[BITList] Inside the strictest school in Britain

[John Feltham]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-the-strictest-school-inbritain-n2333rf5v <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-the-strictest-school-inbritain-n2333rf5v>

Katharine Birbalsingh believes that military-style discipline and pupils that are ‘drilled to thrill’ are key to education

Helen Rumbelow

December 4 2017, 12:01am, The Times



Pupils at Michaela Community School learn by rote and are commanded to look at the teacher

CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES

Us against the world. This is painted in giant yellow letters on the school hallway, looming over children silently padding to their lessons. What school would drum into children such a punchy message, otherwise used by new religions and punk bands? Well, this isn’t a normal school. It’s Michaela.

Anyone who encounters Michaela wants to take a side: it provokes. Do you love it as a visionary experiment that will save British education? Or do you hate it as a cruel Gradgrindian sausage factory that uses poor children as meat? On a deeper level, is childhood about remembering stuff and being good? Or learning to do it your way and rebelling against what came before? This free school in a drab office block overlooking a Tube station in a grim part of Wembley is probably the most divisive and political educational establishment bar Eton.

A lot of your response will be based on how you feel about its founder and head teacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, who launched a devastating attack on the chaos in British state schools — saying “the system is broken, because it keeps poor children poor” — at the Conservative Party conference in 2010. She was forced to leave her school as a result. Michaela is her reply: less a school than a new, messianic movement. If you think I am exaggerating, the book that explains the school’s radical methods is entitled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers and reads like a holy text. A sample quote from a Michaela teacher reads: “I now have a desire to tell everyone of the brave new world I have seen.”



Head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh

CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES

I have no trouble finding the school from the Tube station because a billboard hovers directly over it, reading: “Private School Ethos: No Fees.” But it is not just that, because I can hear hollering. A young, muscular teacher (all of Michaela’s teachers are young, muscular and evangelical, especially on social media) has jumped up on to a bench on the pavement and is giving a rally before school. This is known informally as “the sermon from the bench”. Hundreds of Michaela students gather round. “A journalist from The Times is coming today,” he shouts, to be heard above the rattling trains. “The best journalists in the country come here. They don’t do that with other schools. You’re different.” I shrink back towards the bins, feeling inadequate, and the feeling lasts.

In the school reception you are issued with a sheet of rules on how to conduct yourself as a visitor. I summarise: whisper and don’t ask the children if they hate being robots or other such negative prodding since it is starting to get them down. Michaela is inundated by visitors. Half a dozen teachers a day make the trek here from all over the country, as well as queues of cabinet politicians. Anthony Seldon, the influential educationalist and former head of Wellington College, declared it “one of the most uplifting and arresting schools I have ever seen anywhere in the world”. On the other hand, protests have flared since Michaela was opened in 2014; the school has been broken into by objectors and picketed.

Regardless, it has the most open policy of any school I have encountered. After you have been taken on a tour by a student, if you are cleared to work with children you are free to stay and wander at will among the classrooms. Most of the visitors are head teachers from state schools who peer at the ranks of silent teenagers with expressions of scepticism and awe.

In poor areas over the past decade there has been a new movement of academies that raise standards by means of military-style discipline. All the hallmarks of that approach are here, but Michaela is unique because discipline is only a precursor to what the school sees as the main problem: retention of knowledge. “I wouldn’t say there are any schools doing what we’re doing,” Birbalsingh tells me later.

Sure, the children have to memorise a lot, the homework is rigorous, poetry is learnt by rote and times tables are “drilled to thrill”, as they like to say — all that you would expect of a 1950s grammar school. But what goes on in the classroom is new. The staff are keen on the latest research, which shows that the inbuilt tragedy of teaching is that, by the time a new topic is begun, the old topic is slipping from everyone’s mind.

So staff, who, the website says, “tend to reject all of the accepted wisdoms of the 21st century”, demand not just children’s acquiescence, but their attention. A week-long boot camp when they start inculcates in them a series of commands. A child’s eyeballs must be directed at the page, the board or the teacher. At the command “Three, two, one, track on me”, I see 30 pairs of eyes swing up from work to the teacher’s face. At the command “SLANT!” every child sits straight in their chair, arms folded on the desk (to stop fiddling), eyes on the teacher. I hear “SLANT!” or “track on me” every few minutes. No discussions, no group work. It’s intense. “It’s really hard at first,” says my 13-year-old guide, “then you get adapted. You become an automaton, but not in a bad way.”





Pupils with Mr Hutton, a teacher at Michaela Community School

CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES

The school doesn’t use standard textbooks — too sloppy. There is also no drama or IT, and PE is limited. The staff jointly write the teaching material, which is deliberately prose-heavy. Each child is equipped with an identical clear ruler, which they use to track the text in the frequent class reading. Demerits are rife: I saw one girl get one for absentmindedly turning a page of her book, another for turning her head. A boy got one for knocking a paper off his desk. If, when randomly called on to continue the teacher’s reading of the text, you hesitate, this is grounds for a demerit for the sin of not following along. Two demerits in a lesson means a detention, which is administered by a dedicated and sinister-sounding “detention director”.

