As everyone else headed home for the holidays, I found myself frantically checking my watch at a tube stop, hoping I wouldn’t be late. I was going back to school. Following weeks of self-guided learning, the Michaela Community School in Wembley was a shock to my system. The silent corridors certainly did not facilitate inside jokes about which college is the biggest red flag, and it was quickly obvious I’d left the Cambridge bubble to enter an entirely new one. Cambridge students are known for their intense study hours, dedication, and hardiness in the face of intellectual challenge, but could I survive in Britain’s strictest school?
“[Schools] socialise the future of the country,” says Katherine Birbalsingh, the headmistress and driving force behind Michaela. “I think people underestimate just how important schools are in shaping a country’s culture.” For Birbalsingh, culture is paramount. The culture of Michaela is one of discipline and high standards, to which Birbalsingh attributes the school’s success. She’s meticulous in ensuring that her school encourages pupils to “work hard and be kind”. Teachers are recruited directly or via the school’s talent pool. Birbalsingh spends one-on-one time with her teachers during training, ensuring that her team aligns with her mission. This hands-on approach is the catalyst in creating the distinctive culture of Michaela Community School.
“I think people underestimate just how important schools are in shaping a country’s culture”
This culture is evident from the moment you walk through the doors. Children are silent in the corridors and speak only to greet teachers. In lessons, children were constantly required to keep eyes on their teacher, and students inform me that repeated failure to ‘track the teacher’ in this way can lead to a ‘demerit’ or detention. The teaching approach is uniform and fast-paced. Teachers deliver information, interspersed with questions to test recall. Children with the correct answers are praised and sometimes rewarded with a ‘merit’; those who are incorrect are guided to the correct answer, and the lesson moves on. No faff, no frills.
The school doesn’t allow group work, as the headteacher believes it is a “waste of time”. While she may be correct that it doesn’t directly teach academic skills, group work is also a vehicle for complex interpersonal skills and collective decision making. These skills are not fully neglected at Michaela: “I just don’t think it’s appropriate for the classroom,” Birbalsingh explains. Instead, interpersonal skills are instilled during ‘family lunch’, where students are given a super-curricular topic to discuss while eating (as a musician, I was relieved that this was ‘composers’ during my visit), and report back to the teacher every few minutes. Children defer to an adult at almost every point.
When I ask if deference to authority is really an unquestioned value that we want in the citizens Birbalsingh is shaping, the answer is a clear, confident “yes”. “Children need to understand adults are in charge,” she states, bringing the conversation back to success and discipline – which she believes cannot be taught “by putting them in groups and allowing them to lead themselves”. By obeying as children, she believes that we learn how to become our own authority figure later in life.
“Children need to understand adults are in charge”
Birbalsingh believes that there is an ideal “objective way” to teach, and that her school models it, or at least strives to. To her credit, the school has the results to back it up: her “children achieve huge amounts,” suggesting that Michaela is “getting it right”. When asked if this uniform approach works for all children, considering those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), she remains confident, telling me that their SEND pupils thrive at Michaela. “I would take issue with the assumption that they’re all the same, which they’re not […] What they are is polite,” Birbalsingh states, chiding me for what she saw as a misinterpretation of her student’s behaviour. Where I identified conformity, Birbalsingh sees propriety. “They’re all very different,” she tells me, guiding me to moments from my visit which highlighted the student’s considerate nature. One student asked if I was okay taking the stairs, having noticed I was wearing high heels.
It is also clear that students enjoyed their subjects and engaged with their learning, and evidently, students aren’t asked to lose any glimmer of personal identity, provided they obey the school’s rules. However, accommodation of SEND pupils goes beyond self-expression. Birbalsingh confirms to me that the school employs no SEND specific staff. I’m sceptical of her insistence that because you can’t tell who has ADHD and autism, SEND students are well accommodated, and I worry that masking behaviour may be misinterpreted as “thriving”. These worries are particularly pertinent when the spectrum of severity within these diagnoses is considered, and how masking can have later detrimental effects.
Inspired by my lunch with the students, where a Year 7 pupil publicly thanked a teacher for giving them homework which will help them in their GCSE exams, my questions turn to mental health: how does the school counteract overwhelm and exam anxiety? Birbalsingh finds that children are “very happy” at Michaela. She demands: “Did you find any of the children were dealing with mental health issues?” Concerned by this conflation of mental health issues with visible distress, I push back. I mention how constant cognitive demand can lead to overwhelm, and ask how they motivate students to do well. The headmistress believes that motivation occurs “if you’re taught properly, you have good discipline and you have good values”.
“Birbalsingh insists that her approach prevents children from graduating ‘functionally illiterate’”
While the school has frameworks in place for struggling students, Birbalsingh makes it clear to me that my questions misunderstand her school. When I press the issue further, she bristles and bluntly informs me that “hard work isn’t something [I] should denigrate” by asking about how the children remain motivated in their academic pursuits. She adds that I “seem to have a problem with [hard work],” before insisting that her approach prevents children from graduating “functionally illiterate”. While it seems harsh to imply that hard work and discussions about wellbeing in schools are mutually exclusive, Birbalsingh is correct that inner-city schools do not typically produce such positive outcomes; it could be argued that her no-excuses approach is the result of belief in these children’s futures.
By the end of our interview, my questions over the cost of these futures remain unanswered. Internally, I wonder what good a disciplined child can do if they’re too overwhelmed to perform. Michaela has only been running since the mid-2010s, and so we’re yet to see the long-term fruits of Birbalsingh’s labour. As I’m shown out of the school, I reflect on what Britain’s strictest headmistress has taught me. I have been immersed in education my entire life, and it was jarring to hear that we might have been approaching it wrong. I’m not sure I’m ready to throw out group projects and hallway chatter, but this school and the community it serves make a compelling case.
