Birbalsingh Blasts Phillipson: "You Don't Know Your Own Bill"

Katharine Birbalsingh, the headmistress of one of Britain’s best state schools, has written an excoriating letter to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson after a disappointing meeting where Phillipson exposed her true colours. Published in full in the Spectator, the letter kicks off by noting Michaela’s extraordinary achievements under the freedoms permitted to it as an academy (52% grade 9s across all GCSEs, compared to £60,000-a-year Eton’s 53%) before launching into a devastating rundown of Phillipson’s hypocrisies, Leftist animus towards educational freedom and basic lack of understanding of her own bill. Here’s an excerpt.

You have said that you want to address recruitment. But you are making it harder for schools to hire new staff. There will be fewer maths teachers in our classrooms because of your butchery of the Advanced Maths Support Programme. You are removing schools’ ability to hire teachers without the mountains of bureaucracy that your state-sanctioned, centralised stamping requires.

You are passing a law that we must all follow a brand-new curriculum, before you have even told us what it is. Every teacher knows what this means: more money spent on new resources – such as textbooks – and thousands of man-hours ploughed into a fresh curriculum that hasn’t been finalised and might be changed. Time away from children means time away from raising standards. We tried to explain this, but to no avail.

I believe your lack of clarity and interest unfortunately stems from a deeper problem. It became apparent to me when we met that you do not appear to know your own bill.

When we asked you to explain how the recruitment of new teachers would function, you said that this detail was covered in the bill. When we read to you the relevant extracts from the bill, you said that it would be clarified elsewhere. But when we looked elsewhere, we didn’t find any answers to our questions.

When we asked you to explain how the changes to published admissions numbers would function, again you did not appear to understand. This rule change means that local councils can deliberately reduce the capacity at popular, good schools in order to force families towards less good schools which are undersubscribed. When we asked what you would say to a mother desperate for a place for her child in a successful school, who misses out because the capacity at these institutions has been deliberately reduced, you were unable to answer.

Your party has had 14 years in opposition to prepare for this. You were the Shadow Education Secretary for three years ahead of the election. It should not be left to school leaders to point out the holes in this bill.

So why do all this? Why claim to love academies when you are in fact turning all academies into the equivalent of local authority schools? The reality is that your record in Parliament reveals what you really think of academies, which is that you hate them. You repeatedly voted against academy reforms from 2010 to 2016. You claim to be a great believer in the high standards which academies have brought, but we saw you twist your face with disgust every time you said the word in our meeting, repeating that the worst schools “are, in fact, academies“.

You are pretending to like academies now that you are Education Secretary, because it is hard to openly oppose them in the way that you have done throughout your Parliamentary career, in the face of such obvious success. You don’t want school leaders to have the freedom to innovate and do what is right for their children. You want the state to have control, which is not much of a surprise; I’ve repeatedly pointed out your Marxist leanings. You should stick to your convictions and admit that you do not believe academy freedoms are a good thing and that you believe central Government is the answer. At least that would be honest.

Definitely worth reading in full.