The Most Hated Woman in Britain?
Britain's Strictest Head Teacher
Diversity Is Our Strength, Except When It Isn’t
Born in New Zealand of an Indian father who grew up in Guyana and a Black Jamaican mother descended from slaves, she was raised in Canada. At age 15, she moved with her family to England where her father took a job lecturing at the University of Warwick in Coventry. She graduated from Oxford where she read French and Philosophy at New College. She followed in her father’s footsteps, going into teaching after graduating from the Institute of Education at University College London (UCL).
Katharine Moana Birbalsingh as a woman of color with a patchwork ancestry, including a grandfather who was Hindu and a grandmother who was Muslim, is a walking, talking embodiment of diversity and multiculturalism. She also works in the field of education, an endeavor generally deified by the left. Why, then, is she one of the most hated women in Britain?
Try being a climate denier, or a mask or vax denier, or, Allah forbid, a teacher as merely a facilitator denier. The woke left does not suffer deviationists kindly. If DEI-denial is not reason enough for the education establishment to hate her, Birbalsingh also cites E.D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1999) as being a major influence on her philosophy of education.
Also a hero of mine, Hirsch was one of the reasons that I decided to go into teaching as something substantive to occupy my time in my early retirement years. I soon learned how loathed Hirsch was among educators, or educationists, as he calls the rigidly ideological leftists who dominate the profession.
After several years of teaching in state schools in poor areas, Birbalsingh could not take it any more. She decided to found her own school.
Michaela Community School
Birbalsingh, who goes by @Miss_Snuffy on X/Twitter, founded Michaela Community School in 2014. The school is located in Wembley in London’s inner city, “and we have a typical inner city intake,” Miss Snuffy says. It is a free school, and it is unlike any other school in Britain. How so? The school:
Takes all comers, but most are from poor, often immigrant families
Requires that students wear uniforms and that the uniforms stay uniform
Allows no phones and recommends that parents not allow them at home either
Requires absolute silence in the hallways which all teachers are required to monitor
Tolerates no disruptions in the classroom with discipline being swift, severe and consistent
Emphasizes academics over socialization and cultural awareness; preserving the student’s native culture, language and religion is a family matter, not the business of the school; the school’s purpose is to bring together, not drive apart
Offers sit-down, family-style lunches with students taking responsibility for serving and clean up
Does not segregate students by race, ethnicity or culture; students eat together, not in self-segregated groups; to avoid potential conflicts over different dietary taboos, the school serves strictly vegetarian lunches
Encourages the academically gifted to pursue a college track but also works with trade schools and groups to place less academically gifted students in trades in which they have an interest and aptitude
Is strictly secular; worship is for the church, mosque, temple or synagogue; no prayer rooms exist in the school building
Miss Snuffy has appeared on numerous podcasts, recently on Unherd with Freddy Sayers.
Freddy Sayers (from the podcast):
Since opening in 2014, Michaela School has become a bit of a lightning rod for the Culture War around education. Katharine has set aside the softly, softly approach of modern teaching for a more no tolerance code of behavior….It turns out that the strictest school in Britain seems to work.
Michaela is rated an outstanding school and rivals the top-ranking private schools in England in its exam results.
Such results would seem to a rational person to be reason for acclaim and imitation. Not for the education establishment, however. State-run schools have been in a death spiral toward failure beginning even before the fiasco of school closures during the Covid panic. Nothing angers the unsuccessful more than someone else’s success, especially when that success is achieved by methods of which the less successful do not approve.
Traditional teaching methods are anathema to the education establishment. Derogatory terms like drill and kill are used to put down old-fashioned teaching techniques such as memorization (of multiplication tables, e.g.). Miss Snuffy’s students are drilled and killed. In my recent teaching experience, teachers were expected to be facilitators in student-centered classrooms where students learned critical thinking skills—how to think, not what to think. Group learning was all the rage. Individual effort and achievement were discouraged at all cost. (My Asian students, in particular, were absolutely flummoxed by this obsession with communal learning.)
