No phones, no make-up, no mirrors, and detentions if a pupil steps out of line. These are some of the many rules at the Michaela Community School in Brent, the school led by Katharine Birbalsingh – nicknamed the strictest headmistress in Britain.
But the middle classes don’t send their children to this school, Ms Birbalsingh explained. “They wouldn’t want their children mixing with our children. They don’t have the right accents or come from the right families,” she said in an interview with The Times. “I think that is just terrible. It’s snobbery,” she added.
Yet, the London non-selective school gets better grades than Harrow and ranks among the best in the country. More than 40 per cent of pupils achieved five or more grade 9s in their GCSEs last year despite about 36 per cent of them being on free school meals and speaking English as a second language.
While Ms Birbalsingh agrees that results are important, she explains it’s only a small part of what the school does, explaining that the pupils are “far happier” than at many other inner-city schools.
She insists that the school’s strict rules do not turn the pupils into robots but instead prepare them to be “independent” and ready for a Russell Group University. For those who do not have “structure” at home, they get it at school, she adds.
“People imagine I am walking along the corridor with whips and chains, but I can be quite funny. The staff like me and we have a nice time,” she said.
Ms Birbalsingh argues that phones are the biggest issue in education and it is “breaking their brains”. Pupils in the bottom sets are the biggest phone “users” in her opinion.
She also believes her strict rules and proper education are the answer to the over 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds who are not in employment, education or training (NEET).
Ms Birbalsingh claims there wouldn’t be a NEET problem if the UK educated young people “properly”. She explained young people are “used to failing their entire lives and think the world is against them”.
The headmistress’ parents were a strict Indo-Guyanese academic and a Jamaican nurse. She lived in New Zealand, Nigeria, Paris and Toronto growing up before settling in Britain when she was 15. She later read French and philosophy at Oxford.
Ms Birbalsingh believes in immersing the pupils in British history and literature so everyone is “under one British umbrella of shared values”.
“If you want a multicultural school to work, you have to sacrifice stuff,” she said.
These sacrifices include only serving vegetarian food, as it is simpler to cater for all religions, and also a prayer ban. In 2024, she successfully defended a High Court challenge after a pupil complained she wasn’t allowed to pray between lessons.
“A school should be free to do what is right for the pupils it serves,” she said in a statement following the High Court case.
“At Michaela, we positively embrace small-c conservative values which millions of people, including so many of our families and pupils, also value. Those values enable extraordinary academic progress,” she added.
