Meet the Strictest Headmistress in Britain

The Atlantic

13-03-2025

The main attraction in the Wembley neighborhood of northwest London is the eponymous football stadium where the England national team hosts its matches. But just half a mile away, situated in an almost aggressively unbeautified six-story office block, you'll find an even more impressive repository of human excellence.
The Michaela Community School is a 'free school.' Like charters in America, these schools aim to provide more pedagogical options to poor and marginalized communities. They are publicly funded, privately run, and controversial—both for their approaches to education and, critics say, for diverting resources from the public system. Around Michaela's asphalt courtyard, lines from 'Invictus,' William Henley's ode to grit and perseverance—'I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul'—have been blown up to the size of billboards. The slogan 'Knowledge is power' adorns a four-story banner hanging from the building's brick facade. Another banner reads: Private School Ethos—No Fees.
Michaela has no admissions filters for entrance into Year 7 (the first year of secondary school in Britain) and draws nearly all its students from Wembley, one of the poorest districts in London. Most students are Black or South Asian, and many are the children of immigrants. Yet its pupils perform at the level of their counterparts at the most prestigious private schools, earning twice the national average on the English Baccalaureate and the General Certificate of Secondary Education. More than 80 percent of Michaela graduates continue their studies at Russell Group Universities (Britain's top-24 colleges). One joke I heard repeatedly in conversations about Michaela was that a savvy posh family could spare the £50,000 annual tuition for Eton, purchase a flat in Wembley, and rest assured that their child would enjoy the same outsize chances of gaining admission to Oxford or Cambridge.
Michaela is the brainchild of Katharine Birbalsingh, known widely as 'Britain's strictest headmistress.' Her emphasis on hard work and her unsparing critique of victimization has propelled her to national and international prominence. In her neat and unfussy office hangs a quote from the Black American economist Thomas Sowell: 'When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.' A stack of books includes a collection of essays on Booker T. Washington, Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character, and Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Near the doorway is a life-size cutout of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, bloodied sword in hand, with a piece of paper taped to his mouth reading HOLD THE LINE.
Birbalsingh is the daughter of Guyanese and Jamaican parents and a former French teacher. In 2010, she gave a viral speech at the Conservative Party Conference lamenting the school system's 'culture of excuses, of low standards, and expecting the very least from our poorest and most disadvantaged.' She argued that teachers were too afraid of 'the accusation of racism' to discipline Black boys, and that reform required 'right-wing thinking.' Her speech circulated so widely presumably because she wasn't the only one fed up with the persistent achievement gap between poor and well-off students. And she wasn't alone in believing that the gentler, more progressive approach to addressing students' needs, which had gained traction in the United Kingdom (and the United States), hurts kids who are already behind. Nevertheless, she was promptly pushed out of her teaching job as a result of that speech. Four years later, she co-founded Michaela.
I visited the academy twice—in December and then again in January—to speak with Birbalsingh and her staff and students, and to rove among the classrooms. Multiple delegations of teachers from other schools in the U.K. and abroad were touring Michaela at the same time to try to soak up its protocols and ethos. Birbalsingh told me that the school receives some 800 visitors a year, and copious guest books in the lobby bore their ecstatic testimonials. The students, impeccable in their gray trousers and navy blazers, are so accustomed to this outside interest that they do not so much as glance at a visitor when he enters the classroom.
Those blazers tend to be covered in merit badges: for attendance, club memberships, academic achievement (the 'Scholosaurus' badge). Pupils can earn demerits for infractions as minor as failing to maintain eye contact when a teacher is speaking. In the cafeteria, they shout in unison poems committed to memory before taking their seats. Over family-style meals that they both serve and clean up, conversation is guided by a formal question such as: What does it mean to be successful? Lunch—which is vegetarian—always concludes with students randomly chosen to address the room on the theme of gratitude. Teachers then provide candid feedback on these oratorical performances. I listened as one small girl with a braided ponytail gave an appreciation to her instructor for helping her better understand a math problem. She was praised for her delivery, for 'doing all the basics: confident, loud; she's owning the space.'
