Katherine Birbalsingh?

GreatJehosephat · 2025-05-02T06:22:28+00:00

She’s been popping up on tiktok for the last few days, and seems to be very divisive. She appears to get amazing results, but then people point out she’s misrepresenting the truth as to who goes to her school, that they have far fewer children with SN, and can turn away children if they wish. In rl she seems to be really polarised as well, so I thought I’d ask here and hope to learn more about her system and whether it’s cherry picked (as suggested) or if she has indeed created an amazing experience for her pupils. My own opinion, based on the clips I’ve seen, is that the very strict rules would mostly be intolerable to any adult in a workplace and when you look at other academies who install strict rules it seems to impact heavily on the pupil’s mental health. I believe there’s a place for such schools, and they work very well for some children, but I can think of plenty of children who need a different approach in order to produce a happy, productive population (in a way where people are mentally well enough to find employment - and we seem to be seeing a downturn in this and an upturn in young people being too stressed to do anything!).

sammyvine · 17/05/2025 16:06

Are you guys going on the March?

napody · 06/05/2025 19:33

CruCru · 06/05/2025 19:31

In fairness, people utterly hated the lottery system in Brighton (I grew up there).

Yes I wasn't saying that it was the right approach, just disagreeing that our current system is 'equal allocation'.

CruCru · 06/05/2025 19:31

In fairness, people utterly hated the lottery system in Brighton (I grew up there).

napody · 06/05/2025 19:28

CopperWhite · 02/05/2025 07:31

It’s an unselective state school. They are allocated pupils in the same way as every other state school.

Her approach won’t work well for every child because there is no school that is perfect for every child. But for plenty, it works wonderfully and it’s a shame that all children don’t have access to this type of school.

Well no, for equal allocation it'd have to be a lottery system like the one Brighton Council tried. Our system is marketised- schools are over and under-subscribed and can influence who applies by their messaging. There was an article in the TES this week about one secondary school telling prospective parents if their schild had SEN they weren't the best place, and they should go to the one down the road (not a specialist school or one with a particular resource base, it was just a way of repelling SEN children!) 'Magnet schools' are a thing. I'd argue schools can also be 'magnet schools' for supportive parents with high academic aspirations.

Seymour5 · 06/05/2025 17:16

There are lots of schools in the area around Michaela. Surely parents of children who wouldn’t benefit from it wouldn’t include it in their preferences? It’s always oversubscribed, suggesting parents who support the Michaela ethos are keen to send their children there.

I think it’s sad that some children will have to face a raft of bullying, violence and disrupted lessons on a daily basis, when the only schools in their area are failing. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Wembley. Can’t post the link, but most secondary schools in the area are outstanding, or at least good.

Original poster

GreatJehosephat · 06/05/2025 17:08

Nanny0gg · 03/05/2025 14:10

Which children won't cope? How many?

Her school is not dissimilar to those of the 50s-to the start of the comprehensive system

We survived, we learned, we were not traumatised

And I personally am horrified by the state of some schools today

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Thousands of children are school refusing. It’s a big enough problem for the government (well, the last government) to have launched a campaign telling people that if their children have a sniffle they should still go to school, a campaign that completely missed the mark as minor illness isn’t the reason behind poor attendance levels, SN is a big reason, but funnily enough they are avoiding addressing that like the plague!

Within many schools it’s been reported that SN numbers are going up (DS’s old school was 10% when he was there, it’s now over 30%). Many of these are children who are simply not coping with the pressures of school. SEND teams within schools very often will admit how difficult things are for the children, and how much schools have changed over the last 20+ years, to the detriment of pupils and teachers alike.

Having read the comments here and looked up more about her, I find KB quite goady, but her school sounds amazing. My dd would have thrived and probably loved it. My ds wouldn’t have coped at all, because he has ASD but it’s pda presenting, and that approach (which he had at high school) all but destroyed him and his family within a couple of months.

I was at school 40 years ago, it doesn’t compare to today. The pressure on children now is huge, to learn, to perform. I had less pressure during GCSEs and A levels than children have from age 10, when they start cramming for SATs. We had uniforms, and inspections to make sure skirts were not too short, but at the same time we didn’t have rules imposed on how to walk down a corridor, where precisely to hold a blazer when not wearing it, having punishments handed out left right and centre when these rules are enforced.

