Katherine Birbalsingh?

I'm always amazed that the behaviour is communication people don't get that it works both ways. If you don't punish them they learn it's OK to disrupt the lesson and bully their peers.

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.

Parents of SEN kids are likely to avoid the school like the plague

Not all - the discipline and clear rules would suit some children with ASD very well, far better than being in a noisy, disruptive environment.

The intake probably is self selecting but that is okay. Parents choose the sort of school that they think will best suit their child. If the Michaela school doesn’t appeal, they won’t put it on their preferences.

@Notgoodatpoetrybutgreatatlit good points. Also, it's true to say that many parents support firm boundaries and good discipline until it applies to their own child, then they complain and make excuses. We've seen many such threads on here.

@GreatJehosephat
I can have a go at answering your question about "feral schools", which I assume posters are using to describe schools in which the discipline and behaviour systems are not applied or don't function.
To turn them around schools introduce rules, just normal sensible rules and enforce them. This tends to lead to criticism from people who aren't in the school, journalists, parents, random Internet users, that the school has draconian rules and is destroying the mental health of the students.
However my present school went from the former to the latter, when we had ofsted the inspectors noted the many students who told them that the school used to be dangerous and they couldn't learn and was now safe and they were doing well in their learning. Our exam results are continously improving which we are ruthlessly judged on. So yeah enforce rules including around uniform and manners it all works.
Ms Birbalsingh isn't doing anything particularly different but she is doing it very well judging by her exam results.

I think she seems awful. I've been a teacher for a very long time and am well aware that the behaviour in schools needs sorting out, but although there is no doubt she gets results, I don't think her methods can or should realistically be applied to schools in general.

No, she can't select her intake as such, but it is effectively self-selecting, because of the type of people who will choose a school that extreme in its policies. Any school which requires a level of hoop-jumping or serious parental buy-in is going to be more able to carry out its aims. Parents of SEN kids are likely to avoid the school like the plague, as are parents who would be unlikely to comply with school policies (or have children they know would be unable to cope with them).

I've seen kids (14-15) from this school on a school trip. They looked happy, excited, well behaved, engage with the educational content, respect the teacher and seemed to have a friendly relationship with them. They chat during lunch until they're told it's time to do something else. There are far, far worse schools/children to have on a school trip. In fact, those children probably aren't even allowed on a school trip.

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.

But they could be poor kids too, right?

we all know that, presumably?

The comment about middle class kids was merely because I was paraphrasing the comment that I was replying to. My point was that children who are capable of 12 grade 9s would be limited by a narrower curriculum.

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.

Absolutely. Too strict for adults in the workplace? They're teenagers in school and need firm boundaries. Some pupils have their learning constantly disrupted by bad behaviour and I don't know why that's acceptable to anyone.

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.

My children are adults now but both neurodiverse, they would have got on really well in a school like that. No overwhelming noise in between classes, people arriving on time so the teacher didn't have to deal with late-comers, knowing exactly what is expected of them and the other students rather than being confused (and in some cases distressed) when the rules were bent and expectations were no longer clear.

There is room for more than one type of school, this may not work for everyone but the parents and children there are lucky this is an option for them.

The point of education isn’t just teachers career progression tho

I do agree that the emphasis on uniform is unnecessary.
Schools should have a simple uniform with a wide variety of styles accepted (e.g. any type of collar on a white shirt, any navy cardigan, jumper or sweatshirt, any black shoes or trainers, etc.), cheaply available from lot of suppliers and supermarkets.
Anything else is discriminatory.

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.

So, you don't like anything about her @sprigatito ; that's clear. But according to all the ordinary measures that most people use to gauge success and results, MIchaela scores very highly across the whole range, I don't pretend to understand what you think is important, but I think you are over-egging your reply.

Citation?

She’s a malignant narcissist who comes across extremely badly every time she’s interviewed by someone who doesn’t blow smoke up her ass. Her school is an abusive high-control environment that does nothing to prepare young people for the realities of everyday life (unless they aspire to a career as a Supermax inmate). Her feted “excellent results” come at the price of SEN students and those with mental health difficulties/troubled home lives/neurodiversity who are chewed up and spat out like rubbish. I would rather send my children to Dotheboys Hall than subject them to an “education” in this woman’s sick mind palace.

The Michaela 6th form sounds excellent too.

She can’t turn pupils away. I really like her. I’d be very happy if my children had been given a place at her school.

Her school uses fully scripted lessons, in a practise called direct instruction. Reading about it, it seems like it would feel deskilling for the teacher, as they're following someone else's script for the lesson.

I guess it's good we all have a choice.
I love uniform myself. Didnt make my DC anxious. In fact, the opposite as they could focus on learning.