Latest news with #Birbalsingh
Sky News
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
'Britain's strictest headteacher' Katharine Birbalsingh criticises Education Secretary over 'appalling' schools bill
Educators are split over the government's proposed Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, with some saying the move will improve fairness and accountability and others warning it could limit innovation in academy schools. Pushed by the Department for Education (DfE) as a means to reform the education system, the bill seeks to improve school standards, strengthen attendance policies, and ensure that children receive a well-rounded education that prioritises their wellbeing. The legislation also includes measures to increase school accountability, particularly for academies, by giving more oversight to the DfE. Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of Michaela School in Wembley, north London, called it "absolutely appalling". "I'm just really concerned because, at the moment, school leaders have the freedom to do various things that are right for their intake," she said. "This bill will take those freedoms away." Ms Birbalsingh, also known as 'Britain's strictest headteacher', added: "We got unlucky because we could have had Wes Streeting as education secretary, which would have been fine. Unfortunately, we got her [Bridget Phillipson]. "She [Ms Phillipson] is so arrogant. She's just marched in there and gone, 'I know what I'm doing, I'll just do what I want'." But some argue that academies are left to their own devices and have a lack of accountability when it comes to things like parental complaints. The bill will require all schools to follow the national curriculum and employ teachers who have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) or are working towards it. The founder of Oasis Academies, Steve Chalke, said: "We're excited about the changes because we feel that education has been in a very, very poor place for the last decade or more. "Schools have been stripped of resources and there have been giant problems about the recruitment and retention of teachers. "We feel that this important bill is beginning to address all of those issues." The bill plans to provide all primary school children with breakfast, alongside uniform limits. This would prevent schools from having more than three items of branded uniform clothing, potentially addressing concerns parents have about the cost of uniforms. Mr Chalke said: "I am a fan of working hard collaboratively to create the best opportunities for any and every young person and their family. "Because behind every struggling child is normally a parent who's struggling with that." He added: "We at Oasis are excited about all of this, but that doesn't mean we don't have questions. "It doesn't mean that we're being led blindly down the road, but our job is to be engaged in the discussion about how academies work more widely with their local authorities." 2:40 The bill will also give local authorities greater control over the pupil admission process. Ms Birbalsingh said: "Any council could decide to reduce the number of children in one school and therefore reduce the money at that school and give more pupils to another school that's struggling." Mr Chalke said: "Educational academy boards, academy groups, need to be accountable in strong partnership with others. And if this bill delivers everything it promises, wow. I think [it] will be an extraordinary outcome." The bill is set to be debated further in the coming weeks as it moves through parliament. A DfE spokesperson said: "This government is determined to drive high and rising standards for every child through our Plan for Change, to ensure every family has a good local school for their child. "Our landmark Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill delivers on this mission, getting high-quality teachers into every classroom, and ensuring there is a floor on pay and no ceiling. "These measures will make sure we are giving every child an education as good as the best."
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The dogma of ‘Britain's Strictest Headmistress' is a con as old as time - gentle parenting produces happier kids
You've heard the terrible news, I'm sure. Our children are pampered. We raise the coddled brats not as stern parents but simpering friends. We flatter their whims and let them bury their heads in screens. We fetishise what they feel, care not for what they learn, and neglect what they need: that good old-fashioned commonsense discipline that raised the great generations of times past. Inarguably the greatest peddler of this diagnosis is Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain's Strictest Headmistress™ and co-founder of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, which boasts fastidious adherence to uniforms, timed loo breaks and silent corridors. In an interview with the Times last week, she yet again bemoaned the 'gentle parenting' that is leaving her students ill-equipped for modern life. Her approach is hardly new in modern times. Amy Chua's 2011 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, preached stern, academically focused parenting, in which withholding compliments, denying playdates and banning sleepovers were the order of the day. It was a sensation at the time (and, in fact, so influential to this cohort that Michaela would release a book entitled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers two years later). In the time since, these age-old woes have been joined by constant panics over smartphones, tablets and screen time, perhaps best represented by Jonathan Haidt's 2024 tome The Anxious Generation, which posits that allowing our children to avail themselves of the technology that powers our lives has spawned an epidemic of mental illness that we must do all we can to forestall. At this juncture, I'll admit I'm not convinced. In the case of Birbalsingh, I find her pronouncements to be boilerplate conservatism rebadged as revolutionary pedagogy, complete with consistent, and tired, jeremiads against 'woke culture' and 'Marxist' education ministers. Michaela's academic results are indeed excellent, but so are those of many other schools that do not subscribe to its philosophy, and the web of factors that inform how schools perform is complex. As for how their students are parented at home – the most common crux of Birbalsingh's pronouncements – we, quite rightly, have no idea, despite her constant endeavours to sow the airwaves with charming anecdotes about how feckless and stupid they often are. In the case of Chua, the available research counters her claims quite starkly. A 2013 paper by Su Yeong Kim