I well remember, during a previous life as a schoolteacher (see here and here) my first ever experience with a Muslim student. Despite being the only single freckle of brown in the otherwise pasty, albino-like face of her entire all-white year group, she appeared to expect the entire curriculum to revolve around her, like electrons around a nucleus. Having spotted a wall-display about Animal Farm in an adjoining English classroom, she marched up to my desk on the first day of the new term in September and arrogantly informed me – it was certainly not phrased as a request – that we would absolutely not be reading any books that contained pigs from hereon in, as it was against the tenets of her blessed religion. This was in a Catholic faith-school, by the way.
I told her none of the books our class would be reading that term contained pigs anyway, but, if they had done, then that was just a civilisational sausage she was going to have to swallow.
Lessons in Dictation
Another educationalist whom I imagine treats such request with similar disdain is Katharine Birbalsingh, the famously authoritarian headmistress of Michaela Community School, located in what is often described as “a deprived and highly diverse area” of London – which, these days, could be almost any of them.
Michaela School has attracted controversy recently due to banning public prayer rituals after a number of Muslim children began ostentatiously bowing down towards Mecca on prayer mats in the playground during lunch-hour breaktimes last year. This prohibition led the teenage girl who had instigated the prayer sessions to take the school to court for religious discrimination, an action ultimately funded by you, the dhimmified tax-payer, via legal aid – or jizya tax, if you prefer. This very same highly religious teen, it was reported, had also been suspended for allegedly threatening to stab someone with a knife: doubtless another blow against the girl’s precious human rights.
According to her lawyer, this allegedly discriminatory treatment had “fundamentally changed how she feels as a Muslim in this country”. Yes. For once, she hadn’t just been supinely pandered to. Despite the loud claims of religious discrimination, it turned out the prayer ban actually applied not only to Muslims, but to kids of all faiths, even Satanists. If Michaela School ‘discriminated’ against its pupils, then it discriminated against all of them on a fundamentally equal basis – which, as we shall see, is actually something of a double-edged sword.
In court, the school’s lawyer, Jason Coppel KC, furthermore argued that “peer pressure” was being placed on other Muslim pupils, who make up a large proportion of the school’s intake, to conform and begin praying during break-times too. This, he said, was feared likely to cause “unacceptable segregation or division” between not only the Muslim and non-Muslim pupils, but also between the praying and non-praying elements of the Muslim student body alike.
According to Headmistress Birbalsingh (whose own grandmother was herself a Mohammedan), “we believe it is wrong to separate children according to religion or race” – the problem being that certain of the children themselves apparently did not agree. Coppel told the court that, when ordered to put their prayer-mats away, the children involved had displayed “entitled behaviour”, feeling that “prayer somehow overrode the [secular] regime” at Michaela, which, after all, is not officially a faith-school of any kind at all.
So, Birbalsingh wants her ‘diverse’ pupils to live together in perfect harmony. Yet, quite clearly, a sizable proportion of the student body simply do not wish to live together peacefully and equitably in this manner at all. Neither, it would seem, do certain of their parents or other wider members of the local community, some of whom subsequently sent the school bomb-threats or put bricks through a teacher’s window.
As such, the only way Birbalsingh’s ambition of ‘harmony in diversity’ can be realistically pursued, as far as I can tell, is by her setting out to institute a disciplinary regime of almost comical harshness, restriction and regimentation upon the entire student body as a whole, whether each individual pupil happens to be a racially or religiously motivated troublemaker or not, thereby effectively punishing the innocent as well as the guilty. The scary thing is, such harsh methods are merely a school-based microcosm of what is increasingly coming for Britain’s wider adult population too.
Families at War
Michaela is often described as “Britain’s Strictest School”, due to its draconian policies, like its famed “family lunch” regime, where, in order to emphasise that they really are all part of one big happy school family, whether they like it or not, “teachers actively intervene in the socialising of the pupils to ensure that children are not left out and to encourage social integration” between different ethno-religious sub-groups, as KC Coppel put it in court.
