Michaela school - experiences?

[teathyme]

This is purely out of curiosity as I live nowhere near it. I saw an interview with the HT and whilst I didn't agree with everything she said the results are very impressive. I know sometimes on paper things are very different to on the ground so just wondered if anyone had experience of it and what they thought?

I can believe a school won't feed a child who hasn't paid. In my dc's school I have it set so that when their account goes under a certain amount it automatically tops it up by £5. For some reason once it didn't top up and dd wasn't allowed lunch as she had less in her account than what the cheapest item was.

It was just your post almost justifying putting a child in isolation because a students parents haven't paid for their child's lunch. I refuse to believe schools wouldn't give a student some type of lunch if they have a negative balance on their account. At the school i attended, the school will give you a full lunch but will send letters home asking parents to apply for FSM if they can no longer afford to pay.
For a school to let a child go hungry, is just evil imo. Schools do have a duty of care.

Well the HT was asked about the situation and apparently said no child went without food. If their parents can’t/won’t pay the daily lunch fee they are excluded from ‘family lunch,’ a hot meal enjoyed with their teachers and friends (the lovely experience described by a pp) and spend the 60 minute break sitting alone in a room eating a sandwich and a piece of fruit. Until the money owed is paid in full they are subjected to this every single day. This is to teach the children (who don’t have jobs and therefore have no access to money to pay overdue lunch fees) ‘personal responsibility.’

Wow some schools are ruthless then. The headteacher at my nieces school will write in the weekly newsletter about children having negative balances on their account and it needed to be paid off (or apply for FSM is you can't afford to pay), but they will still be provided with lunch.

That's absolutely ridiculous imo but i guess some parents love it hence why she has soo many fans.

No, it wouldn’t come up, would it? Because a child sitting alone for an hour eating a sandwich and piece of fruit as a punishment for something they have no control over, while others eat a two course hot meal together, doesn’t fit with the ‘family lunch’ image they were trying to portray to you. Isolated from peers and teachers and made sit alone eating restricted foods as punishment because your parent won’t give you money isn’t discipline, it’s bullying. How on earth is a child supposed to come up with that money? But they don’t want to hear that because it goes against the ‘strict punishments teach responsibility.’ They’re being punished for things that aren’t their responsibility.

My niece goes to a school run on similar lines in Sheffield. The thing that worries me is these kids have spent 7 years being told what to do in every aspect of their school lives, they haven't been allowed to think for themselves, how will they cope when they leave school?

I live very close to a school that self-proclaimedly has a similar ethos to this school. I have spoken to members of the SLT and know what they think and why they run the school as they do. I think they are honestly driven by wanting to do the right thing.
I also know the parents who are managing their children's incredibly high rates of anxiety (one ran away rather than going into school having forgotten an item of uniform). I know children who have achieved all 8s and 9s at GCSE and who have completely crumbled at A level and are either unable to engage with education at all or who are doing college courses which, whilst they are laudable courses in themselves, are light-years away from what these students are academically capable of.
My ex-partner taught there for 3 weeks. They have a solid reputation of 20+ years teaching with excellent discipline and respect (and results). They said that, if they'd wanted to teach in Singapore they'd move there. They thought it was the most horrific environment (and they are no "liberal leftie") for education and chose to leave immediately.
My own children go to a relatively liberal school where they can keep their phones, where they enjoy learning and where they are engaged and involved in every aspect of school. Admittedly it's a selective school so there is a lot of parental engagement and support. But their other parent (the teacher above) said he would rather they go to a failing school than the authoritarian one because they felt it would destroy any semblance of creativity, independent thought or personality.

Michaela's sixth form requirements are sky high as well - on par with a grammar schools if not more. You have to have achieved 7s, 8s and 9s at GCSE.

That explains why their alevels results are very high - they literally only accept external students with the highest grades, and you are probably asked to leave and go elsewhere if you are an internal student and didn't get 7s, 8s and 9s.

I didn't have those advantages but the nuns did make sure I could hold my own academically with the kids from the nice areas, nice schools who had no disadvantages.

I suppose some people don't like the kids from the slums doing well, maybe doing better than them. Know your place in the underclass.

@ancientgran
Weirdly, the nuns and Christian Brothers teaching in schools in deprived inner city Dublin in the 1940s and 50s had no hesitation to let the poor children know their place. Even schools for the well off were terrifying and left horrible scars.

A very rigid class structure was maintained in Ireland for many decades by means of the education system until the educational reforms of the 1960s under Donagh O'Malley.

