Is this the mother of all calling out - Katherine Birbalsingh

[DramaFatigue]

Katherine Birbalsingh has done the mother of all calling out and I can't help but sit here with my jaw on the kitchen table in awe.

She has written a 4-page open letter to Sir Kerr Starmer calling out Jess Phillip's behaviour online. Whilst I don't always agree with KB's methods of the school she runs, I do think that Jess Phillips behaviour towards her is shocking and unbefitting of someone who could be running the country. JP should resign TBH.

https://news.sky.com/story/headteacher-katharine-birbalsingh-brands-labour-mp-jess-phillips-social-media-posts-racist-and-bullying-12913139

JP is not racist and anyone who knows her will know that.
Loud and opinionated - yes. You don’t have to like her or agree with her, but calling her racist because she dislikes someone who happens not to be white is a bit shitty.

JP is vocal about lots of people. She calls out things she disagrees with. Sometimes she’s right and sometimes she’s not but she wouldn’t target someone because of their ethnicity.

If you eliminate the children who don't have engaged supportive parents and those with behavioural problems and those financially struggling to comply with the "extras" of course you get good results.

Like for like, the other schools in that part of the borough do well - they also have to mop up the children exited from Michaela (which was also on a much better financial footing for a long time as a gov policy poster school).

I think they both do. Get off social media kids and do something else.

That would be hilarious if it wasn't a head teacher showing they can't read something correctly.

I wonder if KB would accept this sort of excuse from students, "I didn't notice that Miss" "I didn't mean it like that Miss" "Sorry Miss it was just a mistake" somehow I think she'd expect them to check what they are publishing on social media. Would be interesting to know.

Good point. I don't think KN would accept any excuses for anything - especially on SM. She encourages her pupils to stay away from SM and hand their phones in during exam periods because it distracts them from their education.

Clearly she's very "do as I say"

They both sound as bad as each other and shouldn't be in charge of anything. Never mind a school and potentially a country.

It's easy, really.

1. Look at the Admissions Code 2022. Chuck it in the bin.
2. Make the Open evenings and all correspondence absolutely hostile and unappealing - an Open Evening speech saying 'We don't want you as much as you want us, so you'd better be sure that if you are going to try and come here, you'd better be grateful for it, as we'll kick your kid out immediately', for example.
3. Look at the Exclusions and Suspensions Guidance. Chuck it in the bin.
4. Look at every consultation for an EHCP and if the child has anything resembling a challenge to complete, unquestioning compliance and high educational attainment/ability, say that the school is unable to meet their needs and take every single one that is still pushed through to appeal. And then, if that fails, see #2.
5. Make those that slip through the gatekeeping absolutely miserable until their parents move them.
6. Bit of off rolling just before the end of Year 10 so it doesn't flag up as gaming the results with Ofsted. if Ofsted start looking at Year 10, do it six months earlier instead.
7. Have an expensive legal team on retainer for dealing with any inconvenient panels and appeals.
8. Appeal to parents' fears so that they do not question anything done because results/Oxbridge/gangs/etc.
9. Respond to any suggestions, observations or criticism as though it's a direct attack and personal insult.

In fact, she has parents queuing up to get their children a place there and she has children from this inner city school regularly getting places in Oxbridge and other Russell Group universities.

I wouldn’t call it an inner city school. It is in Wembley, an outer suburb!

It's depressing how toxic social media is 😔

Katharine Birbalsingh – undaunted by free school setback | Katharine Birbalsingh | The Guardian

"She thinks black children misbehave because they know that any teacher who disciplines them is accused of racism. "Black kids," writes Miss Snuffy, "all have that winning ace up their sleeve – the race card ... The kid can literally smell the fear. So the teacher starts to back off."

Really? Highlighting and fighting DV is something that politicians should have enough time to do.

Philips, for all her faults, stands up in Parliament every year on IWD and reads out the names of women killed by men since the last IWD. They are killed by current or ex-partners or family members often after years of abuse.

Calling out someone for posting a picture of a known abuser on the death of the woman he abused is appalling even for KB who does some pretty tone deaf stuff. She dishes it out but can't take it, i think?

This is always trotted out, but never seems to be backed up whenever the school is scrutinised.

Totally agree. Whichever 'side' you're on this is not the way to conduct yourself, prolonged spats on social media. The pair of them need their heads banging together and to attend a course on professional behaviour.

I loathe KB but it was JP who was wildly unprofessional in her responses. After KB apologised for the mistake she became aggressively sarcastic. The letter is over written but more right than wrong.
About her results?
Make your school so ambitiously strict that the only parents who select you are aspirational and that your only SEN learners are those who thrive in a quiet controlled environment. Support these children by lots of rote teaching and chanting - matches Grove’s Gradgrind curriculum and then sit back and watch the local schools get the children who would never have thrived there. It’s not much different to being a grammar school. What she does is in no way replicable across the country. These schools convert relatively few tricky students and I do worry about how many they make axious or unprepared for a world that is much much less organised. It reminds me of when I did my Degree and watched an unfathomable amount of students drop out. I realised that most were privately educated and while they had lots of advantages I hadn’t they had never been very responsible for themselves or their work so an English degree with relatively little contact time and lots of independence was something they weren’t prepared for.

Wow. She reads out some names. Absolutely dwarfs the achievements of a successful headteacher and clearly entitled her to impugn that teachers safeguarding standards on the basis of no evidence at all. What a towering example to us all Jess Phillips is.

Would she have done the same if it had been a white Head Teacher doing the same?

I don’t see why not. But how many other headteachers are in the public eye, controversial, and with a high profile on Twitter. I can’t think of any at the moment.

@Iwasafool Absolutely but it seems that this is a social media spat. It's Twitter, we shouldn't run politics on Twitter

Neither woman is exactly covering themselves in glory here, and it's not a great advert for conducting any kind of sensitive or nuanced debate on social media.

That being said, KB's letter has the ring of that colleague in another department who complains about you to your boss without raising the issue directly with you first, and that kind of spiteful pettiness really grinds my gears.

I think both are aiming to stir up controversy on social media which is inevitably going to come back and bite you.

JP should not be questioning the safeguarding at the school with very little specific information or experience.

KB has gone over the top with the letter and should have just apologised for what was obviously a genuine error. She craves publicity.

Not via a personal Twitter spat

She needs to focus on better ways to do it

Funny. When I was at university all the drop outs and 2.2ers were state educated.
if we’re doing anecdata …

Campingsuperstar
Exactly, a set of exam results is not enough to measure outcomes, I do wonder what the school's results would look like if they monitored achievement and mental wellbeing at age 25.
My 25 Yr old DD maintains that if we hadn't removed her from her primary school (which was the UK's top performing state school at the time) she would probably have crashed as a teenager. So many kids who went there, developed mental health problems later on.

People like KB are bullies. Good on JP for standing up to her.

Agree she reminds me of Hopkins.

Her school looks awful to attend or teach at. Dehumanising.

Most schools can if they off roll and are selective. Simple.