Translated, this euphemistically named policy of “guided socialisation” actually appears to mean teachers choosing the children’s ‘friends’ for them, forcing them to sit beside one another, Muslim and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Sontaran and Rutan, Jedi and Sith, handing them out a single pre-agreed anodyne, non-controversial, permitted topic for each day’s shared mealtime conversation, and then squatting alongside them themselves as perpetual spies of the lunchtime Stasi, to ensure these rules are all slavishly adhered to.
Thus, in the name of ensuring racial ‘harmony’, kids are not only prevented from spending the entire lunch hour contentiously discussing how the Holocaust was all a lie, or slavery should never have been abolished, but also from chatting innocently about completely innocuous subjects like last night’s big football match, or who their favourite Pokémon is, like most normal, non-monitored kids would do. In other words, their traditional individual freedoms are severely curbed, in order to ensure that, collectively, the whole incoherent, balkanised multicultural ‘family’ doesn’t potentially collapse down into serious inter-ethnic strife to such an extent that they all start stabbing one another to death with forks.
Therefore, the Michaela inmates’ lunchbreak is “not free time in the usual sense”, KC Coppel argued, but instead “an integral part of the educational regime”. Hence, the litigating schoolgirl’s case that she should be allowed to pay obeisance on her knees to Allah during her own free time did not apply here, as prisoners in Cellblock Michaela H had no free time during school hours; rather, the entire building was one gigantic teacher-monitored panopticon (toilet cubicles apart, one hopes). This may sound somewhat dystopian, but by such means “the school’s community spirit is strengthened”.
The truly alarming thing about the logic of Birbalsingh’s iron discipline here is that it has distinct echoes of the likely modes of population control that will increasingly be placed upon the wider ‘multicultural’ adult population of the country by Governments of the future. In the name of a greater good, that of forcibly-maintained community cohesion, a strong, centralised governing force (here, adult teachers, not policemen, prosecutors and politicians armed with weapons like hate-speech laws and DEI policies, as exists outside the school gates) running Michaela School places severe restrictions upon pupils’ freedom of speech, action and association: it’s like Alawite Syria in miniature form.
“We believe it is wrong to separate children according to religion or race,” say the school’s governing body – but what this simultaneously also means in practice is, “We therefore believe it is right to force children to interact with one another according to religion or race instead.” Isn’t that also kind of a bad thing, too? I don’t want to have to be friends with a Salafist. And, to be fair, a Salafist probably doesn’t want to be friends with me.
You’ll Eat What You’re Given
In a statement later posted online, Headmistress Birbalsingh said the following:
The thing is, what Birbalsingh describes here isn’t actually multiculturalism at all, is it? It is actually the precise reverse, because in truth “multiculturalism can only succeed” when it is used as nothing more than an inverted Newspeak label for imposing a centrally mandated and centrally enforced monoculture upon all by force.
Multiculturism is a recipe for abject failure, as different cultures, surprisingly enough, are different, and therefore frequently fundamentally incompatible with one another. Unless the majority culture (where one still actually remains) is allowed to dominate and dictate the behaviour of all other minority-groups – the ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, model – the only other option, as chosen by Birbalsingh herself, is to rob all cultures present of their chosen ways of living, including the majority one, and replace them instead with a wholly artificial ‘neutral’ option somewhere awkwardly in-between, with which no-one ends being particularly happy – the ‘When in Rome, do as the deracinated do’ model, as it might be dubbed. This sad truth can also be seen in other aspects of Michaela School’s “family lunch” policy:
What this actually all means is that, under a regime of alleged ‘multiculturalism’ like that currently enforced at Michaela School, nobody gets to live their lives how they would naturally choose to do so any more. Instead, they all have to be force-fed the same diet of broad-minimum, mutually acceptable, civilisational pap – here, in a literal sense, bland vegetarian food. Out there in the outside adult world, the Government-enforced diet-plan is both more metaphorical and more all-encompassing.