'Black people, Muslim people, minorities of any sort' should not 'have to hold their hand out to the white man and say, 'Please look after me,'' Birbalsingh told me later in her office. She objected fiercely to what she saw as the 'patronizing' idea being conveyed to young Black people that 'the only way you can get to Oxford is if there is affirmative action of some sort to let you in, or the only way you can get the job is if they have a list of quotas that allows you in because, well, they have to feel sorry for you.' Instead, she's teaching her students 'the knowledge and the skills that they need to be able to make their lives successful.'
Birbalsingh, herself a graduate of Oxford, said that she opens the school up to visitors because she wants 'to show people what's possible.' She conceives of Michaela not merely as a stand-alone educational institution making a difference in the lives of the local children lucky enough to attend it but also as a laboratory for expanding our understanding of what is socially and pedagogically possible for 'kids from the inner city.' She wants people to take her insights and methodology 'back to their schools and make their schools better. A huge part of the mission, actually, is seeding the ideas.' For those who cannot make it to Wembley, she has edited a volume of contributions from more than 20 teachers titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way.
You won't encounter them in Michaela's hallways, but critics of the school are legion. Some say that it is overly focused on test scores and rote memorization. It has little use for 'differentiation—catering differently within a lesson to students of varying ability,' George Duoblys observed in a 2017 London Review of Books essay. Teachers have little flexibility—their role, Duoblys wrote, is 'reduced to the transmission of an existing body of knowledge by means of a set of optimized techniques.'
'Michaela is an absolute monarchy,' Will Lloyd wrote last year in The New Statesman, and Birbalsingh 'its formidable, Gradgrindian headmistress-queen.' The article dismisses the school's conservatism as fetishizing a 'pseudo-British' past. Birbalsingh 'is never more than 30 seconds from saying she wants to return education to the 1950s, or lamenting that it's unfashionable to teach what your grandmother would have taught you,' Lloyd writes. 'She talks about 'love,' but the public persona is more 'Nightmare Victorian Patriarch.''
Michaela isn't a monarchy, but Lloyd is right that it's not a democracy either. Call it a benevolent dictatorship. Roughly half of the school's 700 students are Muslim, and Birbalsingh forbids them from gathering in large groups to pray during recess, arguing that nonobservant students might feel pressured by such outward displays of piety. One student's family took the school to court over the policy, and last year, a judge dismissed the case, arguing that the student knew about the rule before applying to the school. 'If parents do not like what Michaela is,' Birbalsingh remarked, 'they do not need to send their children to us.'
Birbalsingh is now involved in a contentious dispute with the new Labour government's secretary of education, Bridget Phillipson, over proposed reforms that would limit free schools' autonomy by imposing new hiring rules and an as-yet-to-be-defined national curriculum. Birbalsingh argues that teacher-certification requirements would undermine her ability to recruit and develop nontraditional candidates who might be put off by bureaucratic hoop-jumping, and that the national curriculum might force her to lower her own standards. She also called Phillipson a Marxist. Phillipson's office did not reply to a request for comment.
Birbalsingh believes that she's been punished for her political orientation throughout her tenure at Michaela. 'As a teacher, you're not really allowed to be a conservative,' she told me. She may not always vote conservative (she told me that she didn't in the previous election, though she wouldn't say whom she'd voted for). But she embraces the label of cultural conservative—'old-school, Black, small- c conservative,' advocating all manner of progressive taboos: hierarchy, personal responsibility, respectability politics.
When she was drumming up grassroots support around London for what would become Michaela, Birbalsingh recalled, she was protested by white people whom she believes had been 'bused in from the suburbs.' Opponents argued that the school would take resources away from the public system, which was already short on money for primary schools. 'We had to hire bouncers for our events because of the possible violence that might ensue,' Birbalsingh said. 'White people would stand up and shout in order to drown out our voices so that the Black people, the Black moms, generally speaking, could not hear what I was saying.'
Birbalsingh also struggled to find a space for the school. 'That's why we've ended up in this terrible building,' she told me with a laugh. 'No school building has six floors. Normally, it's two floors. You're not right next to the trains. When my staff are trying to talk to the kids, you can hardly hear them because of the trains. We have no car park for the staff. We have no trees and grass for the kids to run around. It's by no means ideal. But because I don't believe in feeling sorry for ourselves, you don't hear me going on about it all the time.' She added, 'I'm not going to spend my time being a victim.'