at the University of Texas at Austin found that children of tiger parents were 'more likely than those with supportive or easygoing parents to feel more alienated from their parents, report greater depressive symptoms, and, in contrast to the stereotype of high achievement, report lower GPAs [grade point averages]'. Haidt's thesis that smartphones and social media use are turning our children into depressive zombies sounds convincing until one considers the correlative fallacy in connecting increased smartphone use to rising diagnoses of mental ill health. When I recall the entirely unaddressed mental wellbeing of classmates during my own pre-smartphone schooling, I can freely imagine that diagnosis and treatment had a lot of catching up to do. Consider, also, the consistent refrain that British kids are falling behind in coding, and that touchy feely subjects like arts and languages should make way for computing classes for every child in Britain. How, precisely, we achieve this without screens is left for brighter minds than ours to figure out. If I sound glib about all these Cassandras, perhaps it's because I'm sick of the tired grift that rewards them for passing off alarmist hectoring as common sense. My own generation of parents – the timid, indulgent, millennials they so despise – are, ourselves, the 'terror tots' of the 80s and 90s, raised on a diet of ultraviolent computer games and video nasties; the very same tykes the press insisted would grow up to be remorseless, vacant serial killers. Were I to sit with those currently stigmatising parental indulgence and yearning for the return of cold, hard discipline, I'd have little problem discerning which generation had trended toward psychopathy in the intervening years. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Just about the only thing we can say with any certainty is that strictures of discipline, education and access to technology, affect different children in different ways. A greater awareness of their individual needs is warranted, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach aimed at scaring parents and flattering the culture war zealots who consider every new thing strange and every kindness wicked. Children are, it turns out, frustratingly individual. In this sense, one might almost compare them to human beings. Anyone still doing the 'kids these days' routine in 2025 is engaged in a con as old as time. You've possibly encountered an old quote that often does the rounds. 'We have fallen upon evil times. The world has waxed very old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their parents.' It's often attributed to King Naram, who ruled the Akkadian empire from approximately 2255–2218 BC, with the humorous implication that people have been saying these kinds of things for millennia. In actual fact, no useful source for it stretches back further than 1913. As such, we don't know if a Mesopotamian king wrote those words more than four millennia ago, but we do know that we've been mocking our peers for echoing these scaremongering, solipsistic sentiments for a century at least. Call me old-fashioned, but this is a tradition I reckon we should uphold.
Telegraph
27-02-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Parenting books aren't the solution, they're actually the problem
I tend to agree with Katherine Birbalsingh's analysis of the ineffectual modern parent – not least because I lack authority myself, and would prefer to blame it on a cultural phenomenon. The woman best known as Britain's strictest head teacher says parents have lost 'dominion' over our children, because of a change in the literature and psychology of child-rearing. 'If you're looking for books to give you advice on what to do as a parent, it's almost impossible to access the kind of advice you would have gotten 50, 60 years ago,' says Birbalsingh. 'The stuff you'll get nowadays will be much more along the lines of gentle parenting, being friends with your children, not holding them to account.' A quick glance at Amazon's childcare section – There's No Such Thing as Naughty; The Patient Parent; Parenting Without Anger; The Gentle Parenting Book – seems to confirm this diagnosis. But even more striking than the tone of these books is their number. There are currently more than 60,000 parenting books listed on Amazon's UK site. Add to that the cacophony of online parenting advice – the websites, apps, forums and social media influencers – and what you have is a psychological Babel. This, it seems to me, is the real cultural difference between my parents' generation and mine. They could still hear themselves think. There was only one notable parenting guru around during my own babyhood: Dr Spock. (He was on the soft side. Not the disciplinarian of Birbalsingh's nostalgic thesis.) The idea that parenting was a complex mission requiring specialist knowledge had not yet fully caught on. My mother tells me she never read a single parenting book. 'I just listened to your grandmothers. And then I ignored them.' By contrast, I read voraciously; it seemed negligent not to, with so much information out there. My parenting style flapped around like a windsock in a hurricane, as one childcare guru superseded another. Every change of direction eroded what little confidence I had in my own instincts; and this, in turn, kept me scurrying back to the bookshelf in search of guidance. I ended up – as I remain – confused, irresolute and inconsistent. Not just from reading the wrong books, but from reading any at all. Social media algorithms There are, it should be said, some benefits to the friendly model of contemporary parenting. My children confide in me with welcome frankness, and in doing so often reveal hidden aspects of their own culture. My eldest boy, for example, tells me that every few weeks he resets his Instagram algorithm by searching for cute wombats, funny pandas and other 'middle-aged mum stuff'. He has to do this, or his timeline becomes over-run with neo-Nazis. The algorithm wants to serve him far-Right content because he is a) a teenage boy, and b) a fan of mixed martial arts (MMA). For reasons that I don't fully understand, but he does, there's an ideological pipeline that runs from MMA to Donald Trump to the white supremacist sub-culture of so-called Active Clubs, which revere Hitler and were closely involved in the rioting that followed the Southport murders. An algorithm is a curiously blunt instrument, even now. It cannot understand that a boy who is interested in fighting might also be gentle, philosophical, politically moderate. Despite having access to all his data, it can't actually see my son at all. Only the pigeonhole into which it keeps trying to usher him.