We all “must make sacrifices for the sake of the whole”, being allowed “freedoms of all sorts, as long as those freedoms do not threaten the happiness and success of the whole… community”. So, no meat for any remaining local white British Christian kids who would previously have been perfectly free to eat the stuff since the year dot, but they do now get alternative new “freedoms of all sorts”, such as the ‘freedom’ to nibble on boiled cabbage, limp carrots or damp lettuce instead, none of which many of them might actually have preferred to a nice hot bacon sandwich. But never mind, “We all make our sacrifices so that we can live in harmony”.
At least Michaela kids just have to sacrifice their meat pies and sausage rolls. What do their parents increasingly have to sacrifice? Oh, just trifling little things like freedom of speech, association, action, conscience, religion, culture and equality in the eyes of the law.
Object to any of this stuff? Just shut up and eat your multicultural greens, your handily non-culture-specific generic ‘Wintervals’, ‘Holiday Seasons’, ‘Multi-Faith Quiet Zones’ and ‘Community Interaction Hubs’, they’re good for you, you know. Swallow ‘em all and you’ll grow up nice and strong, just like tomorrow’s ‘multicultural’ utopia will surely be – or so say the Westminster dieticians forcibly shovelling such unfilling, tasteless, cattle-fodder down our forced-open throats on a daily basis. Talk about being made to swallow lies.
Voters Should Be Seen and Not Heard
“Our children, whatever their background, are British,” Birbalsingh wrote, as if simply saying it over and over again can somehow make it come true. Therefore, “as a school, we celebrate what we have in common so that the extraordinary diversity of cultures that we have under our roof can succeed”. The unspoken truth of this being that “we also studiously ignore what we do not have in common”.
And, if any pupils are foolish enough not to ignore such things, that’s 10 portions of boiled broccoli for them. According to this mindset, the only way ethnically and religiously incoherent societies like those of the West are rapidly becoming can ever potentially ‘succeed’ is via regimes of ever-more limiting rule from the centre – just look at how the AfD in Germany is being threatened with being banned by Germany’s own all-powerful school governors in the Reichstag in the name of “protecting democracy”.
This is not to blame Birbalsingh herself for the sad necessity of her own personal harsh disciplinary policies, of course. She has been placed in a very difficult position by the criminal folly of others, and it may well be that her own unpalatable choice of action is the least-worst option, things now being what they lamentably are. If children really are our future, then, to judge by what’s been unfolding recently at Michaela School, our future is one of centralised Government tyranny – but purely for our own shared collective good, you understand.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
Stop Press: Watch Katharine Birbalsingh tell TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer that parents should buy “brick phones” to keep their children safe. “All teachers will tell you every altercation starts on social media, all the bullying starts on social media.”
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
It’s almost like Islam is an intolerant insane creed set up a by a raping psychopath used as a convert or kill tool against those he was oppressing/conquering. I better be careful though otherwise I’ll be accused of Islamophobia by Keir Starmer etc and I’ll get a fatwah from the “religions” followers. We must not offend ppl who want to behead ppl.
Yes the combo of religious supremacy and intolerance to others that’s bred into them doesn’t exactly bode well for living a peaceful and harmonious life in the West does it? The ‘moderate’ Muslims I have no problem with but the saying, ”stay in your own lane” applies here. People just need to mind their business and don’t encroach on others’ personal beliefs and lives, then everything will work out fine. But giving people who already feel dominant and look down on everybody else as ‘infidels’ any concession is just asking for trouble. It really should be as simple as, ”nobody gets any special treatment, abide by our rules or leave”.
Mogs, you basically nail the issue, the problem is once a Muslim population reaches a critical mass within a nation, the tolerant Muslims rapidly join the intolerant ones. Essentially all other religions and cultures are then crushed under the nihilistic Islamist wheel. This is what is happening across the entirety of the middle east. Other large scale religions don’t do this, and are not so nearly tribal. All this anti Israel stuff is ridiculous it’s the size of a bloody postage stamp, even if I don’t exactly think their military strategy is particularly wise.
