate on that, because that’s obvious, you know, the ‘strictest’ thing. But actually, it’s also about how we teach them. It’s about the values of the school, teaching them gratitude and personal responsibility and all of that. Now, the thing is, if you’ve never been in an environment that teaches kids the right kind of values and has the highest of expectations for them when it comes to behaviour, then you don’t know that they can behave. Like, you just never seen it. And actually, it turns out that mainly it is the black kids who are misbehaving or it mainly is the poor kids who are misbehaving. So you believe the rhetoric. It is the case that a poor kid cannot behave. It wasn’t until I went travelling and would go into classrooms from China to India, to South Africa to Jamaica, to New York to Toronto, etc., to France too. And I’d look around, especially in South Africa, for instance, or in India, or in China, and I think, “Look at all these really, really poor kids. Really poor, like far poorer than my kids in London. And yet they’re behaving and there’s 200 of them in the classroom. And they’ve got broken chairs and broken tables, and textbooks from 1974. And look at them all, they’re just hungry for learning.” So, the rhetoric that I’m being told that you cannot behave if you’re poor, or you cannot behave if you’re black, it’s just not true. It’s just not true. So, of course, if you haven’t seen that, it’s very hard to come to that conclusion. So, I then started thinking, “Right, well, something else is going on here.” And as I now understand fully, it’s because the values that those kids are taught in those South African schools are very different, and their families very different to the ones that we’re teaching our kids here in the West. So, it matters. Communities matter. What we tell our kids matters. It matters. You know, and I started off by saying this, we don’t really think in detail about bringing up children. I think, for instance, people have children, they don’t really think about what they’re doing. They just have kids, and “Hey, they entertain us” and whatever. And you give them a phone, and then that means you can chat to your friend at lunch. And you give them an iPad, and “Who cares, they’ll be fine.” And you don’t really think, “How am I going to get them reading before they start school?” The number of times I put on Twitter about what parents should be doing to help the children at school, the response I get is, “I’m not meant to teach my child. This teacher is meant to teach my child.” And I always think, “Well, okay. And you know what? Some other family that’s teaching their child at home, their child is going to do better than your child. And there’s nothing I can do apart from trying to persuade you.” You know, there are some kids who are strongly supported by their families at home, doing extra work at home, reading with their children at home, getting them prepared for their exams every time they have set a set of exams, etc. And there are other families who farm their children out to the state and say “Get to it”. You know, all I can do is advise families and say, “Look, that’s a silly decision if you just leave it up to the state”. You know, you’ve got to look after yourself, too. It’s sort of like health. The fact is, you can just keep eating chocolate all the time and never do any exercise, never eat any greens. And then you can go to the doctor, and you can say, “Well, it’s for you to make me well, so give me some pills.” Well, he can do that, but you’re gonna get less and less well over time. Ultimately, we are responsible for ourselves. And yes, the state should help with that. And yes, the state should provide education, and obviously, my whole life has been about state education, so, it’s not like I don’t believe in it. But the fact is, parents need to play their part. And I think far too often, we don’t. We don’t. We just don’t play the part that we’re meant to be playing as adults in children’s lives.
Elizabeth
Katharine Birbalsingh thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Katharine Birbalsingh
Thank you for having me.