Telegraph
26-02-2025
- General
- Telegraph
From the naughty step to no punishment – how ‘gentle parenting' went too far
Britain's strictest teacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, has no time for 'gentle parenting'. The headteacher of the Michaela Community School, in Wembley, has become famous for her school's remarkable results, as well as her outspoken views in support of discipline, uniform, written exams and other vestiges of an earlier educational era. In an interview this week, Birbalsingh claimed parents have been 'infantilised' by modern literature that prioritises the child's feelings, rather than empowering them. 'The culture and the language that's being used means parents feel that they're not in a position of authority over their child,' Birbalsingh told The Times. 'If you're looking for books to give you advice on what to do as a parent, it's almost impossible to access the kind of advice you would have gotten 50, 60 years ago. The stuff you'll get nowadays will be much more along the lines of gentle parenting, being friends with your children, not holding them to account.' Every era has its own parenting neuroses, about how to balance healthy child development with being kind and loving. For baby boomers there was 'latchkey parenting', where children were home alone without adults. Millennials had ' helicopter parenting ', where parents were too involved in every aspect of their little darlings' lives, given its most extreme expression in Amy Chua's 2011 bestseller, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which coined ' tiger parenting ' for parents relentlessly pushing their children to succeed. While some of the older advice is out of date; many parents today will relate to Birbalsingh's position. Gentle parenting's advocates believe that attending to a child's motivations and feelings, rather than guiding them with punishment or shame for the behaviour, equips them better for adult life. Writers and influencers like Sarah Ockwell-Smith, and Becky Kennedy (Dr Becky on Instagram) have gained huge followings with their calm, patient advice on how to be calm and patient with children. The naughty step is out, talking feelings through is in. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dr. Becky (@drbeckyatgoodinside) But there are signs the trend may have passed its peak. Birbalsingh argues the philosophy has contributed to a post-covid world where children are increasingly ill-equipped for school. Parenting forums and surveys suggest that frazzled parents are tiring of deferring to their children's every whim. Sometimes children hit their little brother not because they are working through some unresolved trauma, but because their little brother is being annoying. Here are some examples of advice, from then and now… Perhaps the most drastic shift from traditional parenting advice to gentle parenting is in discipline. In the Intelligent Parents' Manual (1943), the authors write that 'there are certain rare occasions when a spanking or a well-administered slap on the hand is not only excusable but beneficial. 'A child who has been behaving in a truculent way all the afternoon, purposefully doing all the things he knows are forbidden, and who as evening comes makes a terrific scene about going to bed, may possibly profit from spanking.' Gentle parenting makes the furthest swing of the pendulum in the other direction. In LR Knost's The Gentle Parent (2013), she writes that if parents 'want to help stop the bullying epidemic,' then they should not 'act like a bully.' This means they 'don't hit, threaten, ignore, isolate, intimidate, ridicule or manipulate your child.' Elsewhere she writes that 'effective parenting, and more specifically, effective discipline, don't require punishment.' It wouldn't have flown in the 60s. One curious aspect of gentle parenting is the way some advice has almost come full circle. Cuddling and kissing is one example. In John B Watson's influential 1928 book on the Psychological care of infant and child, he writes: 'Never hug and kiss children, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Try it out.' Within a week, he adds, 'you will be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.' A similar sentiment is evident in the Intelligent Parents' Manual, 15 years later, which advises that 'too many caresses, too much emotion lavished, may accustom a child to so much pleasure in being touched and handled that all future relationships may seem cold and unsatisfactory by comparison.' Most modern parenting advice has encouraged cuddles and kisses. But in the far reaches of gentle parenting social media, even this is becoming too much. GentleHealingMom advises that parents should not insist on physical contact with reluctant children. In one post, she says: 'Gentle parents teach this: I don't have to hug or kiss anyone if I don't want to. I'm allowed to say no and stop. It's MY body, I get to choose.' A hundred years on, it's similar advice to Watson's, except this time the power is with the children rather than the adults. View this post on Instagram A post shared by KJ | Certified Parent Coach | Conscious Parent (@gentlehealingmom) Similarly the question of whether feeding and sleeping be at the discretion of the child or the parent has flip-flopped over the years. Dr Benjamin Spock, in his radical 1946 book Baby and Child Care, advised parents to 'say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don't go back'. His comments were echoed by Dr Walter Sackett jr in his Bringing Up Babies: A Family Doctor's Practical Approach to Child Care (1962). 