The results are astonishing. When there is nothing else to do but learn, children really do. I have a child, in a good school, who has just started French in year seven, but the year-sevens here, half a term in, are way in advance of that, being able to parse complicated sentences about “getting along with stepfathers”. This year Ofsted rated the school “outstanding” in all areas. The oldest children in the school are 14 and yet to take GCSEs, but I have no doubt they will be good.

More than half the children at Michaela are on free school meals and two fifths have English as a second language. When you get Birbalsingh on the theme of disadvantage, she is liable to go off on one. At a conference on the Michaela way, her speech gave way to full-on shouting as she said that poor children “don’t have order at school and when they don’t do well, we blame it on poverty. It’s wrong, I tell you. We need to have a revolution!” What you don’t hear much of in class are the children’s views. The idea is that they need to know something to give an informed opinion.

In a way, this school was built on a moment in Birbalsingh’s life. Her mother was a Jamaican nurse and her father was a Guyanese academic. They lived in a Canada for a time, and Birbalsingh still speaks with a strong Canadian accent, although she came to England as a teenager. She went to state schools all her life and was only the second pupil in her school’s history to get to the University of Oxford.

Yet at university she struggled to catch up and was plagued by the yawning gaps in her knowledge compared with the privately educated students, as well as her feelings of injustice that black Oxbridge students were as rare as unicorns. At the end of her degree she locked up her bike at the station and couldn’t bring herself to go back for it. You were traumatised by inadequacy, I say, as we sit in her office. “Exactly,” she says. “I felt so inadequate.”

We insist on a lot from children because we want them to succeed

To Miss With Love, the blog she wrote of her time on the front line in inner-city schools, became a book and was serialised on Radio 4. There are some great lines in it. “Is it because I am black?” is, she writes, the way that black students can wriggle away when white teachers impose heavy sanctions. She responds to such questions with a simple “yes”. She also wrote a chick-lit novel, and I had come prepared to ask whether the children tease her about the naughty bits, but after some time here the question died on my lips.

She says that after the 2010 conference speech “it became increasingly clear I would not work in a state school again. What I’d done was unforgivable.” She didn’t want to work in private schools, so she set up her own under the new free-school policy directed by Michael Gove, who was education secretary at the time (Gove and Birbalsingh talk about each other with the highest regard). Birbalsingh named the school Michaela after a friend and colleague who died of cancer in 2011.

“Michaela didn’t know the debate raging between knowledge and skills,” Birbalsingh says of this person. “She was just old-fashioned. She thought adults were adults and kids were kids, and she stood in front of the classroom and taught. The difference here is every classroom has a teacher like that.”

Birbalsingh, 44, is a mother and says that both her roles are similar. “You have to make sure they understand the reason you insist on a lot from them is because you love them and want them to succeed in life.” Her children, she says, are happy. “They are confident, knowing lots. They don’t feel inadequate, going back to my time at Oxford, they don’t feel inadequate because they know so much about the world.”

We need to talk about Ahmed. The motto of Michaela is “work hard, be kind”. But in the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers one teacher describes how she had to punish a boy, Ahmed (not his real name), who did not hand in his homework because he had to visit his mother in hospital. This teacher said at first she found this hard. Poor Ahmed, I say to Birbalsingh.

“From the outside, if you don’t know how a school works, all you see is Ahmed, and you think, ‘Poor Ahmed.’ But in the end you hurt Ahmed badly because he ends up in a school where nobody does homework. You have to see it through to the end. The middle-class kids may do it, the ones with supportive families may do it, but not the kids who really need it. And then when they don’t get into university, we say, ‘Well they were poor, so that’s what happens to poor kids.’ I say, ‘If you make tough decisions, and do what’s right by them they will succeed.’ They need us to be the adults here.”

This brings us on to Michaela’s biggest hoo-ha, which occurred last summer, when a child was excluded from the school’s “family lunch” because his or her parents had not paid the bill. The child sat with a teacher eating a sandwich instead. Birbalsingh got death threats. She remains firm: every child at her school eats because they eat in small groups, as a family would. “At other schools they go hungry all the time. They never bring in a packed lunch and nobody notices. So here it’s better.”

We file into “family lunch”, the grand piano tinkling away. I sit round a cosy table of five teenagers who serve each other a hot meal, and although I am the designated adult on this table, meant to be leading a discussion of my favourite books, I go way off message. Do their friends at other schools think it’s odd here, I ask. “Yes!” they reply. Would they like it if they came here? “No!” they say. But do you like it? “Yes!”

Then silence is called and we begin the unusual daily ritual of post-lunch “appreciations” from pupils standing and praising individual teachers. One child gets up from our table and tells the room of his appreciation to me, for taking the time to visit. Two military-style claps are given. Even though I know this is rehearsed, it still feels good.

Wembley school hiring 'sergeant major' detention enforcer on £35k salary
 
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-school-dubbed-britains-strictest-hiring-sergeant-major-detention-role-a3453391.html <https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-school-dubbed-britains-strictest-hiring-sergeant-major-detention-role-a3453391.html>
 
 
The methods seem reminiscent of the nineteen fifties which isn’t such a bad idea.
 
…


I agree. I knew my tables when I was nine years old and fractions too.

The author of this article has trouble with her grammar. See the bit down at the bottom 'family lunch’ that I have placed in bold.

Is the comma in the right place?

Unsure?

See…

http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-marks.html <http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-marks.html>



ooroo


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