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Original poster

GreatJehosephat · 06/05/2025 16:47

ArtTheClown · 03/05/2025 09:06

Not really. She's just scaring away all the Send pupils so they go elsewhere and it looks like she's done all the hard work. She's cherry picking pupils by the back door.

This, to me, argues for the urgent need for more specialist schools for SEN pupils.
That being said, as someone with ASD, I thrived in a school with similar discipline and structure - in fact even stricter - so it will suit some.

Yes I agree.
I have a child who thrived in an academy with similar rules (it helped that she was liked by teachers who gave her chances when she slipped up - a common theme sadly for pupils who are less likeable who have no second chances), and two who were really badly harmed by the same approach.

Variety in approaches is good, we have a system that’s mostly one size fits all right now, and apart from some outliers it’s not working.

Parents are often blamed for not arguing against punishments for their dc, and this is a tricky one. I’ve been that parent, but whilst advocating for my autistic son who was being put in unacceptable situations (going against his EHCP and therefore discriminatory) and being punished for being autistic, and this is seen over and over again! My younger son was regularly punished by teachers for having tics, both motor and vocal, despite having a letter from his paed and having made sure all teachers were aware of this - yet barely a week went by when he received another negative point for it. If there are parents who are in denial of their children’s genuine bad behaviour, like bullying, it shouldn’t matter, the school processes should mean that these are dealt with regardless of having parents on board or not. However I suspect that many of “those” parents are SN parents whose children have little option but to be in schools that are harmful to them, and honestly as parents what else are you supposed to do?

Having a variety of different schools with a variety of approaches would address this. At the moment the majority of schools are academies, with academic curriculums and often draconian rules, which do not suit everyone, and probably explains why there are such issues around schooling right now. Thousands of schools refusers, growing number of children needing support, increasingly poor behaviour.

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AllProperTeaIsTheft · 05/05/2025 17:08

Sleepingmole6 · 03/05/2025 13:20

For everyone who wouldn't send their child to her school, I guarantee you would choose it any day over the school I have just left.

The basis of our behaviour policy is 'all behaviour is communication' and that 'the classroom is a safe place'.

Sounds wonderful, right?! The reality is that it was horrible for 99% of students. We had students shouting rubbish out during entire lessons or standing at the door banging it open and closed, knowing that there would be no consequences or that they would get to go and calm down with a member of staff for a game or stickers. SEN students suffered the worse - they became disregulated and had to be taken out by TAs to calm down. The same happened next day, repeated over several classes in the school. Students looked depressed, most told me they hated school and in the end I did too.

Oh yes, the 'all behaviour is communication' attitude is woolly nonsense. There has to be such thing as a happy medium though.

After decades of teaching, I still fundamentally disagree with the principle that being really petty and very draconian over the very minor things, and trying to make behaviour super-regimented at all times, is the only or best way to prevent serious bad behaviour.

The vast majority of kids in these bonkers schools who get detentions for not walking in silence down the corridor, not tracking the teacher with their eyes for every second of the lesson, underlining their title in blue not black, or wearing socks with a small logo, were never going to commit serious misdemeanours in the first place.

Replacing the atmosphere of fear caused by bad behaviour with an oppressive atmosphere of fear created by teachers is cruel and unnecessary. Just deal really swiftly and harshly with genuinely bad behaviour - disruption, rudeness, bullying etc. Kids don't respect schools and teachers when they perceive the rules as petty and trivial, even if they obey them.

AllProperTeaIsTheft · 05/05/2025 16:52

roses2 · 03/05/2025 21:31

A lot of people are criticising the rote learning approach but do you really think it's different to all the other schools that get similar results like the grammars and private schools? Highly doubtful. All these kids are taught to get the best possible exam score. KB is just more vocal about what all these schools do.

Edited

Yes, I do think it's different, and I teach in a grammar school.

