Isabel Paterson (a pseudonym) has written a great article on her Substack about the extraordinary success of Michaela Community School, which has just recorded the best Progress 8 score in the country for the third year running. But, of course, not a word of praise for the outstanding free school has passed the lips of Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary. For those unfamiliar with this metric, it measures how much progress children make at a school between the ages of 11 and 16 in a core set of subjects relative to other cohorts of 11-16 year-olds with the same characteristics, including prior attainment. It’s about the most objective way we have of measuring how good a school is since it controls for so many variables. Here’s an extract:
There are ~4,000 state secondary schools in England. If Progress 8 outcomes were random:
- the probability of coming top twice would be 1 in 16 million.
- the probability of coming top three times would be 1 in 64 billion.
Clearly, it’s not random, it’s sticky from year to year. The worst-performing school this year is not going to be the best next year. But even assuming it was only possible for last year’s top 10 to be this year’s winner…the odds of Michaela’s hat-trick would still be 1 in a thousand.
There’s something going on here…the others aren’t even close. The extent of the “something” also comes out of this chart:
As Nick Timothy writes here it would be nice if the Education Secretary could find a few words of praise for Miss Snuffy:
It would be fantastic to hear Bridget Phillipson MP congratulate Michaela for its status as the best school in the country – and endorse its approach to curriculum, discipline and pedagogy, and the free school model that made it all possible.
And here’s what Tom Bennett wrote:
Before Michaela opened: IT WILL NEVER OPEN ; Once Michaela opened: IT WILL NEVER WORK ; Once Michaela posts incredible results: IT WILL NEVER LAST ; Once Michaela smashes the barrier of what is humanly possible for several years in a row:
THE WAY WE ASSESS SCHOOLS IS INVALID, IT SHOULD BE BASED ON HUGS & VIBES
Quite.
Why won’t Phillipson visit, acknowledge or learn from Michaela?
Many progressives give Miss Snuffy a hard time for her emphasis on discipline, because discipline is fascism y’see. On that basis, every high-performing military outfit, sports team, orchestra or start-up in history was basically colonial-fascist-transphobe-racist-checkyourprivilege… word salad. The rest of us, quite glad to win the war/the world championship/enjoy sublime Mahler/own shares in a unicorn…? Completely beside the point.
Show them excellence and they see only inequality. Off with the heads of the tall poppies.
Likewise, the fact parents really, really like Michaela. So much so that she’s seen a stream of independent school families paying her a visit, and it’s not just out of curiosity. Besides the point.
It’s impossible for progressive educationists to imagine a path starting with discipline, through self-discipline, to community, engagement, self-worth and self-awareness, and finally excellence. It’s impossible to consider that that path is shaped by manners, consistency, high standards, and ambition. It’s irrelevant that Birbalsingh’s self-described small-c conservative approach is exactly what parents what.
Isn’t it better (they think) to allow children to express themselves? If they kick off in the corridor, to trust them to learn for themselves with just a mild reprimand… no need for any of that punishment stuff.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The West London Free School, the school I co-founded in 2011, has been named London Comprehensive of the Year by the Sunday Times.
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Good article. I would like to see the demographic makeup of Michaela, I doubt it ressembles the photo. Seems the Education Propaganda UberGruepenFuehrer was too busy with the Muzzies and non-Whites (as given in the photo op) to care much about what enables and drive high performance. As if great athletes were not coerced, forced, discplined, coached, berated and pushed beyond normal limits. Maybe the UberGruepen puppet can visit say a poor working class white school in the North East? And discuss the disadvantages experienced by this ‘class’ of whites?
‘I doubt it ressembles the photo’
What’s your point?
Suggest you do your research Ferd. The photo-op is of Michaela school and the adult is Ms Birbalsingh. see https://michaela.education/home/secondary-school-wembley/ I believe the racial mix is roughly that of the community within which the school is located.
1% of the students are White British. Kumbabloodyya.
Wembley is as English as Waziristan.
A poster for why the country is in the shitter.
https://crystalroof.co.uk/school/140862-michaela-community-school
Watch the documentary of Michaela and the head mistress. It is a once in a lifetime story for this country. And of course it is a huge success. Brits don’t do success, they prefer losers, whiners and a feudal system.
We used to do success before the planned invasion.
You can search online, it’s about half muslim.
I think Ms Birbalsingh has done a marvelous job, by all accounts. I’m wondering just how many more strikes of reality the resident misogynists can take to their delusion…LOL.
Speaking of schools, since when has it been normal for them to have lock down practice runs, that have nothing to do with lurgy viruses/government overreach? The U.S I can understand, as school shooters are a very real threat, but the U.K? Check out this letter from a deputy head teacher. Is it another ‘new norm’ like armed police at Christmas markets and ‘diversity barriers’ in city centres?
”Why has the UK reached a point where children must practice hiding in classrooms, away from windows, and in silence, to ensure their safety?
Yesterday pupils at a school close to a hotel filled with immigrants in Altrincham were taken through plans on how to safely go in to lockdown in case of emergencies
Schools are now acting like fortresses rather than just centers of learning
This shift towards routine lockdown drills indicates a troubling trend where even the sanctity of a school environment is no longer guaranteed
While lockdown drills are a necessary response to current threats, they are not a solution but a symptom of deeper societal problems
As a community, we need to address these underlying safety issues head-on!”
https://x.com/ActivePatriotUK/status/1865197148163170707
Maybe this was just a one-off;
”Farnborough 6th Form College was sent into lockdown following a bomb threat against the school. Hampshire police were called at 11.35am following reports of the bomb threat.
