PR0FILE: KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH BRITAIN'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL TEACHER:Her experience as a teacher in London's inner-city schools taught Katharine Birbalsingh that poor pupils fail because in a culture of excuses, so little is expected of them. When she went public with her theories, she was fired
WHISTLE-BLOWING is a risky manoeuvre in any organisation. It’s practically unheard of in education because teachers are caught in the nexus of vulnerable children, powerful unions, church interests and the State paymaster. Katharine Birbalsingh has compared the relationship of teachers to the system as that of an abused child to its abuser – if you speak out, everyone will blame you.
Birbalsingh knows. After 10 years teaching in inner-city schools in London, she decided to blow the whistle on what she saw as a broken education system consistently failing disadvantaged children in a culture of secrecy. Her actions have drawn opprobrium from teachers, media and the public. She has lost her job at the now doomed St Michael’s and All Angel’s Academy in Southwark and she is certain, she claims, never to work in a state school again.
Birbalsingh began her teaching career in 2000 and moved through a number of disadvantaged schools around the Brixton area of London. In 2007, she began to record her experiences anonymously in a blog under the name Snuffleupagus, eventually shortened to Snuffy. She chose the name of the shaggy elephant from Sesame Streetbecause, in the 1970s TV series, he was never seen by the other characters. She claims that the English education system is full of such "invisible elephants".
Her blog gained underground notoriety and in 2008 it was spotted by a beady eye at Penguin books. Birbalsingh was offered a publishing deal.
“I thought this would be a dangerous move, but I also thought it would be a good idea to let the public know what is really going on in our schools,” says Birbalsingh, who now spends her days writing instead of teaching, but not by choice. “I decided to write the book anonymously.”
In the meantime Birbalsingh met Michael Gove, the new Conservative education secretary. “I spoke to him about my ideas for education and he was very interested. He asked me to come and speak at the Conservative Party Conference last October. I assumed I would be speaking at a small workshop group or something of that kind. I had no idea I would be addressing the whole conference.”
Birbalsingh delivered a seven-minute speech on England’s “broken education system”, offering unadorned views on racism and the reproduction of disadvantage in state schools. Her call for a return to basic values of discipline and competition chimed with the Conservative Party ethos. She received a standing ovation.
Birbalsingh attacked a “culture of excuses” that saw educators lowering their expectations of black and disadvantaged children. She described a system that rewards lower and lower levels of achievement. She criticised endemic indiscipline in inner city schools and claimed that teachers are afraid to impose rules and sanctions on black children lest they are accused of racism. She laid much of the blame for this culture on left-wing thinking and claimed that most teachers are cut from this ideological cloth.
Birbalsingh claims no political affiliation but has, unsurprisingly, been dubbed a “Tory pin-up”.
The days after the Tory conference were seismic for Birbalsingh. The veil was lifted and her blog could now be read in the context of the schools she had worked at. Within days she was asked to leave her post as French teacher and deputy head of St Michael’s and All Angels (where she had only taken up employment weeks before). She was attacked in the media and in education for her views and accused of being a mouthpiece for Michael Gove and a ruthless operator exploiting her former pupils and employers to boost her publishing career.
Her book, To Miss With Love(Viking) was published earlier this year – it's currently no 10 on the Amazon chart. It was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Month in March and has been widely and critically acclaimed. But Birbalsingh is not happy. She has lost her job and believes that because she addressed the Tory conference she will never work in a state school again. Her former school, St Michael's and All Angels, is closing down due to lack of demand from parents. The school blames Birbalsingh's Tory conference speech: she says it would have happened anyway.
Primarily, however, Birbalsingh is unhappy about the true impact of her speech and the book that followed. Despite all the media attention she’s getting, she doesn’t believe that her core messages are taking root.
“I’m worried about the children,” she says. “I thought people didn’t know how bad things were and that if I told them, things would change. I’ve since learned that there are huge numbers of people whose self-interest is implicated in change. They want things to stay as they are.”
Birbalsingh’s school portrait is populated by poor children who face daily encounters with violence, chaos and failure. She describes teachers whose attempts at raising standards in the classroom are met with systemic resistance. Bad teachers and bad school heads are kept in place while teachers who try to change things are professionally exiled, she says.
Meaningful teaching and learning has been replaced by a bureaucratic obsession with statistical measures that have stymied educational leadership in inner city schools.
“Many people are fighting to keep things as they are,” says Birbalsingh. “Big union bosses are the fat cats of this system. They fight to keep bad teachers and bad heads in position. The exam boards are making exams easier because the heads of departments choose the easiest papers in order to get school results up. Promotions are given to people that invent qualifications for schools. People are duped into taking meaningless qualifications. We’re all completely duped by this insane system. Everyone insists I’m lying because they want to keep their jobs.”
Predictably, much of the discourse surrounding Birbalsingh’s commentary is focused on the left/right divide.
Conservative education secretary Michael Gove has introduced Free Schools – institutions set up by groups of parents or teachers that do not have to hire from union membership lists or be subjected to Ofsted (the English school inspectorate) standards. These schools will be funded by the state but not controlled by it.
Labour and the teaching unions are staunchly opposed, claiming that Free Schools will intensify disadvantage in schooling as middle-class parents leave state schools for Free Schools, creating a two-tier system propped up by government funds. Birbalsingh now proposes to establish and head one of these schools.
“Gove is doing the right thing,” says Birbalsingh. “Just because he’s Conservative everyone says he’s evil and the left keep saying he’s wrong.”
She remains committed to disadvantaged pupils and does not believe that schools with higher standards of discipline and academic performance will necessarily be beyond the reach of minority groups.
She invokes the “broken window theory” of criminology; that disorder and vandalism lead to further disorder and vandalism, where higher standards improve behaviour.
“For too long now we’ve looked at underperforming children in the system and instead of trying to raise the standards we’ve excused everybody by saying ‘but he’s poor, it’s not his fault’. Everyone is rewarded or excused and no one is held to account for their own behaviour. I’ve visited schools across the globe.
“Poor kids in developing countries are the best-behaved children in the world. They’re hungry for education. We’ve ruined that hunger in this country. We think the poor cannot behave themselves because they are poor. What incredible prejudice!”
The comments that led to teacher Katharine Birbalsingh being fired
“My experience of teaching in five different schools over a decade has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the system is broken because it keeps poor children poor.”
“I am fighting a generation of thinking that has left our education system in pieces, where all must have prizes, all must have GCSEs and all must go to university”
“We have a situation where standards have been so dumbed down that even the children themselves know it. When I give them past exam papers to do from 1998 they groan and beg for one from 2006 because they know it will be easier.”
“The idea of benchmarking children and letting them know how they compare to their peers is considered so poisonous that we don’t ever do it, and we let children live in darkness without any idea of how they compare to those around them, let alone those educated in the private sector.”
“Black children underachieve because of what well-meaning liberals have done to them. We teachers tend to be blinded by leftist ideology. Many of the necessary changes in education require right-wing thinking and we teachers instinctively reject such developments because of our loyalty to the left.”
“In school and in society we need high expectations of everyone, even if you’re black and live in a council estate.”
- speaking at the Conservative Party Conference 2010