You can’t use the word ‘fatwah’ as it’s not inclusive of people who are gravitationally challenged.
Seems to me as part of the problem is an obsession for control and a visceral fear of disorder and momentary chaos.
The world is being taken over by control freaks.
Btw, that headteacher sounds like a complete obsessive lunatic.
Hearing her you come to the conclusion is that she doesn’t want to deal with kids, she wants to have an army of drones or robots who behave in exactly the way she wants them to.
Ban this, ban that, stop this, stop that.
Jesus…
An acquaintance of mine was part of the senior leadership team at Mossbourne Academy, an inner city school in Hackney, London, during the time when Sir Michael Wilshaw was headmaster there. (Wilshaw went on to lead Ofsted). They had what sounded like military discipline there. The chap I knew was a natural bleeding heart liberal by nature but justified the regime by maintaining that without this, nobody would learn much and the kids would constantly be kicking off – apparently the school that used to be on the site, Hackney Downs School, was like that (and it was certainly notorious). Quite sad really.
My other Hackey Downs anecdote concerns another bleeding heart liberal acquaintance of mine who cycles to work across the Downs (it’s a park in East London). One day he say a group of black boys on the path ahead. His natural instinct was to take different route to avoid any potential trouble, but then he changed his mind because doing so would be racist. They assaulted him and stole his bike. At least he’s not a hypocrite I suppose. I would have changed course, or got ready for a fight (and I would have done the same for a group of thug-looking whites too – plenty of those in London).
Yes stewart, she wants to ‘ban this, ban that, stop this, stop that’ – but only for children. There are lots of things children shouldn’t be allowed to do, for their own good.
You should allow them the leeway they are capable of handling without getting themselves or others into serious danger – short or medium or long term. The trouble starts when you have a huge divergence within a given group in the leeway they can handle, and that there are significant numbers who cannot handle much leeway. You may go down the road of being draconian with all of them – for some this may be helpful and appropriate, for others not. Norms of behaviour differ between cultures and average typical behaviours differ between races. That makes life difficult.
Few rules, strictly enforced is, in my experience the best way. With children and with adults alike.
If you listen to the woman she sounds like she wants to control every aspect of children’s life. Like enforcing a vegetarian diet on everyone. The last time I checked that wasn’t a fundamental requirement to keep children from rioting.
She also appeals for legislation to limit the use of smartphones and social media among children. Which of course sounds like a sensible well-meaning idea, but like so many ideas of that sort end up giving more power to enforcing bureaucrats.
To me she sounds like a very modern day liberal, who presents themselves as caring and wanting the best for everyone but is in fact a pathological busybody. I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like to me.
She’s not the first person to have to deal with a tricky school body.
Or we can have children running amok, with knives, and beating the shit out of teachers. ——-Our schools are turning into “Lord of the Flies” because of the insidious Liberal Progressive Virus infesting all our institutions where discipline and punishment are dirty words. Children benefit from being taught how to be civilised. They will not behave like good little boys and girls of their own accord. If we don’t teach them how then the standard of our civilisation deteriorates. ——-At school I was always happiest with the strictest teachers where there was order instead of chaos.
I agree with strictness. I also experienced it. But strictness and oppressiveness are two different things. And this type of schooling strikes me as oppressive.
It isn’t either this woman’s regime or crime and mayhem, That’s a false dichotomy.
I jus think the kind of people this school is going to turn out. Basically people who believe that every aspect of a person’s life needs to be prescribed and controlled, because that’s what they’re apparently experiencing.
it there is one thing this world needs less not more of is people who think that a higher authority should tell us what we have to do down to the type of food we must eat.