'Absolutely no night feedings, no matter how young the baby, nor how much it cried… if we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism.' Heaven forbid. Gina Ford's 1999 book The Contented Little Baby Book argued that the best solution was to set strict, rigid limits for parents and children, dividing up the day into discrete units so the child learned its routine. Gentle parenting goes a step further, putting the question back on the parents. 'We sleep train our children in order that we fit into our modern lives more easily,' writes Sarah Ockwell-Smith. 'We fool ourselves into believing that it is our offspring that have 'sleep problems' rather than opening our eyes to the real problem – that is the disharmony between the primal needs of our young and the expectations of the modern world. Who really has the problem?' Something to think about at four in the morning when you have been woken for the fifth time. View this post on Instagram A post shared by GENTLE PARENTING (@gentle_parenting) The part of sleep training parents dread is learning to resist their child's cries. Easier said than done. The principle has been around for a long time. In 1894, Luther Emmett Holt wrote that the child 'should simply be allowed to 'cry it out'. This often requires an hour, and in some cases, two or three hours. A second struggle will seldom last more than ten or fifteen minutes, and a third will rarely be necessary.' Gentle parenting holds that when they cry, children are working through emotional issues they lack the language or maturity to express. 'It's not our job to stop children from crying,' writes Pam Leo. 'The crying is the healing, not the hurting. When we stop children from crying they have to stuff the hurt inside instead of releasing it.' Again, fine in theory. Like other aspects of gentle parenting, this advice brings to mind Mike Tyson's boxing maxim that 'everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.' The tantrum may be the most exasperating moment as a parent. Even the progressive Dr Spock advised parents to hold the line. 'If a tantrum erupts anyway, don't back down or give in,' he wrote. 'If you do, she'll eventually catch on that tantrums get her what she wants, and she's likely to begin using them as a deliberate tactic.' For gentle parents, tantrums are like like tears, only more extreme. 'Tantrums are not bad behaviour,' writes Rebecca Eanes in the Newbie's Guide to Positive Parenting. 'Tantrums are an expression of emotion that became too much for the child to bear. No punishment is required. What your child needs is compassion and safe, loving arms to unload in.' Maybe after they have had a few minutes to cool off. The classic Dreikurs and Goldman advice on children's independence is to encourage it at every step. In the mid-1960s, they argued that parents should 'never do for a child what a child can do for himself'. Only by doing things themselves whenever possible would children acquire the skills they need for adulthood. Later, Peggy O'Mara, founder of Mothering magazine, encouraged parents to embrace their child's dependence, which they will grow out of in time. 'It is in the nature of the child to be dependent, and it is the nature of dependence to be outgrown. Begrudging dependency because it is not independence is like begrudging winter because it is not yet spring.' Gentle parenting strikes a balance, encouraging independence within set boundaries: cleaning up toys, putting away groceries. Freedom but not anarchy. Perhaps the most famous parenting maxim of all – along with 'spare the rod, spoil the child' – is that children should be 'seen but not heard'; gentle parenting, broadly defined, is in effect a rebuke to these aphorisms. Children, as Katharine Birbalsingh agrees, should be taught how to behave. As Emily Post wrote in Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home in 1922, 'any child can be taught to be beautifully behaved with no effort greater than quiet patience and perseverance, whereas to break bad habits once they are acquired is a Herculean task.' Gentle parenting abhors the silent, well-behaved, potentially repressed child. Children ought to be encouraged to speak their minds and assert themselves, even at the expense of manners. *** The glut of parenting advice is self-perpetuating. Parenting tips echo other societal anxieties. The advice from the mid-20th century on being less strict with your little darlings came at the same time as other aspects of society were becoming more liberal. Gina Ford's strict regime was designed to help busy mothers 'have it all' – manage bedtime with a career and a social life. Being saturated in advice from social media, podcasts, articles and every other angle, parents will inevitably dwell on how they parent, and hunger for more advice. At its core, gentle parenting encourages self-reflection in the parent. As Becky Kennedy writes: 'When you orient a child to focus on the impact of her feelings on you instead of the reality of the feelings inside herself, you are wiring a child for co-dependency.' If parents risk co-dependency with their children, they are increasingly co-dependent with parenting advice.