HippoStraw · 05/05/2025 16:44

As a teacher I’ve read and heard a lot about her over the years. I’m not keen on her as a person. However there are many things I don’t dislike about her school, and I can see that teaching there might be brilliant in many ways.
The problem is that it can’t be scaled up to everywhere. She’s in London, with lots of other varied schools. She got her message out loud and clear in the early days which led to a self selecting cohort with massive parental buy in. People who didn’t like what she was offering could put down other alternatives. That doesn’t work if you are a small town with one or two schools. Many parents will simply ignore the rules and code of conduct and if there are no alternative places, they won’t leave.

sammyvine · 05/05/2025 16:25

LobeliaBaggins · 02/05/2025 10:14

I am an ethnic minority who has always voted Labour, but I completely agree that a sort of whiny, self-obsessed, identity grievance victimhood is not what I want for my DC. Also agree with personal responsibility and no religion in schools, including the religion of idiotic gender ideology.

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Does this happen in schools? Most schools these days are strict.
You can flip it and say what about schools that have racist, right wing teachers that are against ethnic minority pupils?

sammyvine · 05/05/2025 16:24

sesquipedalian · 02/05/2025 08:54

Katharine Birbalsingh started a school in a deprived part of London, and gets astounding results - I believe her “value added” scores are among the best in the country. Before sending your child to the school, you need to sign up to the rules, most particularly that it’s a secular school (she has a lot of Muslim pupils), and that the rules over uniform and behaviour will be followed. The school is rigorous and she believes in what might be considered old fashioned academic values - but the children seem happy, they get good results, and she has transformed the lives of many of her pupils.

A lot of headtachers have done the same. Do they deserve medals as well?

sammyvine · 05/05/2025 16:23

I find it weird how she is always in the media. There are a lot of good schools all over the country but we never hear from the headteachers. Why is this?

Why is she always on GB News and TalkRadio?

1SillySossij · 04/05/2025 07:06

Visitors and parents seem to comment on how happy the students are there

GrammarTeacher · 04/05/2025 06:29

Helpmeplease2025 · 04/05/2025 06:24

Everything I have read about it sounds great.

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Really, parroting a prescribed response isn't demonstrating understanding.

Helpmeplease2025 · 04/05/2025 06:24

Motherknowsrest · 02/05/2025 08:06

Yes, she runs a very strict school. Everything I have read about it sounds awful.

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Everything I have read about it sounds great.

GrammarTeacher · 04/05/2025 06:22

roses2 · 03/05/2025 21:31

A lot of people are criticising the rote learning approach but do you really think it's different to all the other schools that get similar results like the grammars and private schools? Highly doubtful. All these kids are taught to get the best possible exam score. KB is just more vocal about what all these schools do.

Edited

It blinking well is different to the approach in grammar schools. We also teach Music beyond year 8, Technology and Computing. We also have teacher freedom.
Michaela is nothing like a grammar or independent school!

aWomanbyGumIndeed · 03/05/2025 22:25

I was at sixth form with her.

At a school that was opposite Michaela in ethos and environment in every way.

She was very outspoken even then.

The school that we went to had had a maverick and unique head until a few years before sixth form. The sort of person that commands respect such that pupils were keen to earn his respect in turn. This teacher changed many people’s lives - but his mantra was that there were no ‘rules’ - except that pupils should strive to know what was a responsible and caring way to treat others. If you caused a problem you went to his office and you had to talk to him and solve the problem. I can’t tell you how unusual this was at the time - ‘restorative justice’ before it was invented.

it does not cease to surprise me me how different what she has created is. But I do think that somewhere in there she understands that you can’t ask a child to obey you without respect for you. That’s all I can see that comes from our experience.

flossydog · 03/05/2025 21:56

roses2 · 03/05/2025 21:31

A lot of people are criticising the rote learning approach but do you really think it's different to all the other schools that get similar results like the grammars and private schools? Highly doubtful. All these kids are taught to get the best possible exam score. KB is just more vocal about what all these schools do.

Edited

My understanding is that most private schools pride themselves on "going beyond the syllabus". Direct Instruction is used by a few other schools but all the fee paying schools I know of tend towards giving a lot of latitude to teachers.

roses2 · 03/05/2025 21:31

A lot of people are criticising the rote learning approach but do you really think it's different to all the other schools that get similar results like the grammars and private schools? Highly doubtful. All these kids are taught to get the best possible exam score. KB is just more vocal about what all these schools do.

flossydog · 03/05/2025 21:00

RhododendronFlowers · 03/05/2025 08:57

Indeed. Plus delivering specific content isn't "de skilling" because the teacher still has to communicate, supervise activities, give feedback and is accountable for progression.