What you fail to appreciate is that once you introduce Islam into any mix, the choice is submit or submit. It is a totalitarian ideology and cannot be added to any mixed group because it will dominate and take control. Otherwise there is bloodshed. As the writer says, the school is a microcosm of the country as a whole. We have seen the bloodshed and it will get worse as Muslims become a majority in the UK.
Correct. ————-Muslims are used to being in the Majority. They don’t take kindly to anything else.
Not every aspect of a persons life. ——–Just every aspect of their schooling. Which by the way can still be enjoyable within a stricter environment. I recall at school there was respect for teachers. We had a School Orchestra, we put on Opera’s. The Art department took us to Paris and Rome etc. ——A school with no discipline is chaos. There is only one thing I would need to clarify and that is the part about food.
Kids are so pandered to in our society because of guilt ridden weak parents, so I do think they need a bit of boot camp treatment. She can’t bend to Muslim nutters either, which means no religious freedom for everyone else. Sad but true. Still voted yr comment up as it was food for thought.
Stewart I am sorry mate. ——-I agree with you on a lot of stuff but not on this. You are being very naive if you think that religious intolerance coming from one bunch of people is anything other than attempt to get their own way and elevate their particular culture above others. ——–I recommended a book for you to read in another article ——“While Europe Slept” by Bruce Bawer. ——-I suggest you read it.
There are two control freaks – the Communists and Islamists – both want global domination and are prepared to cause death and mayhem to achieve their goal. Also, both are mates.
Crikey, I had no idea this headmistress had gone so over the top! No kids should feel so constrained and be micromanaged like this in their break times. When I was at school we just had a few teachers on play ground duty making sure kids weren’t smoking, beating each other up or sniffing the Tippex they’d pilfered from class. Mind, we certainly didn’t have the whole ‘multicultural’ thing going on then so I do sympathize with the challenges this entire sh*tfest must throw up. More examples of the impact of other culturally enriched schools elsewhere;
”Balwant Bains was a school principal in Birmingham. A second-generation Indian Sikh, Bains explained that when a Muslim student threatened his classmates with a knife, the principal expelled him. The board revoked the suspension accusing the principal of being “Islamophobic and racist.” Bains resigned and was replaced by a friend of the head of the school board.
The principal of a high school in Drammen did not want Muslim students to leave class to pray. She apologized when several of them reacted violently and now she is facing death threats. Hanne Merete Hagby is the principal of the high school, which has 30 percent Muslim students. “It’s not okay to leave class or be late for this reason,” she wrote. She deleted the post after two hours.
An appointment to “lynch” the principal was published on social media. The police had to be there to protect her.
In Germany, a principal has banned Islamic prayers in a school in Wuppertal. In Belgium, however, private Catholic schools, which now have more Muslim students than Catholics, have allowed them.
Frédéric Mortier ended up in court as a teacher at the Wresinski high school in Angers, France, for “racist comments against students”. “This is a man who spreads hatred,” attacks SOS Racisme. What did Mortier do that was so bad? During a lesson at his Catholic school, the teacher said that “France is a Catholic country”.
The director of the children’s organization “Arche”, Wolfgang Büscher, who looks after 7,000 young people every day in 33 facilities across Germany, many of them with a migrant background, reveals to BILD: “We are facing a catastrophe”. It emerges clearly from the declaration of the young Arabs cited by Büscher: “First let’s cut the throats of the Jews, then the gays and finally the Christians!”. Says Büscher: “I have never experienced anything like this. A 12-year-old boy came to me and said, ‘I hate you. We will take back the country’. They reject our culture, our values. Their hatred is unimaginable.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/384645
Nothing will change unless the people themselves rise up against this. The people in charge and the people who check the people in charge have all been either replaced or corrupted. You cannot get justice at any level. The only way you can get justice is if 100,000 of your peers stand behind you and say “No. This is far enough. We’re not going to do this anymore.” But we always stand alone, don’t we? The people aren’t there yet. Not enough of them have felt this on their own skin. Not enough of them know what this is actually about. I think it will be 10 more years until people start rising up against this en masse, but by that point it will probably be too late. White native English people are already a minority in London. In 10 years time they will probably be something like 20%. And by that time they’ll probably make up less than 50% of the population. When they’ll finally get up to complain about it, they will be put back in their place with a level of violence they never thought possible.
