Rita Panahi: Going back to basics comes top of the class

A groundbreaking free school has defied hostility and abuse by smashing the soft bigotry of low expectations that characterises the Australian school system. This is how education should be, writes Rita Panahi.

I have a new heroine. She’s a fiercely intelligent, dedicated and principled woman who’s overcome enormous odds to achieve a spectacular feat.

Katharine Birbalsingh’s achievements cannot be overstated. For close to a decade she stared down the abusers, hostility from educators and obstruction from government authorities to set up a free school based on traditional teaching methods with a curriculum stripped of ideological gimmickry.

Birbalsingh was monstered for rejecting modern education dogma and all it entails. The state school she founded, Michaela, has been labelled “Britain’s strictest school” and last week it received its first GCSE results after opening five years ago. The results were simply stunning and acknowledged far and wide, including by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The school named after Birbalsingh’s colleague, Michaela Emanus (who died of cancer in 2011), recorded results four times better than the national average.

Close to one in four students achieved a grade of 7 or above (A or A+) in all subjects, giving Michaela a score which would place it in the top 10 schools in the country based on last year’s results.

Half the pupils received a grade of 7 or above in at least five subjects. Those results are all the more spectacular when you consider Michaela is a non-selective state school whose students are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Educator Katharine Birbalsingh. Picture: Claudia Rose Carter

Most of the students are from ethnic backgrounds and more than half speak English as a second language. The student population also has socio-economic disadvantages with close to half the beneficiaries of the free school meal program.

There is also a higher than average number of students with special education needs. But Birbalsingh never expected anything other than her students’ best. She is a rare conservative in the education sector and brings to her role an uncompromising belief in personal responsibility, hard work, discipline and pursuit of excellence regardless of background.

“If a school is too permissive, allowing too many exceptions, it risks creating helplessness, selfishness or dependence in its pupils rather than responsibility, consideration and agency. If a school reduces its standards for poorer pupils because of their poverty or difficult home life, it does them a disservice; frankly, it doesn’t believe in them enough,” she said.

The soft bigotry of low expectations that marks our system is nowhere to be seen in Michaela School.

“We instil a respect for authority and unashamedly champion a knowledge-based curriculum,” she said.

“Some characterise this as mere rote-learning which strips pupils of their ingenuity — but on the contrary, it involves analysis and exploration and promotes creativity, memory and independent thinking.

The school’s results were simply stunning and acknowledged far and wide, including by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“Only by having knowledge at their fingertips can children write, speak and learn with confidence.”

As headmistress, Birbalsingh has seen her school vilified from its inception. She told the Herald Sun about her battle to set up Michaela and why she believes old-fashioned values can see children from all backgrounds succeed.

“It has taken nine years to get to the point of having actual GCSE results. It took 3½ years fighting our detractors to get the school open and then five years for our first year group to produce results,” Birbalsingh said. “We are thrilled that the children have performed so well.

Our model of traditional teaching combined with high standards of behaviour works.”

There is hope for our overfunded, underperforming education sector in Australia, where the traditional foundations of reading, writing and arithmetic, are being crowded out with relentlessly Leftist ideological hogwash that is increasingly infecting the curriculum.

Birbalsingh believes you achieve equality of opportunity not by tearing down private schools but by improving state schools and giving children from disadvantaged backgrounds the same disciplined and outcome-focused program privileged kids enjoy.

As Nick Timothy noted in The Telegraph: “Birbalsingh is succeeding for the same reasons that the ideological Left sought to stop her. She insists on a ‘no excuses’ culture.

“She demands impeccable discipline and punishes pupils if she does not get it. She believes in traditional, didactic teaching methods, which aim to instil knowledge — not ephemeral skills — in her pupils. And she expects nothing but the best.”

Despite the school’s extraordinary achievements, Birbalsingh and her ethos remain under attack with detractors painting her students as “robots”.

“They hate free schools, conservative values, black people thinking for themselves, refusal to embody victimhood, perseverance, light shining on bad ideology, anti-virtue-signalling and determination. They hate all that I am,” she tweeted.

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“The Left has persuaded us that good is Left and Right is bad, so naturally we want to be good people and convince ourselves that our instincts and judgments are Left-leaning when in fact they lean Right. Best thing I ever did was break out of that slave mentality.

“I believe in everyone fulfilling their potential, not in everyone being given a certificate. Some will win more, thanks to hard work and/or ability. That’s OK. Prizes for all destroys ambition and rewards unmet potential, which in time decimates entire communities.

“When I am asked what motivates me, I always say, the thousands of children I have known in my lifetime failed by our education system and our modern values.

“When I get tired (and I do), I think of them, pick myself up and KEEP ON GOING.”

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist.

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