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With Direct Instruction, they're literally following a script. It tells them what to say, who to say it to, where to point. It's designed to be teacher-proof. So while there is a teaching skill component it is massively deemphasised in favour of delivering standardised lessons.

Yes, the purpose of education isn't teacher career progression— but the purpose also isn't (or shouldn't be) treating kids like robots, cramming for tests. Education is about preparing children to enter into the adult world, one where they won't (hopefully) be micromanaged cogs.

zingally · 03/05/2025 15:28

As someone who works in education myself (albeit primary not secondary), I've always found her fairly irritating. Mostly because of what she expects from her staff. I read something bonkers about requiring all her senior leaders in every day at 7am for briefings. And then the very uniform teaching methods she gets her average teachers using... There's no room for being a professional and using a teaching style that works for you. She seems to have very little trust in the staff around her to be the highly trained professionals that they are. She's also very good at stepping out of her lane, and offering opinions on areas of education she has no experience of, such as Early Years.

That being said, I've also seen the tiktoks of her on a podcast I think it is, and found myself thinking that a lot of stuff she said made sense. Especially relating to some behaviour management and being strict on the small stuff. There's a certain good logic to it. But that's also how she's got where she is. She gets people nodding along with her soundbites.

I also think that when she retires/steps back, her school will very quickly start fitting in more with the norm and dialing back on the more controversial aspects of their practice.

GrammarTeacher · 03/05/2025 14:28

EuclidianGeometryFan · 03/05/2025 08:32

Very good question.
It would deskill the teacher's ability to create their own schemes of work and lesson plans - but that is the most boring and easiest part of the job. Most schools have departmental schemes of work, and/or teachers pull ready-made schemes and lesson plans off the internet.

But as every military strategist knows, the plan never survives first contact with the enemy (tongue in cheek likening the children to "enemy").
i.e. the lesson plan gets adapted on the fly depending on how the children react and what gaps in knowledge are discovered and have to be plugged as you go.

The real skill in teaching is in the face-to-face teaching, not the planning.

If the teacher is literally following a script, that is not good teaching. However, I can see it would be useful to do this for a while as training for a teacher who is not familiar with content-heavy teaching: most teachers are not because most universities and teacher training courses follow the "skills" ideology.
Teachers nowadays are taught how to organise group work and have the children 'solve problems', how to make lessons more fun with lots of quizzes and games, how to 'compare sources' in history or 'discover' answers for themselves in science. This is all largely a waste of precious classroom time that is better spent actually teaching children content.
Plus you have the problem of teachers who don't actually know a lot of stuff - they need the script because they can't teach what they don't know.

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I’m sorry I disagree here. Planning is one of the most fun parts of teaching. I LOVE preparing and researching new texts. I rotate which I choose at GCSE regularly.
I would hate to work somewhere as rigid as Michaela. I think their meeting times for SLT are discriminatory against those with caring responsibilities.
I’ve been teaching over 20 years and wouldn’t touch that school with a barge pole. The lack of space concerns me as does their limited curriculum (which other schools got into trouble with OFSTED for).

BingoBling · 03/05/2025 14:18

I wouldn't have wanted her type of school for my DC, but I can see why some parents do want it.
Possibly because they feel its a choice between that and chaos in the school down the road.

I did agree with the statement she put out after the court case, and thought well done on her for saying those things.

There's a whole movement of ultra strict schools in the US , I listened to a radio programme about it. It sounded very scary and worrying to me!
almost brain washing.

Nanny0gg · 03/05/2025 14:10

GreatJehosephat · 02/05/2025 14:16

I agree, she gets results for that cohort, but I think that’s where people have an issue with her system, because it simply wouldn’t work for many children.

Acadrmies have a huge problem with school refusal and managing out SN (not saying Michaela does this, because I don’t know), which can help them get great results, but doesn’t particularly help children who are being left behind in education.

@Ablondiebutagoody many children have no need for learning coping mechanisms, but plenty do, which is why so many children struggle with the rise in academies and the trickle down of academy behaviour policies, which arguably work for the children who don’t need them.

I think there’s definitely a place for schools like KB’s, but we currently have a lack of suitable provision for the children who cannot cope with that sort of system.

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Which children won't cope? How many?

Her school is not dissimilar to those of the 50s-to the start of the comprehensive system

We survived, we learned, we were not traumatised

And I personally am horrified by the state of some schools today