Very, very sadly I cannot fault your assessment. The process is deliberate.
Yes, I think we are due to be a Muslim country by 2050. I suppose at least that will have finished off the Net Zero fanatics – I don’t think any Muslim country has signed up to that.
It is too late. The Multi cultural horse has bolted so to speak. Pretty soon our daughters will be going to school with headscarves on because of our handwringing capitulation.
But France is not a “Catholic Country”. Britain s not a “Christian Country”. —-Countries should not be getting defined like this. Where my brother lives in the West Midlands looks like Islamabad. If we are going to bring millions of people from other cultures and religions we cannot keep saying “We are Christian”———-In Multiculture you longer have any culture.
Agree with the vast majority of this. I’ve got no issue, however, when children don’t “get to live their lives how they would naturally choose to do“. That’s what we used to call defining boundaries – the edge of the circle that children need to understand if they are to develop into well-balanced, decent, adults that fit well into society. After saying that, this headmistress seems to have swallowed the contents of every tyrants biography in history.
I’ve maintained for as long as I can remember that, although I’m not a religious man (certainly not in the traditional sense of the word), the collapse of religious beliefs in the West is leading to a loss of Western values that is being replaced by the religion of woke dogma. Muslims have maintained their religious beliefs which gives them a family that they are far more loyal to than their adopted country. Most these Muslim children will not identify as British, they identify as Muslims. Therein lies the problem.
I’m on exactly the same page as you with regard to religion. I hope we find a workable compromise.
I can’t see how it’s possible to compromise with Islam. Can anyone point to a non-Islamic country where there is no friction between Muslim and non-Muslim people?
Sorry if I wasn’t clear – I was referring to a compromise between a secular and Christian UK.
Regarding muslims, I agree that having large numbers of them here is probably not a good idea. The same goes for large numbers of any group who are not British, to differing degrees (for example, white Europeans are our cousins, racially and culturally, so they will on average integrate better).
Can you name any other group who are not British, other than Muslims, who cause as much trouble as Muslims?
Well, life in the UK has not been a great success for a significant number of people of African origin, in particular black caribbeans. But the simplest solution is just to stop all immigration. We’ve had more than enough. Other cultures and races may well be bloody marvellous, but I want the British and the English in particular to go forward long into the future as a separate people with their own country. Saying that would be condemned as racist, but it seems it’s OK to say that about anyone other than white people.
I didn’t ask you to name another group of people who have trouble and difficulty living in the UK. My question was the other way round: can you name another group of people who cause as much trouble and difficulty as Muslims?
As for “the British and the English in particular to go forward long into the future as a separate people with their own country”, how could you distinguish those who are “British and English” from those who are not?
If the children of two Irish parents and four Irish grandparents speak with an English accent, are they “British and English”?
If the children of two Polish parents and four Polish grandparents speak with an English accent, are they “British and English”?
If the children of two Indian parents and four Indian grandparents speak with an English accent, are they “British and English”?
If the children of two Iranian parents and four Iranian grandparents speak with an English accent, are they “British and English”?
How do you define “British and English”?
“I didn’t ask you to name another group of people who have trouble and difficulty living in the UK. My question was the other way round: can you name another group of people who cause as much trouble and difficulty as Muslims?”
I’m not sure I can really answer that question, though I think coexistence with the some of the group I named has been quite troublesome. But I don’t like identity politicis, which is one reason I would like to stop immgration.
English/British stock are people whose family origins go back to a time when we hadn’t had much mass immigration into the UK for a long time – let’s say at some time during the early 20th century.
