‘White teachers should teach ethnic minority children to sing God Save the King’, says government’s social mobility tsar Katharine Birbalsingh
- Katharine Birbalsingh said ethnic minority pupils should learn national anthem
- Social mobility tsar, 49, said not belonging makes pupils ‘ripe for radicalisation’
- Britain’s strictest head also slammed identity politics taking over British schools
The government’s social mobility tsar has said that white teachers should teach schoolchildren from an ethnic minority background to sing God Save the King.
Social Mobility Commission chair Katharine Birbalsingh, who is known as Britain’s strictest headteacher, said children could risk not feeling they ‘belong’ in the UK if they do not sing the national anthem – even if it makes them feel ‘uncomfortable’.
In a lecture at the University Oxford yesterday Ms Birbalsingh, 49, said that ethnic minority children can suffer poor teaching of ‘basic cultural knowledge’ because teachers believe they ‘cannot identify with so-called “white” things’.
She added that white teachers can ‘feel uncomfortable having ethnic minority children sing the national anthem’.
Social Mobility Commission chair Katharine Birbalsingh (pictured), who is known as Britain’s strictest headteacher, said children could risk not feeling they ‘belong’ in the UK if they do not sing the national anthem
‘But who loses out?’ the co-founder Michaela Community School in Wembley, London asked the audience of her Roger Scruton Memorial lecture education, race and conservatism yesterday
‘But who loses out?’ the co-founder Michaela Community School in Wembley, London asked the audience of her Roger Scruton Memorial lecture education, race and conservatism.
Ms Birbalsingh said the child who is ‘taught over and over by his school, by the media’ that he does not belong in country loses out as no child could succeed in a country they do not see as home, The Telegraph reports.
The ‘Tiger Teacher’ issued a stark warning that not letting ethnic minorities identify as ‘British’ left them ‘ripe for radicalisation’.
Ms Birbalsingh also slammed identity politics taking over British schools as well as plans to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.
Pupils at her school sing the national anthem and teacher wore black and flew the Union Flag at half-mast in the wake of the Queen’s death.
She added that stopping poorer children from learning about Great British culture, customs and historical literature ‘shuts them in a cage’.
It is also right to talk about controversial parts of Britain’s history and wrong to ‘whitewash’ ethnic minority people out of it, adding that it was ‘wrong to talk about “black history” as if it is some kind of add-on.’
She said the ‘determination of the progressives to deny ethnic minorities their birthright to identify as British, is outrageous’.
Britain’s ‘tiger headmistress’ took on her own school where students must ‘dress smartly’ and phones are BANNED
Katharine Birbalsingh won a standing ovation at the Conservative Party conference after she delivered a damning indictment of ‘utterly chaotic’ state schools in 2010.
But soon afterwards she was sent home from her school in Camberwell, South London, after her speech, and lost her job as a deputy head teacher at the inner city academy.
The former Marxist turned conservative was the surprise star of the Tory conference when she laid bare an education system in which children were ‘lost in a sea of bureaucracy’.
She said schools were crippled by league tables, exams were dumbed down and ‘well meaning liberal’ teachers refused to discipline black children for fear of being called racist.
The Oxford University graduate also admitted that she had voted Conservative for the first time after a decade working in state schools having supported Labour.
She was born in New Zealand, the elder of two daughters of Frank Birbalsingh, an academic, and his wife, Norma, a nurse.
After leaving Oxford she began working in inner city schools in South London. After her sacking in 2010 she wrote several books before becoming head of Michaela Community School in Wembley, having founded the school in 2014 with Suella Braverman, who is now a Tory MP.
She was dubbed the ‘tiger headmistress’ for how she runs her school, where Year 7 pupils are taught how to sit properly on a chair.
New students are also shown how to walk to lessons quickly in single file and how to concentrate on the teacher and to instill good behaviour as soon as they arrive, while mobile phones are banned.
They are told to keep their shirts tucked in and to pick up crumbs from the floor after eating at a boot camp, which teaches pupils how to ‘behave in the Michaela way’.
She was voted in the top 20 most influential people in British education in 2017 and given a CBE for services to education in 2020.
In October 2021, she was appointed Chair of the Social Mobility Commission.
She has has never spoken publicly about her private life, other than about her parents, and is understood not to have any children saying previously she is ‘completely dedicated’ to her work.
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