London's Michaela School Shows What's Possible & How Far Behind America Is

My experience visiting this "controversial" school and the impression it left me

Last month, while visiting London, I had the privilege to be invited to visit the Michaela Community School which sits in the shadow of Wembley Stadium.

For people who aren’t familiar, the Michaela Community School has been marked as a controversial school in the U.K. media for its strict educational environment and has been deemed as radical by some in the media along with its headmistress (equivalent to a principal in the U.S.), Katharine Birbalsingh.

Matter of Fact, she’s been officially dubbed by the U.K. media as the “strictest headmistress in the U.K.” to grab the attention of the audience.

The Guardian’s article published in 2022

If there is one thing I’ve learned in the past few years is that the media will often frame rational people as being radical, and then use this framing to sell fear to the public.

I’m also extra skeptical about if these allegations are true when virtually all mainstream media publications use the same tactic or language to describe this individual.

So, is Birbalsingh really a radical? I wanted to find out for myself.

By virtue of the networking wonder that Twitter is, Katharine and I began communicating in 2022 at which she invited me to come to the school to see what it’s like there for myself. By coincidence, a friend of mine and writer for

Wrong Speak Publishing

,

Dr. Joel Brown FRSA

, was also invited to tour this “infamous” secondary school at the same time.

I will say, the last thing I thought I would be doing is attending a tour of a secondary school especially because of how much I disliked school when I was a kid but there must be a reason why people come from all over the world to come to Wembley for a tour.

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While waiting for our tour guides to show, the front reception area started filling up with people who were all there to see what the fuss was all about and ready to embark on their tour as well.

The doors opened and there was a line of pairing children waiting for us: they were our tour guides. Prior to our tour beginning, we were given a long list of rules to abide by while on tour and our guides re-emphasized the importance of us following those rules while entering each classroom.

The first thing I noticed was how quiet the halls were. There were no children hanging out in the hallways and if you saw people in the hallways, students or teachers, they were walking with a purpose and would give a brief “good morning” as they quickly scurried by.

At random, we were taken to each floor of the school and our guides would choose a classroom to enter or not enter due to those students having serious upcoming academic tests which required their full attention. We were instructed to walk into each classroom and go directly to the back of the room without saying a word and stand quietly while in their classroom.

What I saw was something I never saw before: full engagement. If we did this in my old school, all the kids would be talking to each other about who these visitors are, staring at us as we walked in and it would take the teacher 5 minutes to get the kids’ attention again.

At the Michaela School, in every classroom we entered, we were treated like we were invisible. We were never acknowledged and the children had full attention on the teacher 100% of the time. Not a single child turned their head or cared that we were there.

Everything felt fast-paced and even taking notes down was timed. The teachers spoke loudly and quickly, asking the children questions and every child would raise their hand to answer it. The child chosen would answer the question correctly and would be given a “merit”, which is a merit point system that is implemented in all aspects of the school.

What about the children who need help? The teacher would ask all the children to put their heads down and then instruct them to raise their hands based on how many of the answers they got wrong. This strategy is so that other kids in the class can’t see who’s doing good and who’s struggling.

I remember back to when I was in grade school and I would pretend to understand everything when I clearly didn’t just so I didn’t have to suffer the embarrassment of seeming dumb. I would have loved something like this so the teacher understood where I needed help without my peers knowing.

Joel and I would frequently leave a classroom speechless and look at each other with the same look of disbelief. We’ve never seen children so engaged in learning and every teacher was genuinely happy when their children succeeded.

The highlight of the visit was lunch time and it wasn’t because of the food.

In America, when you go to lunch, it’s like a learning dead zone and a time to co-mingle. There aren’t really any teachers there and if they are there, they’re not engaging with the kids. This was the complete opposite at the Michaela Community School.

Everything they did was with a purpose. If you sat in a particular seat at a table, you had an assignment. One seat would require you to pour a drink for everyone at the table. Another seat would require you to grab the prepared food and bring it to the table…and so on…

While the children were eating, they began practicing lines and repeating them over and over which was initially strange for me to witness. Then I realized why: they might get called on by one of the teachers.

The question of the day: what are you thankful for? Every child chosen had a different answer as to what they were thankful for. Some were thankful for their teachers, others were thankful for their parents sacrificing to help them get better at their studies.

When a child stood up to speak, there was complete silence from the rest of the children. With every successful speech, that child would earn a merit and I could see the absolute joy on the faces of their teachers who were standing nearby.

The Michaela Community School operates similarly to a charter school in the U.S. but the difference is that there is no lottery system. Their school is part of the local general admissions, which means children who may not have wanted to go to the school initially also get sent to this school, making the results they’re able to garner even more impressive.

In 2019, they made U.K. headlines when their GCSE test results showed as being four times higher than the national average, five years after their doors opened in 2014.

The Telegraph

So, this brings me to my previous question: is Katharine Birbalsingh a radical? Yes but not in the way you’re probably thinking. Katharine is a radical in the same way honest politicians are radical: they’re the few good people who are in an increasingly failing environment.

The media tries to smear her because her success is showing how wrong every else might be and nobody likes that, especially the elitist mainstream media.

In the West, it’s seen as radical to stand firm and hold children to a set of standards that are higher than the norm. It’s radical to not preach victimhood to children just because they come from a poor household, are of a particular ethnic background, or are experiencing personal struggles.

America’s educational system is filled with ideologues, bloated administration, and union vs. management animosity.

You often have teachers who are constantly dealing with fighting against the administration’s bureaucracy and debating their implementations especially when many have never done their job. Or you have teachers who are terrible at their jobs but are protected by a powerful union, which maintains the status quo of failure.

Even worse, you have administrators who have succumbed to implementing excess empathy for the worst-behaving children and refuse to discipline children (or expel them), leaving the children who actually want to learn to suffer surviving in a chaotic environment where no one appears to care.

In the end, the children are the ones who lose out. They’re the ones who get demoralized and withdraw from caring about their educational potential. The “adults” in the room are far too focused on their personal interests to see how they’re failing a generation of children because their ego is blinding.

Katharine Birbalsingh isn’t an ideologue, she’s just doing what works. But maybe being effective is radical as well.