At the Michaela Community School near Wembley, in north-west London, there are no mobile phones, detentions are given for the slightest misdemeanour and a disused car park is the no-frills playground.
The high school is famed for being Britain’s strictest, and its headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, pulls no punches.“We have the same issues that you have in Australia: poor behaviour and poor learning outcomes, in particular for disadvantaged children,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Katharine Moana Birbalsingh is a British teacher and education reformer who is the founder and head teacher of Michaela Community School.
Birbalsingh espouses traditional teaching and believes in military-style discipline: students walk the corridors in silence and get detentions for forgetting a pencil case, ruler or not turning in their homework. Timetables are taught by rote. Progressive education methods are shunned. Gratitude is practised and expectations are high.
“I’m not wandering up and down the corridors with whips and chains, obviously,” she says. “People say [discipline] is mean. I’d say what is mean is keeping a child illiterate and innumerate.”
Birbalsingh, who was recently appointed chair of the UK’s social mobility commission, was thrust into the spotlight after giving a speech at the 2010 Conservative Party conference where she warned the education system was “broken because it keeps poor children poor”. Four years later, after battling a barrage of detractors and critics, she opened the Michaela school in a dreary converted office block based in the disadvantaged borough of Brent.
The school’s explicit teaching methods, no-excuses behaviour policy and direct instruction style divide opinion. Tough-love behaviour systems (slouching in class is off-limits, toilet breaks are timed) has attracted controversy and critics.
However, it has also drawn praise from experts including Programme for International Student Assessment boss Andreas Schleicher who has described the school as creating “discipline created through structure, predictability and ownership. The children I met appeared happy and confident.” And its results place it well above average when compared to other similar schools, with graduates going off to universities including Oxford and the London School of Economics.
Birbalsingh, labelled Britain’s strictest headteacher, is firm that the school’s behaviour policies, including the silent corridor rule, minimise bullying and maximise teaching time.
“In schools with disadvantaged children sometimes you can find poor behaviour, and it can be constant disruption. As a disadvantaged child school is your one route out, your way of being able to be socially mobile. And if school lets you down, then that’s it.”
Katharine Birbalsingh, the headmistress at Michaela Community School in Wembley, has been billed Britain’s strictest headteacher.
“We expect everyone to do their homework. If standards are lowered for certain children, who will inevitably be the disadvantaged children, then those children will never succeed.”
She rejects “progressive” teaching methods, where desks are grouped and students “lead the learning”. Teachers at Michaela have a single voice in the classroom and there is silence for reading, writing and practice.
“You have got to have lots of knowledge about something to think differently about it. When you teach children as a traditionalist you can still break up explanations and have a bit of turn to your partner work and class discussions.”
Tight rules around smartphones and social media are also critical, she says. At an education conference this year she told the audience: “If we genuinely want things to be fairer, and we want our disadvantaged children to be socially mobile, the best thing is getting them not to have a smartphone.”
Students are encouraged to hand over their mobile phones where they are put in a school safe for days, weeks or months.
Michaela, one of about 600 “free schools” in the UK, was singled out last month by NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet in a speech for the James Martin Institute as a school with a “rigorous culture of high expectations, high behavioural standards and back-to- basics teaching that [has] propelled disadvantaged students to extraordinary achievement. I want the same outcomes for our kids.”
“When students are held to reasonable standards of behaviour and respect – they perform better, and they are happier,” he said. It came after NSW announced a global recruitment search for a chief behaviour adviser, as schools across sectors battle worsening student conduct.
This month, Birbalsingh, who was a teacher for more than a decade in inner-London schools before starting Michaela, will appear at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney on a discussion about building world-class schools.
She emphasises that her school, next to the jubilee and metropolitan line (the train can be heard rattling loudly in the bare-bones school yard), looks “quite simple”.
“We’ve not covered the walls with lots of pictures and things. People don’t realise, when I was a younger teacher, I spent all of my time decorating. I use my fire engine red paint for the border around my bulletin board and would put up lovely dark blue paper with a golden border around it and I would pay myself to create big laminated sheets with instructions.
“I should have as my time planning better lessons… I shouldn’t have been spending my time on that. And sometimes we all spend our time on things that don’t have as much impact.”
Oliver Lovell, a Melbourne-based maths teacher who visited the school last month, said while it was hard to overstate the positive impact of Michaela’s instruction on disadvantaged students, there were potential costs when a particular educational approach is passionately pursued.
“Some have argued that highly structured instructional methods reduce learner independence which has negative impacts when the structure is removed at university and beyond. I’m glad that we have a diversity of schools, including Michaela, so that we can begin to gain clearer answers to these important questions.”
Lovell said one of the most striking aspects to the school was seeing how the lack of student disruptions “frees up teacher time”.
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