Educational improvements included provision of bus transport from rural homes to secondary schools, widening of access to secondary schools through creation of Community Schools, and improvements to the already existing Technical Schools, and the development of a network of Regional Technical Colleges (now called Institutes of Technology) which initially offered certificate programmes in various vocational and technical courses but now offer degrees. All schools in Ireland offer the same curriculum and all students take the same national exams.

Is it possible that creating a more egalitarian primary and secondary education system and offering students realistic and practical options at third level in the UK could have a better effect in the long run than a return to the brutal regimes of the past? A little thinking outside the box is sometimes a very good thing.

What I'd like to see is KB go into a deprived inner city school where there's 2500 pupils and replicate this.

Prove to us it's nothing to do with area, pupil numbers, cohort etc.

She believes it can be done so do it. Give every pupil in England and Wales the opportunities she thinks other HTs are denying them.

See what happens when a whole generation of pupils are made to eat one lunch choice a day, see if you can replicate the same lunch experiences where you have twice as many pupils per sitting, 5 times as many students daily in detention etc.

More children with send and echps.

In fact - they can't have many students with echps in they have no TAs. Echps are for students who need more than is readily available in MS school. By definition that requires a tailored approach and 1:1 support.

They appear to make sen students stay longer for extra input and my ds school did this and it was slammed by the judge in tribunal.

No one is suggesting elements of this aren't good. But everyone is realistic enough to know this isn't your typical school from the off.

Why should she go and replicate her system elsewhere? She has a school to run.
The pont about one choice for meals is ridiculous. I was at school in the sixties and there was only ever one meal on offer. It's not a disadvantage. The opposite, in fact. In those days school meals had to be nutritionally balanced, which is not the case today.

KB has been rather contradictory on SEN. On the one hand she's "no excuses" but then when asked says "Well we wouldn't expect an autistic child to do XYZ" and "autistic children love structure". I daresay parents of kids who wouldn't cope just don't apply. I know I wouldn't; I have a DC who simply cannot stay still and putting him in a school like this would set him up to fail.

The apologist post saying "But Michaela doesn't have a narrow curriculum!" directly contradicts the evidence given above. They don't get as many choices for curriculum. Extracurricular clubs aren't a full substitute. If you drill children for their exams, they will pass them. Michaela uses a very rigid approach to teaching as well and KB claims that children aren't unique and all basically learn the same way. I suspect only a certain type of teacher would enjoy working there: I've been a teacher and I don't think I would.

I do think KB rather delights in her image as "the strictest headteacher". Plenty of schools are rather strict and traditional without delighting in this kind of punitive behaviour or claiming it's how black & brown children need to learn.

I wouldn't go so far to say that it's horrible and abusive but Katharine Birbalsingh massively exaggerates what she does.

It's also a bit weird, from the little I've seen.

Not just strict, but strange and strict — teaching unusual behaviours as desirable. The documentary I saw, a kid was instructed to stand there with crossed arms while talking to the teacher, which as body language goes, tends to communicate rude, dismissive, impatient aloofness more than respectful listening, in a 1–1 situation. My teachers wouldn't have been very happy about the message a kid was sending by standing there talking to them with crossed arms (though depending on the situation I'd guess they might let it slide), and that's good, because the rest of our society would potentially interpret it as rude or hostile too. I wonder how long it would take an autistic Michaela student to relearn how crossed arms can often be perceived socially, once they leave.

The kids in the documentary kept doing frankly odd-looking things they were clearly expected to do, like standing up (after a meal I think?) and gabbling shouted gratitudes, or doing peculiar rhythmic things when putting away their study materials.

I know it's minor, but I think that's one of the things that puts people off the idea of the school when they see documentaries — not so much the expectation that behaviour which is normally desired in schools will be very strictly enforced, but kids being systematically instructed and required to behave in ways that creep us out because they're unfamiliar and don't quite adhere to social norms.

Yes the crossed arms is weird. All the children being interviewed sit like it and I couldn't work out why I didn't like it - but you're right it's the body language message it conveys.

And my point about 1 choice of food is that not everyone likes everything. It's well known that by making food an issue or punishment you are increasing chances of an eating disorder.

The school has refused to respond to a FOI request asking how many pupils have autism in the school. Why?

There is some really good ideas and practice in the school but their overall glee in being punitive, regimented and limiting access to a variety of subjects just doesn't sell it to me as a success story. Rather a small school doing what it can.

Success would be proving it can work in all schools and proving her way of teaching is really the gold standard and only way to create successful students.

@itsgettingweird I remember those interviews too — it's possible that the documentary-makers asked the children to sit like that while being interviewed, to reinforce the impression of weird, brainwashed cult-children… hopefully, most of them don't follow the Michaela way on their own time.