Philosophers like Rousseau and the late Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist, are key figures whose philosophical views are promoted in education schools. According to Rousseau, children are born innocent, blank slates, to be written upon by their experiences. Society, particularly its nuclear family unit, corrupts children. It is up to the education system to counter the influence of the family which is the source of prejudice, greed, racism, etc.—essentially all of society’s evils are learned behavior, learned mostly from the mother and father. Birbalsingh believes, however, that children need a strict system of traditional beliefs and values instilled in them in order to develop the discipline and work ethic to succeed in adult life.
The High Court Case Against Miss Snuffy
The left has been trying to cancel Miss Snuffy from the moment her Michaela School first gained positive press. They have unsuccessfully tried every weapon short of an RPG to shoot her down, so far without success. However, recently, she and her school have been grievously wounded. Ironically, it is religion, Islam, that is being used against her.
That was the topic of conversation in her recent interview with Freddy Sayers: My High Court Case to Ban Prayer in School. At first glance, this seems contradictory, at least to American eyes. It is usually Christian fundamentalists who argue against banning prayer in schools and the liberal education establishment that mandates a secular classroom. (Of course, the politics of the far-left these days is more religion than political philosophy, but that’s another topic for another substack.)
A Muslim student (presumably government-funded) is suing the school because it does not have a prayer room. Why is Birbalsingh opposed to providing a prayer room?
We’ve never had a prayer room….First of all, half our kids are Muslim, so a prayer room wouldn’t do. You’re looking at over 300 children, right, so you would need…to have several rooms….Where do you get these several rooms from? We only have enough rooms for the classrooms, so you would have to allow them into the classrooms….
If it’s the case that non-Muslim kids are sent outside and the Muslim kids are all sent upstairs to run around the corridors to go into random classrooms, it would mean total chaos. So, I would never divide the children according to race and religion….
Birbalsingh points out that the student Muslim population at ther school has grown from 30% upon opening to 50% today. It has always been made clear to Muslim and all other families that Michaela does not have a prayer room. Muslim parents have the choice of sending their kids to Islamic schools should they want a religion-based curriculum. No one is forced to attend Michaela.
We’ve done that (increased the Muslim student population) all the while without a prayer room. So, that means the Muslim families have been very happy, and of course the other Muslim families have heard of us and have thought, well, we’re going to come here….
So, lots of familes will say…we wish you had one, but you know, (if) you don’t have a prayer room, it’s okay because we love the school (in) all these other ways…and that’s more important to us in the end. So, it’s sort of up to the families.
Prayer Room, No; Prayer Yes
Although Michaela School has no prayer room, prayer is allowed on an individual basis. From the beginning, students were free to pray in the schoolyard during lunch break.
For eight years nobody ever prayed….I, personally, have never seen a single child pray….Last year, for whatever reason, I don’t know, a few of the children decided to pray and this then spun into something huge which ended up with there being a petition online….
A petition was started. A campaign of hatred was started, campaigning against us, saying that we obviously hate Islam, etc., etc.
The situation came to a head during Ramadan when Muslims, with certain exceptions, are required to fast from sunrise to sunset. Some students chose to fast and some, including girls on their period who are exempt from fasting, chose to eat. Soon, a few of the more fanatic Muslims were intimidating those choosing to eat. The bullies stood by the food stand and prevented students from taking food. The more committed Muslims also intimidated those who were not praying and were not, in the fundamentalists’view, dressed according to the dictates of Allah.
We noticed one girl, for instance, who never wore a hijab before who was suddenly wearing one….So, the culture of the place changed very quickly within days from being this lovely, happy place into one which was quite aggressive and intimidating. And where Muslim children were being intimidated into doing things they didn’t necessarily want to do.
Charitably, Birbalsingh does not attribute the prayer room controversy to being fomented by outside forces. She says that one sees this all the time in schools. The strong kids take over the culture and intimidate the weaker kids.
It’s one of the reasons we have silent corridors….When the stronger kids, the more powerful kids, the cooler kids take over the corridors, the weaker ones end up being hurt by that….The cooler ones end up vying for the position of authority….They’re the ones on top of the culture, and that’s what was happening here….