From what I saw, none of this presented a hindrance to learning. Nor was I very convinced that Michaela's teaching style sacrifices intellectual nuance and rigor on the altar of standardized-test scores. In December, I took a seat in the back of a room of 11- and 12-year-old students involved in a spirited discussion on atheism. When the teacher, a young man named Josh Cowland, posed a question, every single student's hand shot up. 'Atheists therefore argue that God cannot be omnipotent,' Cowland said. 'Because what is he not doing?' The students were given 10 seconds to consult their neighbors. 'Four, three, two,' Cowland counted down, and on 'one,' the room was blanketed in silence, as if you'd slipped on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Once again, all hands were raised. A boy answered confidently: 'He's not stopping evil!'
Another teacher, James Sibley, told me that he knows the school has a reputation for drilling and being strict—as if 'you're going to get a knife in the face' if you get an answer wrong. But the expectations aren't the problem, he said: 'I think children are most unhappy not when there's pressure on them, but with inconsistency.'
'It was quite difficult to adapt to the expectations that the teachers had for us,' one boy told me, 'but once we did, it allowed us to be more successful and to be able to have high goals for ourselves as well.' An older girl agreed. 'The whole environment is mutually reinforcing the norms of excellence,' she said, 'which I think is what's so difficult in certain schools where even if you want to try your hardest, if you're not around other people who are doing it, it can be very difficult to be the only person living by certain standards.'
That sense of shared purpose is very different from what I remember of my own high school, where kids would laugh in your face for 'talking white.' My father, another Black, small- c cultural conservative, also made me recite 'Invictus.' From ninth to 12th grade, my best friend, Carlos, and I studied with him for hours in the evenings and on weekends, and we hid this deepest aspect of ourselves from our classmates. All of us judged one another by the quality of our outfits, by our physical indomitability and sexual prowess, and by our ability to evince an above-it-all insouciance in the face of the larger, white society around us. Sociologists call this 'cool-pose culture,' and it hobbled my friends and me when we were navigating adolescence. I saw no sign of it at Michaela.
In the hallways, the only talk I heard was 'Good day, sir,' as I passed earnest boys and girls moving efficiently between their classes. No one roughhoused or wasted time or teased one another. Nor did anyone laugh. I would be lying if I said that I didn't notice this distinct lack of levity. What was it like to always have to be a model student on display for curious onlookers? By comparison, my friends and I were free—luxuriously so—in ways these children possibly couldn't even imagine. But that freedom that so many underprivileged and minority children bask in isn't worth a damn thing if it leads to an adulthood boxed in by self-inflicted limitations.
'The stuff that really matters here is who our children are as people,' Birbalsingh told me. There's 'no exam in that,' she said, but you can 'look at our children, look at how they walk. Look at how they talk to each other. These are normal inner-city children, but they're not walking with that bop. They're not talking with that slang' or being 'rude to people on the buses.' None of this is accidental. 'We are teaching them how to behave,' she continued, so that they may 'live lives of dignity and of meaning.'
This all sounds like common sense, but it's hard to overstate the visceral disdain it can elicit. In a Guardian column about a 2022 documentary on Michaela, Britain's Strictest Headmistress, Zoe Williams sneered that the film 'continues to do the diligent work of Katharine Birbalsingh, in mythologizing herself so furiously that, if you didn't have a memory or know any better, you would think she invented the phrases 'please' and 'thank you.'' Such condescension would be merely impolite if it weren't leveraged in service of a status quo that has been failing children who are not already the beneficiaries of privilege. 'Competence is controversial,' Birbalsingh said, when I asked her why she thinks there is so much enmity directed at her project.
But competence is also infectious. On my second visit, I struck up a conversation with a young teacher named Ryan Badolato from Vertex Partnership Academies, in the Bronx, a charter school with a mission similar to Michaela's. 'I've never seen kids so invested in their academic success, praised so much for their hard work, or any group of teenagers as polite and respectful as they all were,' he expanded several days later over email. 'Despite the outside world viewing their school as overly strict—a place where students should feel unhappy and eager to leave—what I witnessed was the opposite: They are the happiest and most proud teenagers I have ever met.'