(I don't think they are weird, brainwashed cult-children; all the kids in the documentary I saw seemed like perfectly nice ordinary kids — but the behaviour expected of them in the school is a little weird at times and I think it's likely the documentary-makers had an incentive to play that up as much as possible.)

I don’t think they were asked to as such - they are expected to always have their eyes following the teacher and if the teacher shouts ‘slant’ (made up jargon, a technique common to cults, the army, and this school apparently) all the students have to suddenly bolt upright with crossed arms. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this particular position. Same as there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the rote learning etc. Most of the things they do aren’t really considered best practice - they brag that they read 5 Shakespeare plays a year, learn several poems by heart etc. But in academic life you aren’t really rewarded for being able to shout out a whole poem or explain the basic plot of 10 Shakespeare works. It isn’t really what people are looking for. You’re certainly not rewarded for being able to do ridiculous tasks in tiny timeframes - while at Michaela you can land yourself in detention if you can’t retrieve your book from your bag and find the right page within 10 seconds. Who of us have ever had to do that? What skill could it possibly be teaching?

The arm folding comes out of her belief that all children with free arms will fidget or maul each other. It's the Michaela equivalent of being made to sit on your hands. In the free school near me they also do this, and have to walk in corridors silently (which was actually fairly blissful for a one off visit!) but with arms behind backs which made them all look like middle aged men walking a cricket boundary.

More children with send and echps.

In fact - they can't have many students with echps in they have no TAs. Echps are for students who need more than is readily available in MS school. By definition that requires a tailored approach and 1:1 support.

Having looked at the statistics for Michaela and other state funded secondary schools in the same LA. 8 schools have higher percentage of EHCPs, although at 2 have ARPs so you would perhaps expect a higher %. 6 schools have a lower percentage of EHCPs, although one of these schools is relatively new, so perhaps should be excluded from comparisons.

The school has a higher than average (both nationally and within the LA) percentage of pupils on SEN support.

And yet on the good schools guide they are way below average for teaching assistants. Rated poor actually.

And also have a higher than average percentage on unqualified teachers.

And a below average number of students going on to post 16 training. They only take students with an average of 7 GCSEs at 7+ grade and need an 8 in a level subjects studying. They take 40 pupils onto a level courses.

The numbers are just very skewed to the point they don't add up.

Its also a school that under occupied with a low offer rate which I think explains a lot.

You wrote More children with send and echps. In fact - they can't have many students with echps in they have no TAs.

But they have a higher than average % of pupils with SEND and sit roughly in the middle of the LA for the percentage of EHCPs. So your point is moot. Yes, it doesn’t suit all pupils with an EHCP or at SEN support level, but it clearly suits some. Not all EHCPs include specified and quantified 1:1 support. I have no idea but perhaps they use the unqualified teachers to provide the provision in the EHCPs or perhaps the pupils’ EHCPs include other provision rather than TA support.

The higher number of unqualified teachers could be explained by it being a free school.

They don’t have a below average number of students continuing in education or employment for at least 2 terms after KS4. They have 94% according to the government statistics, which is the same as the national average. Although admittedly that is 1% lower than the LA average.

The 40 pupils for A levels isn’t the total number, but the PAN for external pupils they take. Internal students aren’t included in that number.

Do you have statistics to back up your claim Michaela is undersubscribed? The school’s PAN is 120 and according to the government statistics they had 120 in Y11 last year. They also had 360 pupils in 2017 when OFSTED visited when they only had Y7-Y9.

Their SEN policy includes 1:1 and small group work and mentions support staff so they must have someone who delivers this even if they don’t call them TAs.

I said above I read the good schools guide.

I just said the information doesn't add up statistics wise to me knowing what I know about education. In many different ways shape and forms.

I just don't think you can take the data and make the same work in all schools which is what KB claims should be happening.

I don't think she could even replicate it in a normal sized secondary school in areas of different ethnicity or predominantly white British WC males.

I don't dispute that it works for her school - I don't like her methods but clearly some do - I dispute her claims it's easily and should replicated. And if it isn't it's because the HTs are wokey lefties.

Some of the good schools guide statistics must be incorrect or out of date then as they don’t have a lower than average number of pupils continuing in education or employment according the the official government statistics.

I can’t see where on the good schools guide it states they are undersubscribed. It states they have “pupils: 698; sixth formers: 85” which means they are actually oversubscribed in Y7-11 as their PAN is 120.

Yes, it isn’t for everyone and I don’t agree with all the approach, but criticising because you think the school is undersubscribed, has a low number of pupils with EHCP or SEN support and a lower than average continuing in education/employment is strange when none of that is true.