The Independent
18-02-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
‘Strictest head' warns Government ‘about to totally destroy academies'
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is about to 'totally destroy academies' and has failed to 'listen' to school leaders, Katharine Birbalsingh has claimed. Sometimes described as Britain's strictest headteacher, Ms Birbalsingh suggested a proposed cap on the amount of different branded uniform items a school can demand could hamper teachers' efforts to improve behaviour. The headteacher of Michaela Community School in Brent, London, met with Ms Phillipson earlier this month, when they had a heated exchange about the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which the Commons is yet to sign off on. I think she would do well to listen to school leaders and she's not listening to them, and that's a worry - that an Education Secretary would simply say, 'no, I don't need to listen to you, I already know better than you do Katharine Birbalsingh According to meeting minutes prepared by the Department for Education and obtained by the magazine Schools Week after a freedom of information request, the Education Secretary urged Ms Birbalsingh to 'lower her tone and asked they remove the heat from the discussion'. Asked about the exchange, the headteacher said on Tuesday she thinks Ms Phillipson 'believes that because she's gone to school in Sunderland, that means she's now an expert on how to teach and how to run a school'. She told the PA news agency: 'I have to say, I was asking her lots of questions, I wasn't lecturing her. 'But I think she would do well to listen to school leaders and she's not listening to them, and that's a worry – that an Education Secretary would simply say, 'no, I don't need to listen to you, I already know better than you do'. 'That's the biggest concern, because she is about to totally destroy academies and I know she believes that she's going to be helping poor children by doing this. 'She's actually going to ruin their chances in life, and we won't see it right away. 'The thing about education is that it takes many years before those changes embed and I am desperately worried. 'There are other school leaders who have spoken out, and lots of them don't feel they can speak out, even though privately they are very worried about this Bill.' The Bill, if agreed to, would set a limit on mandatory branded school uniform items. Primary schools would only be allowed to demand parents buy a maximum of three different types of branded items of uniform each year, rising to four items at secondary school. Attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) conference in east London, Ms Birbalsingh said: 'To give you an example – uniform. 'Bridget Phillipson is going to reduce the number of branded items that a school can have to three, and that's to include sport as well as the normal school uniform. 'Whenever anyone comes to visit us and they say 'our school's in difficulty, what can we do to make it better?', I explain about broken windows theory, I explain that you need to begin with uniform, I explain how to do it. 'We need uniform way less. Those schools are desperate for those branded items in order to turn those schools around. 'Bridget Phillipson is not a school leader, so she doesn't know about broken windows theory, and about uniform, and how when you want to improve behaviour you need to begin with uniform.' The headteacher also said she was 'very much against' using artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom, a day after royal family member and actor Sophie Winkleman, styled as Lady Frederick Windsor, said 'schools should be backing away from the neurological junk food of digital learning'. Ms Birbalsingh said: 'Your brain remembers stuff if you write it down, if you read it. The fact that AI will soon outperform humans in many areas means schools should be backing away from the neurological junk food of digital learning Sophie Winkleman 'The reason why our children are so literate and so articulate is because they do loads of reading and writing in the classroom. 'If you're on a screen, you're just not going to learn as much and the business of being on a screen actually dumbs you down, so that is devastating for kids that come from more challenging backgrounds. 'We strongly advise our families not to give them smartphones at all, so obviously smartphones aren't allowed in school, but we actually advise them just not to give them smartphones at all.' Winkleman, known for playing Big Suze in Channel 4 comedy Peep Show, spoke on Monday at the Arc conference, when she told activists: 'Why is digitally transporting a child to the Egyptian pyramids better than that child imagining it? 'This kind of jazz-hands immersion as an engagement tool doesn't work. 'It negates the need to imagine, rendering the pupil a passive rather than an active learner.' The actor said: 'The fact that AI will soon outperform humans in many areas means schools should be backing away from the neurological junk food of digital learning, alert to the fact that it's counterproductive to learn anyway from an instantly ageing system, and teaching their pupils the deeply human skills, which AI will have a harder time replacing.'# A Department for Education spokesperson said: 'We would not comment on what was a private meeting, held in good faith. 'As the Education Secretary said in her speech at the CSJ, debate around education policy is welcome, and ministers will always meet with a wide range of stakeholders, with a range of different views.'