Nearby schools were also locked down during the incident. Students were not allowed to enter or leave the site, with the school telling outsiders to not to contact the college.
Police say a 40-year-old man has been arrested, and remains in custody.”
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/live-lockdown-farnborough-6th-form-30404852?utm_source=linkCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar
An acquaintance of mine was recently on a visit to a London school with work colleagues as part of a planned educational outreach programme. During their visit, the school was put into lockdown. At one stage, they were even instructed to hide under desks. One of the visitors tried to call their office during the lockdown, to raise the alarm. Perhaps it was fortunate that they couldn’t get a signal, because it proved to be a drill. Even so it was highly traumatic for the visitors, and arguably unfair to put them into that sort of position without having either warned them or rescheduled their visit for reasons which the school would not have needed to disclose. This is just another example of people in authority showing no care or concern for the mental wellbeing of those in their charge. Nothing has been learnt from the Covid lockdowns.
Socialism is all about process not outcomes.
I suppose the school just isn’t doing it tte “correct” way.
After all, the Process is the Punishment.
My old headmaster used to say (quoted from somewhere else…)
“A child is like a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled”
Probably because the Michaela School doesn’t fill their heads with ideological mumbo-jumbo!
This success is very inconvenient and embarrassing for Phillipson and her supporters.
You don’t understand, people. This Communist Indo-Guyanese Sikh woman masquerading as a “small-c” Tory, who labelled herself as “Britain’s strictest headteacher, etc.” is tasked by the Globalists to train Third World Ethnics for THE GREAT REPLACEMENT. The photo accurately reflects the ethnicity of the majority of students.
There is little mention that the school was co-founded by Joe Kirby, who “rewrote Year 7’s study of the Odyssey, removing the parts he felt were less important to read.”
Her methods are Stalinist:
“There is no group work. Children sit in rows and learn by rote, walking in single file between classrooms.”
“Pupils must be silent in school corridors and are forbidden to gather in groups larger than four.”
“Lunchtime consists of a pescatarian meal [no red meat allowed] described as a “family lunch”. Pupils sit at tables of six, with one teacher or guest, and take responsibility for serving each other. They lay the table together. One pours water. Another brings in and serves the food. Another serves dessert. Two clear the table following the meal. TEACHERS EAT WITH THEIR STUDENTS, and the tables discuss what the children have learned that day, or a topic of the day such as the most inspirational person they have learned about in their history classes. After eating, the pupils spend five minutes thanking someone, followed by two claps from the rest of the school.”
Joe Kirby introduced a key method of organising knowledge at Michaela, from Wikipedia:
“In 2015, Michaela Community School teacher, Joe Kirby, wrote a blog detailing the value of listing, on one side of A4 paper, key points to learn.[1][2] He called the template a knowledge organiser.[3][4]”
I would also question why ALL school children are forced to learn ANY of The Odyssey. I know nothing about it, and that ain’t done me any harm, innit.
Perhaps Starmer attended a similar school!
Brings to mind The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie this talk of school and fascism. I don’t know anything about this case but of course they should have acknowledged this achievement regardless of their views on discipline. I can’t imagine anything too nasty goes on with the law as it is these days. To get these results with slum-dwelling children in England is a very impressive achievement. I wish I had that ability and vision and optimism for the future. I think people who are quick to dismiss fascism make the mistake of confusing discipline with sadism. Westerners who go to Japan to study martial arts often remark that within Japanese society fascism has a family feel. Like the Kurosawa film where the man shows how easy it is to break one stick with this hands. But if you bundle a number of sticks together, as in a family, it becomes very difficult to break. It is a silly mistake the conflation of the discipline of a totalitarian state, which is inevitably coercive, with the discipline that can co-exist with genuine benevolence.
Bridget Phillipson Communist Clown
“At university, Catherine Birbalsingh was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and read ‘Living Marxism’, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party.”
“It was resurrected as ‘Spiked’, an internet journal, which has published many articles by and about her.
Catherine Birbalsingh Communist Clown
It is the only path. Even in the 1950s TS Eliot remarked that young boys needed something strong to be attached to. Ask yourself, has there been any sort of coherent philosophy regarding the human will since 1945? It was as if after this date the will was just some free-floating energy and if a child or a pet willed something then this willing contained some validity. This is a complete betrayal of those that we are supposed to look after.
Since 1945 it has been the cult of ‘…the man from Whitehall knows best..’
So where were the Tories in 14 years to improve schools and suppress wokery there? Where are they now?
What a failure they have been and they remain so.
Absolutely.
And Labour can be trusted to make matters even worse.
Gov did improve the schools. He made the exams more rigorous and we have moved up the international tables in science and maths in the past 10 years. It is labour who will send us backwards again. The science for 21C I had to teach in the early 2000 was drivel
the answer to your headline is so simple. Michaela is an institution of excellence, the current government is an example of complete incompetence, and negligible intelligence. Excellence is a word that would NEVER be used to describe the socialist gov’t in place.
Congratulations re the West London Free School.
Regarding Michaela, it is clearly a very good school. However it is not that simple, and it is not just down to discipline.
There is a clue in that line “she’s seen a stream of independent school families paying her a visit”. When you have a good school, it attracts parents who want the best for their children, and who value education. And in turn that is one of the reasons why the school continues to do well.
In short, it’s about the pupils and their parents, and not just the school.
Unfortunately too many parents in our country don’t care about education, don’t see the value in school for their children, and don’t support their schools. Parents who complain about Britain’s schools need to look at themselves and their friends as well as the schools themselves.