‘Britain’s Strictest Headmistress’: A Bit Much — But It’s Hard to Argue with the Exam Results
A review of ‘Britain’s Strictest Headmistress’; Riverdog
Productions, 2022.
I have a very strong intuition that conservatives and progressives exist in a state of productive tension, with the progressives galloping off in whatever direction they want and the conservatives desperately trying to slow them down, with the result (in theory, if not always in practice) being a much better outcome for everyone. (When I was small, I and my brother were put on reins, lest we charge off and lose our nanny du jour. The same principles apply: in that instance — to stretch my metaphor — we were the progressives; our nannies were the conservatives.)
I open with this thought because a documentary about a school in England put me in mind of it. The film, Britain’s Strictest Headmistress, concerns Katherine Birbalsingh, a strong-willed headteacher, and the inner-city school she runs. Her school takes students of a wide range of social backgrounds, faiths and ethnicities, many are very poor, and many live with just one parent. And yet these students go on to universities like Oxford and Cambridge as thoroughly articulate, self-confident, impressive eighteen-year-olds. How can this be?
Her school takes students of a wide range of social backgrounds, and these students go on to universities like Oxford and Cambridge as articulate, self-confident, impressive eighteen-year-olds.
The staff at Michaela — that is the name of this school — say it is because it does not work like other schools, which stress ‘child-centred’ learning and a progressive curriculum. Children at Michaela, in contrast, are expected to present themselves well, be silent between lessons, express gratitude before lunch, sing the national anthem, and, on cue, ‘slant’ — stand erect with arms folded across the chest, so straightening the back. Children study Shakespeare, learn by rote and do what they are told or guarantee punishment. This, in other words, is a traditional education of the kind typical in the 1950s; and accordingly the teachers transmit knowledge to the students, stating facts that are to be learnt, rather than try to draw it out of them. Rousseau believed that without the constraints that society placed on children, they would grow naturally towards their highest potential, educationally and morally. But he was wrong, says Birbalsingh: children do not naturally contain the information they need to thrive, and moreover they do not contain the information they need to thrive alongside others. They must receive this information from qualified adults.
Birbalsingh is keen to stress both to her pupils and their parents (from time to time she brings the parents to the school to talk to them about the role they play in supporting their child’s education) that any emphasis on their ‘circumstances’ is harmful. To put it another way, invoking class, racism, sexism, etc. as an explanation for poor behaviour or a sub-par academic performance is, in Birbalsingh’s eyes, disempowering and ultimately detrimental to the child’s growth. She accepts that racism, sexism and so on exist (for what it is worth, she is mixed race); but she chooses to stress the agency of the individual and that individual’s own responsibility in where she lands. In one scene, you can see Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom on her bookshelf, a book which, based on the author’s experience as a prison psychiatrist, argues that the abnegation of personal responsibility, and the emphasis placed on circumstances by academics and public intellectuals, is the root of most social ills, such as violent crime.
Invoking class, racism, sexism, etc. as an explanation for poor behaviour or a sub-par academic performance is, in Birbalsingh’s eyes, disempowering.
As you can imagine, Michaela has more than a few critics. Birbalsingh is routinely called a ‘fascist’, in part because of the highly structured and ritualised character of her school, but mostly because she spoke at the Tory party conference some years ago about failures in education. ‘The system is broken because it keeps poor children poor,’ she said, attacking ‘a culture of excuses, of low standards’, ‘chaos in classrooms’ and a ‘sea of bureaucracy’. She was ostracised over this. And the teachers at Michaela, which she later set up, say they have ‘lost friends’ over their employment at the school. At a parent’s evening, Michaela had to hire a bouncer to stop protestors disrupting the event. And all of this because of the perceived authoritarianism of the place. ‘There is a difference between authoritative and authoritarian,’ Birbalsingh says. The teachers are tough, though. Children are given ‘demerits’ and detentions for being late or for failing to show appropriate respect (such as by sighing). Adult men shout in the faces of children to speak up.
But you cannot argue with the results. At GCSE level, about 90 percent of the students achieve a grade of 4 or above in both Maths and English, and more than half the students score a grade 7 or higher in five subjects, which is equivalent to an A or A*. That is astonishing. The school’s Progress 8 score, which tracks the progress of students from the end of primary school to the end of secondary school, has placed Michaela as one of the top schools in the country. At Sixth Form, about 80 percent of Michaela graduates get places at Russell Group universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE, and Imperial College London. These are some of the best universities in the world. For some privileged children in the United Kingdom, attending one of these universities seems practically to be birthright. For others, it is another world—and a ticket to a different world.
Michaela isone of the top schools in the country. At Sixth Form, about 80 percent of Michaela graduates get places at Russell Group universities.
It is not really worth appraising how the documentary was made, since it is fairly straightforward stuff: narration, b-roll, interviews with children, staff and assorted talking heads. So I will spare you any kind of assessment of its production quality. More interesting, I think, are the questions it raises. What is the purpose of a school education? What will these children say about their experience at Michaela 20 or 30 years from now? Will the academic emphasis have any impact on, say, the social skills of these children? And what happens when, as adults, the children find themselves in less structured environments? (An anecdote: I have a number of friends, some scarily clever, who are fantastic academically but have struggled in non-academic environments precisely because of the perceived lack of structure.)
To return to my opening, it seems to me to be unlikely that either this, very traditional, 50s-inspired approach to schooling can be the best one. But neither is a highly progressive one: in 2022, 41 percent of year 6 pupils in England left primary school without meeting the expected (very basic) standards in literacy and maths — 275,000 11-year-olds, according to researchers at the Centre for Social Justice think-tank. Context, as I will repeat till I am hoarse, is everything, reader, but I suspect neither of these approaches is liable to produce the kind of rounded human beings that can navigate a course through the very choppy waters of life. There is an alternative to the binary traditional-versus-progressive view: work together. But perhaps, in our febrile and sensitive times, that goal too ambitious.
