What does Katharine Birbalsingh do different?

[User2346]

I can’t say I like her but I am intrigued as to how she gets the results which are remarkable.

I know the model of zero tolerance etc but this is copied in a lot of academies without the resounding success.

Is there something different with the teaching methods? Is there an element of selection weeding out children with SEN and EHCP’s?

I would love the perspective of parents who have their DC at the school.

Number of exclusions doesn't tell you much. Official statistics will never show you the children who are effectively managed out by making their lives hell, failing to meet SEN, punishing them for the effects of disabilities etc.

Not true. Local authorities don't control intake on academies.

I'm fairly local to the school and have visited. I'm not that keen on KB and her self promotion but there is a lot of misinformation about her and the methods including on this thread. She does seem to care for her students and want them to do well.

Allocations are by the council and the school can't control intake. I've been to the open evening for prospective year 7s and there was a big emphasis on not sending your child there then objective to the rules and philosophy as it would be unfair in the child. No other covert selection methods that I noticed.

Even the family who sued the school over prayer facilities says when they lost the case said they would still want to go there and not consider switching schools as it was a good school.

The curriculum may be narrow in terms of subjects but it is not all teach to the test and make within subjects. They had written their own curriculum booklets and went into far more depth on some topics and unlike other local schools did look at reading full texts but just extracts and establishing an interest of not a love of reading.

The facilities are very small, it's an office block a short walk from Wembley stadium. There is no school field and PE lessons are at the local power league which they walk to. It wouldn't likely be a school named on EHCP for children with some physical disabilities as access is difficult.

I imagine some ND students would struggle particularly if PDA but others thrive on the explicit instruction for behaviour. The consistent clear lesson structure with booklets actually is supportive of executive functioning and less stressful for some.

But what if those children would like the option of taking in school GCSEs or A levels in subjects like dance, drama, IT, DT, Food tech, German, Spanish, Chinese, Urdu, Business studies, in preference to Humanities, French etc? Effectively they're managed out because the subjects they may excel in just aren't on offer.

Brent council control the intake and the criteria is EHCP, looked after children, siblings, children of staff, lottery/random allocation with 5 miles (which sounds small but is actually quite large catchment in the area, popular schools which allocate on distance have much smaller catchment).

The sixth form is selective but that is also very common if not exclusively the method locally.

My kids went to a very similar school to Michaela. My eldest ds was really naughty (now dx adhd) did compulsory homework club Monday to Thursday and pretty much every week would have a 2 hour detention on Friday. Yes, it wasn’t ideal. BUT he did get his 5 GCSEs and I used to joke it was equivalent to paying for them to stay and do prep at a private school. In an ideal world he would have had adhd medication. My other son was an 8 and 9 (or straight A) student. He tells me how much he hated the school all the bloody time. Not sure what point I’m making, except perhaps some kids may need detention to help them study? It’s not necessarily terrible.

Pick a school that does those?

Been teaching 25 years and still love it. An ex colleague worked there and enjoyed it but did say that it was less inquiry based learning and more learning by rote. For some kids this is great and for others it wouldn't work. The parents that select this school know what their kids will be getting.
There should be more variation in schools parents get to choose, rather than exam results.

If you don't focus all your teaching on what is necessary to do well in the particular syllabus your school chooses, you give children a wider education and stand a much better chance of teaching them to think for themselves. On the other hand, if, for instance, you drill them for years in certain Shakespeare quotes that always come up in set texts, they don't learn to analyse why those quotes are important in relation to, say, plot or character analysis, they just know they will pass if they somehow shoehorn them into their exam answers.

If you have been taught that way for years, it all kind of falls apart when you are expected to think for yourself at university and no longer have someone kindly feeing you standard exam answers and quotes. It falls apart even more when you are learning something from scratch In a manner that requires much more input and thinking from you, and/or much more practical application. Some people can overcome that and will still do OK, but all too many will not and will have been badly failed.

Do you think children should be punished and segregated for what their parents do or don't do?

Fairly obviously, because if you focus on the relatively narrow requirements of the syllabus for any given GCSE or A level exam to the exclusion of all else, you give pupils an incredibly narrow education. For instance, if I had been in a school which solely concentrated on drilling for A levels, the only periods in history that I would have learned would have been the Tudors and Stuarts, and the first half of the twentieth century, and I would have had zero idea of anything that happened before the Tudors, in between those periods, and after 1945. In English, I would have been taught to chant quotes from Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream before I'd even read either play, and would never have read any others.

