Fuller disclosure

Posted on 17/02/2025

Labour’s modest moves against academisation have upset Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School. Patrick Yarker fills in some background to the school and spotlights the reactionary myth-making its headteacher deals in.

Katharine Birbalsingh is headteacher of Michaela Community School, a small secondary school in Brent, North-West London, with an intake a little more deprived than the (scandalous) English norm. Her school has 723 students. The average English secondary school has 1054 students, almost half as many again.[1] 30% of Michaela’s students are in receipt of free school meals (FSM), a figure 5% higher than the national average of about 25%.[2]

Michaela is graded ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted. Other non-denominational secondary schools in the local authority, with intakes comparable to Michaela’s in terms of students in receipt of FSM, are graded ‘Outstanding’ too.  One is Ark Elvin Academy, which has 1300 students or almost twice as many as Michaela. 35% of them are entitled to FSM. Another is the Ark Academy, a 3-18 school with 1640 pupils and students, of whom 30% are in receipt of FSM.

For three years running Michaela has recorded an extraordinarily high figure for its Progress 8 performance. A remarkable achievement. Michaela’s performance on other current metrics is rather less distinguished.[3] For example:

• The average number of GCSEs taken by Michaela’s students is 7.1. The average for state-funded schools in England is 7.3 and in Brent is 7.8. A detailed statistical analysis from 2019 until 2023 reveals that: ‘the exam subject offering at Michaela is far lower than nearly all other comparable schools, i.e. schools of similar size which currently hold an “Outstanding” Oftsed grade.’ [4]
• Michaela enters 10% of its students for more than one foreign language at GCSE, only marginally more than the Brent average of 8%.
• In Brent, 23% of GCSE students in state-funded schools are entered for triple science. Michaela’s figure is an astonishingly low 2%. Triple science offers the best grounding for those looking to study science at university.
• 100% of Michaela’s students secure at least one qualification. The figure for Brent is not much below this, at 97.6%.
• Official figures show that Michaela has space for 840 students, indicating that 17% of places, or one in six, remain unfilled.[5]

Full disclosure. I don’t like what Katharine Birbalsingh writes, nor the way she writes. A dozen years ago I reviewed her book To Miss With Love, condemning it as thoughtless and ignorant: ‘ignorant where it preens itself on being most in the know, and content with rhetoric rather than thought…’ Birbalsingh allowed the book’s narrator, plainly her own alter ego, to ‘deploy unsubstantiated assertions as if they were facts… Yet many of the most significant claims she has [her narrator] make or endorse about state education, state schools and the people who teach and learn in them are grossly misleading if not mendacious…’

At that time Birbalsingh was still being portrayed, misleadingly, as a victimised whistleblower. She had given a speech at the Conservative Party conference in 2010 in which she castigated the education system for its supposed ‘low standards’ and for ensuring, in her words,  that ‘poor kids stay poor’. After making her speech Birbalsingh lost her teaching job because, as I wrote, she illustrated her speech with ‘photos of the pupils she taught… without obtaining all necessary permissions. That is, for paying inadequate heed to the ethical implications of what she determined to do. In return she gained a lot of powerful friends and supporters…’[6]

Two recent articles in The Spectator, a journal edited by one of those powerful supporters, show that Birbalsingh hasn’t changed.[7] She still misleads. She still presents half-truths as facts, asserts baselessly or against evidence, and prefers rhetorical antagonism to thoughtful consideration of issues. All in the service of a hard right-wing education policy and a reactionary approach to matters of teaching and learning.[8] For example :

• In her first article Birbalsingh writes: Allowing us as school leaders the freedom to do what is best for our children is not just a sign of respect and trust for us as teachers… Birbalsingh is not a teacher.
• To confirm what she calls the good that the Conservatives have done in education Birbalsingh presents a graph of rankings for England in PISA international tests since 2000 in Maths and Reading. She does so partly to disparage the relative performance of Wales and Scotland. She misleadingly omits the caveat on the salient government website that Rankings need to be treated with caution and can be difficult to compare over time. This is because an increase or fall in rankings may be due to an increase in the number of participating countries.[9]
• Birbalsingh defends the right of academies not to pay staff according to national agreements, pointing out that: lots of academies have used their freedoms to pay their staff more than the national pay scales. As the National Education Union has noted, DfE data shows that on average staff in academies earn about £100 per month less than their colleagues in maintained schools.[10]
• Writing before they met, Birbalsing imputed venomous views to the Education Secretary: Do you assume that schools don’t care about their poor kids…? Would you really want to prevent schools … inspiring their children…? I don’t actually think you hate poor kids… After the meeting Birbalsingh dispensed with rhetorical tropes and simply asserted she knew the Education Secretary’s mind: You are pretending to like academies now… I’ve repeatedly pointed out your Marxist leanings…
• In her second article Birbalsingh says: Politicians who truly want to raise standards for our most deprived communities would ordinarily be interested in hearing from the people who know best how to do it: teachers. No doubt. But no matter how often she lays claim to the role—five times across both articles—the fact is Birbalsingh isn’t a teacher.
• She goes on to say: We asked [the Education Secretary] to explain why it is that academies were able to drive up standards. The evidence is that academisation does not produce better results for equivalent school populations.[11]
• Birbalsingh writes that the Education Secretary …insisted that some schools were not meeting… ‘floor’ curriculum requirements. We asked you to name one school that does not offer a core curriculum to its pupils You could not name a single one. Courtesy may have prevented the Education Secretary from naming Michaela as just such a school. It does not offer substantial courses in a number of subjects which might be expected to feature in a ‘core curriculum’, such as design and technology, computing, sociology, or drama or music at key stage 4.

These aren’t the only examples of Birbalsingh’s disregard in her articles for facts and evidence.

Birbalsingh made her Mephistophelian bargain with the educational New Right and has parlayed into a distinctive brand her school’s adherence to teacher-led instruction and the need for total control. After a decade and more, is the brand failing? Nearby, Ark Elvin Academy is significantly over-subscribed. No spare places there. A headteacher is expected occasionally to big-up their school, but how tediously wearisome it must be for all at work in Brent’s other secondaries each time Birbalsingh feels compelled to tell the world she knows best.

 

Notes

[1]  Fact Sheet 5: New homes and school places – GOV.UK ]

[2]  Schools, pupils and their characteristics, Academic year 2023/24 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK

[3] All figures available here: Additional entry and achievement measures – Michaela Community School – Compare school and college performance data in England – GOV.UK

[4] See: https://peterejkemp.github.io/demos/michaela/

[5] See: Michaela Community School – GOV.UK

[6] Patrick Yarker, book review of ‘To Miss With Love’, Forum 54,1, pp170-76, p176: https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/forum/vol-54-issue-1/abstract-4956/

[7]  Katharine Birbalsingh, 17 January 2025: What problem is the Education Secretary trying to solve? | The Spectator; 8 February 2025: What I learned from my meeting with the Education Secretary | The Spectator

[8] Charlotte Haines Lyon, ‘Demonic education: rethinking education through a political theology lens’, Forum, 66,1, 115-129: https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/forum/vol-66-issue-1/abstract-9885/

[9] https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/09/what-is-pisa-data-and-how-does-it-measure-students-success-at-school/

[10] The NEU case against academisation | National Education Union See also: How trusts use freedoms to exceed national teacher pay scales | Tes

[11] See this study from 2023: Should you send your child to an academy or a council-run school? – Durham University, and also material included here: Improving schools’ performance: Are multi-academy trusts the answer? – House of Lords Library