One thing that is always hard to explain to people about our school is that we control the culture. Elsewhere, people leave the culture to just happen, and whatever happens, happens.
Birbalsingh says that current woke society has it backwards. To be free as adults, children need discipline when they are young. The left says it is okay to chat in class as children, but at the same time, they are censoring adult speech, and censoring it with a vengeance.
“It actually should be the other way around,” she says.
The Elephant in the Prayer Room
Freddy Sayers asks the question why is the case even happening?
Why are we funding a case all the way up to the high court and potentially beyond for someone to try to make this change? Could they not just withdraw from the school and go somewhere else if they don’t like how it’s run?
It is almost a rhetorical question. The obvious answer is yes they can.
What is not supposed to be said (and I eimphasize that I am the one saying it, not Katharine Birbalsingh or Freddy sayers) is that this is happening because it is the nature of Islam to proselytize. Islam spread through military force (jihad). Islam imposed its religion on lands that were conquered by Muslim armies, not by missionaries going door-to-door passing out leaflets.
Fundamentalist Islam sees itself as the one true religion, the culmination of previous religious efforts, be they Zoroastrian, Christian, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism—whatever. Islam emerged from these imperfect attempts at religion to become the one true religion.
Muhammad was not just a prophet, he was THE Prophet. Jesus was also a prophet but an earlier, lesser prophet. The Quran is not just holy scripture. It is divine revelation directly from Allah, through the archangel Gabriel, to the Prophet Muhammad. It is THE holy book. The ONLY holy book.
To the extreme true believers, in fact, it is the only book neccessary to be in print. Because of this, Islam was late to adopt the printing press, and Islamic countries published very few books compared to non-Muslim countries. To engage in an exegesis of the Quran is blasphemy. It is perfection itself, Allah’s word. It cannot be altered or reformed. Finally, the Quran can only be really understood by those who read classical Arabic. Translations do not suffice.
What other culture and/or religion would think to impose its laws and beliefs on a school system of a country to which its believers have immigrated voluntarily, in most cases to escape the oppression of their native country? I think none.
I taught English at El Colegio Americano of Guayaquil, Ecuador. The American School offered an American curriculum for dependents of American expats who wanted their children prepared to reenter American schools when the parents returned to the States.
For Ecuadorians, the school offered a separate Ecuadorian curriculum with a substantial side of English—half the day was spent studying the Ecuadorian curriculum in Spanish, then the second half was spent studying English literature and writing with all classes conducted in English. In both cases, attendance was entirely voluntary.
Similarly, there was an English School, a French School, a German School, etc., for those parents who wanted their kids to study the standard curriculum of their home country. Muslims in Britain have the same option. Why do they not exercise it? Why must they insist that their way of doing things must prevail in a country where they are effectively guests? Aliens, as it were, or used to be, at any rate.
When I started high school, The Ugly American had just been published. We read the book in English class. The book was aimed at America’s disastrous foreign policy, but the title soon became synonymous with the stereotypical boorish American tourist abroad. Two years after high school graduation, I spent the better part of a year hitchhiking through Europe. I worked briefly in Germany, Norway and France. I did everything I could not to come off as the Ugly American.
After college, I spent two years in Ecuador in the Peace Corps. I also spent twenty years in the travel business and traveled extensively. After observing many different nationalities of tourists, I came to believe that the ugly American tourist stereotype was largely myth—that any tourist, whatever nationality, can have his ugly moments.
However, if it can be said that the ugly American, in fact, exists, then surely the ugly Muslim exists as well. However, the ugly Muslim is the only immigrant whose ugliness persists when his status changes from tourist to citizen or resident alien. The ugliness of a distinct minority of Muslims must no longer be tolerated, or we risk losing our free societies.
A popular bumper sticker during the era of Vietnam War protests was America, Love It Or Leave It. Immigrants do not have to love America (or Britain), but they must make adjustments in order to live harmoniously in a melting pot. If an immigrant cannot make the adjustment, then he or she is free to leave, just as students who cannot adjust to the strict requirements of Michaela School are free to leave.
A true heroine. Thank you for this article on a brave person 🙏