I hope that the defects of that sort of education are obvious.

Anyone who thinks this is what routinely happens in schools is deluded.

The purpose of school is not to give you all the knowledge you'll ever need. It's to enable you to discover things for yourself. The school cannot teach you all the History periods, but you learn to engage and you learn to evaluate to structure essays and to use source materials. You learned that for the Tudors and Stuarts, you could surely apply that to the Napoleonic Wars or The Roman Republic or Russia under Stalin.

This kind of school will is best suited to an area of genuine school choice. We've only got one state secondary that we could get a place at. It wouldn't be reasonable for our local school to be run like this.

Well these are arguments for the government surely not an individual school that recognises that if you want to get on in life, the better the qualifications, the more choices and opportunities you have in life. Just because Micheala rigorously teaches for the exams, does not mean that they don’t do anything else to develop the children’s minds- am confused why people think these are mutually exclusive?

no one has ever said school teaches everything. It is impossible. There is a wonderful thing called the internet with endless information for people to find stuff that interests them and they can learn things not in school- prior to this it was boos from the library (I mean it still is but less convinient). I was terrible at science at school, didn’t enjoy it but subsequently as I have aged I have watched loads of information on scientific topics. Life is about endless learning, not just the years you are at school. Parents should be instilling this in their children from birth

Well, no. Plenty of schools manage to get excellent exam results without using Michaela's methods, and also succeed in producing pupils who emerge much better fitted for the world outside schools - precisely because they teach pupils to think for themselves and not to parrot information.

The parents know the GCSEs available before their children start.

If the "predominantly first generation immigrant parents" are anything like my first generation immigrant mother, then the children may not get much of a say in their subject choices anyway. My DM only really approved of science and maths A levels. I doubt she'd have let me do gcse drama, dance, food tech, dt or business studies.

Admissions go through the council, but that does not mean that the school has no say in how those criteria are operated. In particular, the council has to consult the school before naming it for pupils with EHCPs.

Exactly - so they are effectively managed out, in the interests of making life easier for Michaela.

I’d be interested to know how these kids fair at A levels and uni … I mean getting all 9s at GCSE level is very good but it’s only one step in quite a long journey and I’d love to know if her methods ensure ‘success’ further down the line ie can these kids who’ve had a very regimented and drilled education at secondary still do well when they go on to college or university? When there will be distractions, poor behaviour, and no one telling them the formula for how to answer an A grade essay question. If a child can do well at a bog standard secondary, they can do well anywhere!

I work in Education, sot on boads with headteachers and Dorectoes of Education. She and her methods are not well respected. As well as actual exclusion there's a lot of exclusion by way of persuading "unsuitable" families the school is not for them.

Which may well make it an excellent school for those who remain.

But Michaela can’t offer those subjects. Not physically possible- they are in a Tiny office block. They also don’t have the budget to offer all that very specialist teaching to small amounts of children. They aren’t doing it to spite anyone. They literally can’t pull a DT workshop out of thin air (the cost of the equipment is astronomical) or a a massive room full of sewing machines or install working kitchens. Micheala have said they have a narrow curriculum as that is what is practical for them given their space and budget constraints. There will be other schools locally which are bigger that can take on those students who want to do those subjects

It's.not the the school manage admissions from actual applications but that families who don't meet the "standards" are made to feel they won't fit in and don't apply.

Sure, but this was in relation to a question about the methods used at Michaela and why they don't prepare you. I went into the Tudors and Stuarts in depth for A levels, but I had had the benefit through my secondary school life of covering at least UK history from the middle ages up to the 1950s. If all you have ever learnt in history is what the examiners expect you to churn out about the Tudors and Stuarts, that will be of no use to you whatsoever in relation to learning any other history, let alone in learning valuable lessons from history.

I couldn't disagree more about the function of schools. They receive large sums of public money, and they should therefore be providing a proper, rounded education, not just drilling children to pass exams for the greater glory of the headteacher. Getting a good result at A level doesn't give you better choices and opportunities in life if you have not been allowed to develop an ability to think independently because you are so used to being spoonfed.