Thailand (around 5%) Spain (5%). Philippines (6%), would say Myanmar (2%), but there it’s the Buddhist that have hounded Muslims down.
Off the top of my head.
Islam means ‘submission’. There is no negotiation, no compromise.
Sharia is now adopted and enforced by the Police, local, councils and schools.
Christian tradition has almost been eradicated.
Fight or flight.
It appears to be just one faith that wants to be treated differently; pandered to and dominate.
Eventually, thanks to the treachery and cowardice of the Establishment, we will not have a multicultural/multi-faith society: we will have an Islamist one.
It already is an Islamic society. There’s blasphemy laws made to protect it. They’re given preferential treatment everywhere. And the country is full of mosques and Sharia courts.
Like a famous school of magic but without the eccentric (English) humour.
Back in the 1960s when a late relative worked as a dinner lady in a primary school in London, she was frequently asked by children if a dish contained pork or beef. An indication of what was to come, if anyone had eyes to see.
Having attended a university course fairly recently, the young woman lecturer conveyed a new class member to the table where I was sitting and made him sit there, purposely introducing him to me rather than the other students sitting at it. He was a person of colour.
It was clear that this lecturer thought that, given my age, I must be in need of multiculturalisation. As if I had never met such a person before, nor had any as friends at school.
But surely the point is that the parents can do what they jolly well like outside of school but inside the school the students should stick to the rules. The parents, including the parents of the vexatious student, will have chosen to send their child there, it’s not exactly a sink school so it is more likely to be over- than under-subscribed.
People do not have to send their kids there but they do. If they don’t like the rules, go somewhere else. As admirable as the authors principles are, his preffreed approach only works when everyone else is as reasonable and sensible as him and his mates. We have allowed the wrong sort in and have erased the social values of the natives. Reep what you sow and at least this place gets good academic results.
Unless you can afford private schools, getting into a secondary school of your choice is not always that simple, at least not in London. Catchment areas are small. If your local school is one you don’t like, you’d better hope that schools further away are less popular – and that means they may well be delivering poor results (though in my experience results are in large measure dictated by your demographic and not that much to do with the school). I agree in general with your comments.
I imagine the parents will be fighting like cats in a sack to get their children into this one. There will be no student there whose parents didn’t actively choose it.
Yeah, that would be my guess, though there will be parents who don’t like that kind of atmosphere but my guess would be that they will be in the main the kind of people who can afford to go private.
They do, its massively oversubscribed.
When Ms Birbalsingh was exploring the opening of another similar school in SE London a public meeting was held to inform local parents and gauge interest. The meeting venue was crammed to the rafters but of course it was picketed by the usual suspects, violent and well organised. The police turned up and…you’ve guessed it…closed down the meeting for everyone’s safety
James Delingpole did an excellent interview with her a couple of years ago in which she explains why she is “tyrannical” and why it is so popular. I recommend it.
Which raises the question of why is Kneel so keen to destroy private education?
Indeed. It plays well to his core supporters, and lefties hate the idea of things they think should be done by the state being done privately – especially education.
Simple answer: Forcing more talented kids to attend public comprehensives, while personally causing them to underachieve, still benefits the comprehensives or rather, the people running them, it raises the average outcome of pupils going to comprehensives. That’s one of the most nasty scams I’m aware of because
1) It’s bad for the talented kids who are stopped from reaching their full potential.
2) It doesn’t help the aggressive thickos who underperform as ever.
3) But if you average the grades of both groups, group 1 being there raise the average, ie, makes people running comprehensives like less bad.
This is being done despite its known to be bad for the kids themselves because it enable some inappropriate mathematical trickery (averaging measurements of different things is still nonsense) which gives an impression of the opposite to a clueless, casual observer.
Exactly the argument a socialist friend, who objected to private schools, made. Exactly!
She couldn’t understand why I wanted the best opportunities for my children – simply didn’t compute. She was childless, but I’m sure would have sacrificed any children she might have had on this ideological altar.