Elizabeth Oldfield’s reflection on her conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh
Elizabeth
So, Katharine. This is the strongest reaction from other people I’ve had about a guest since Nick Cave – obviously. But a slightly different reaction. I think I probably know a lot of teachers and Katharine, she’s a really controversial figure. When you get a reaction like that of people going, “Ooh, you know, what would they be like?” I always take it as a sort of interesting bit of data, and almost always, the same thing happens that happens with every guest: that you start with this public narrative, this kind of two dimensional cartoon of a person in your hand. And then you encounter them and that cartoon begins to become much more multi–dimensional, much richer, much more interesting. I’m interested that she said “truth” as her sacred value, and have this kind of a running thing that most people’s sacred values group into these three categories of goodness, truth and beauty, which is the kind of Thomas Aquinas theological model for one of the models for what God is like. And this is not at all scientific, so don’t interrogate my rigour here. But I do think that there’s a bit of a pattern about what people’s sacred values are. They tend to cluster. And there are some things that don’t fit into these, but I would put kind of truth, or people say reason, or people say, kind of intellectual honesty, or things like that. Often, those kinds of people have found their way into scientific careers or academic careers, philosophers, that kind of interest group. And so it’s really interesting to me that our Headteacher came out with that. There’s a whole other sway the people who say something along the lines of goodness or love. I don’t think love is necessarily a proxy for goodness, but I’m going to botch it for the sake of my model. Love, goodness, kindness, decency to each other, like ‘treat each other how you’d like to be treated’, that comes out a lot. And those – again, this is very generalised – but often those people are coming from kind of more caring professions or backgrounds in which that kind of pastoral attentiveness to other people is a real driver for them. And then, there’s a third cluster which is rarer, around beauty. But within that I would put kind of awe and mystery and curiosity and space. Pippa Evans, one of our very early guests who was an improviser, said ‘space’. And it’s always really been interesting to me. And people with a slightly more creative bent do, I think, their sacred value is often to sit there. So yeah, ‘truth’. And that kind of makes a lot of sense. Truth and children as Katharine’s sacred values. Just on that, actually, I’d love to know if listeners have a sense of where their sacred value would fit in that kind of Trinity. And then if you have a sense of where it would fit, if you had to kind of pick one, do you find it easier or harder to listen to people who fall somewhere else on that little model? I have a hunch that it might be one of the ways we do the kind of ‘people like us’ tribal thing. Katharine’s clearly a campaigner right? Many guests, I think, who are quite adversarial out in the public square, like arguing their point all the time, take a beat to shift into a more personal reflective space. And Katharine certainly did that. Although, I did feel we got a bit more of her as a human. So fascinated by this kind of ‘human nature thing’. I think it’s so what divides progressive and conservatives. How much emphasis we put on kind of original goodness, rather than original sin. And I would want to just hold those two things together so tightly and not give in to the binary. But yeah, this sense of what your vision of the human is, is that from which everything else flows. And if you haven’t checked out, our sister podcasts “Reading Our Times”, Nick Spencer is obsessed with this question. And he’s always asking what kind of ideas people tend to pop the bonnet a bit about what their vision of a human is. I would highly recommend that… I won’t go down that rabbit hole. But I came away thinking about… I mean, Katharine is clearly very charismatic and very persuasive and very passionate. And I really did get a sense of her as a person of goodwill, as someone who was strongly motivated by the welfare of children. It is quite extreme, some of her policies, or they seem quite extreme to me. But that overarching thing is if you have good behaviour, then the learning environment for everyone is better. If you have good behaviour – and this is not an argument she brought up here, but she used she’s used it a lot elsewhere – that you stamp out bullying instantly, which is again, a very compelling argument. And I don’t need to pick a side about an educational philosophy and I’m not an expert. So I won’t. But the thing I wish I talked to her about is, does this work for different children differently? My sense is, even as adults, we are so temperamentally different, right? And some people really value structure and planning, and clarity about what’s going to happen next, and what’s required of them, and they really flourish in that environment. And some people, myself included, do not like being told what to do, and are very self–directed and like the ability to be spontaneous. And I see it in even just between my two children, and in a lot of children. I wonder how much actually there’s a very valid approach that works for some children but that might really not work for other children, and how you might navigate that? I was left with this impression of someone who actually has a really mischievous side – a sort of scrappy rebel stealing the television… paying, you know, trying to save up for television from her dad – who is really passionate about what she does. And that’s so helpful when you have a caricature of a kind of media monster actually, in some bits of the progressive media, to see that human and that motivation. Just really enjoyed getting to know Katharine a little bit.
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