Harder to brainwash the plebs at private schools than in the state school system. Got to indoctrinate the children with all the woke agenda & introduce the sexual grooming so beloved of the UN at age 4…. Parents paying for the privilege of educating their children will be far less amenable to having their children groomed for sexual deviance.
All you need to know about Islam in one handy guide…
.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/the-problem-with-islam/
More power to Ms. Birbalsingh – my wife and I have followed her since her “Ms. Snuffy” blogging days, and her horrifying the Left by attending a Conservative Party conference and speaking about the utter mess state education was and is in.
Had I millions, I’d happily help her fund more schools such as Michaela. She needs cloning, bless her. More power to her elbow. She’s one strong woman.
totally agree
It’s always one religion in particular that is causing issues. I have honestly never heard anything about Jewish kids protesting the lack of kosher food. I have not heard any other cultural group raise a big scandal over anything. But halal food and Islamic prayer times? All the time. Seems like everything in our society is being reshaped to cater to this one religion. This is why I say the UK is an Islamic state. There’s not doubt about it.
At the core of multiculturalism is the dictum that all people are equally worthless individually and hence, whatever they happen to be can and must be ignored and suppressed. Your are all equal and insofar you’re not, we will make you so!
One should also remember that this concept ultimatively came from the so-called counter culture. That’s another term to be taken literally: It’s not about some form of alternate culture but about no culture beyond trans-politcorrected rainbow flags and Black Friday! offers.
There are plenty of countries where you can prey to Mecca at your hearts content and not eat or read about pigs. The UK is not one of them.
“Our children, whatever their background, are British,” Birbalsingh wrote, as if simply saying it over and over again can somehow make it come true.
Well it works if a man wants to identify as a women. Ms Sturgeon and may others even made it a law.
Multiculture = No culture at all.
The people behind this doubtlessly envision this mostly as an innummerable amount of ‘exciting’ differently coloured fastfood stalls all selling different kinds of
junkstreet food.A happy mixed bag of people all respecting each other and eating kebabs and pork with mini skirts and head scarves all in the same classroom ———-ha ha ah ie a fantasy land
She’s quite right – a willingness to “sacrifice” (some part of the ‘right’ to impose one’s national identity on others) is what it will take for people of vastly different cultures to live together. She’s quite right. But, er…they don’t… want…to do…that. How dense does an authoritarian headmistress have to be to fail to understand that?
And yes – microcosm is the word. This is how it already is in the wider world, as a glance, if you dare, at any TV programme or commercial will remind you.
Dense? What do you mean? She realises it, and that is why we need more like her.
Parents send their kids here because it’s a good school. There is a choice, accept the rules or go elsewhere.
The concept of freedom only works when all parties respect the views and beliefs of others.
None of us are free to do what we like, when we like. Society is rules based and always has been.
Freedom has limits and boundaries, it’s only when these are not respected by all that problems arise.
A lot of negative ignorant comments on here about Katherine Birbalsinghs Michaela School .. for starters people aren’t forced to put their children in the school .. they choose .. and she is massively oversubscribed and, probably because, she gets the best academic results in the country, bar none, in the category of progress from entry to exit.
Most of the comments suggest she’s a tyrant … wrong .. she’s strict but the behaviour of the kids is relatively outstanding compared to the local area and she has 800 visitors a year to see how the hell she achieves it.
So although I agree with most commenters about the dangers of the Islamic quest for submission (Islam translated means Submission to God) most of you are way off base regards the Headteacher.
She’s done a handful of interviews with Triggernometry (amongst others – she spoke at ARC and the tory conference in 2010 – so the leftwaffe hate her) if you want to know who she really is.
For goodness sake if only Heads were like her all around the country we’d have a much better cohort of school leavers academically and socially.
if you don’t like the school ethos, go somewhere else. The school is over-subscribed, so enough parents believe the ethos will ensure their kids will get results. If the Governors don’t like the ethos (or they lose enough pupils), they can change it.