Miracle: A British School That Works

Were it not for the large placard affixed to it, you would never guess that this undistinguished office block, opposite the entrance to a London Underground station in a northwest London suburb, is home to one of the most famous secondary schools in the country: the Michaela Community School. It attracts a steady stream of visitors from across Britain and abroad, drawn by the unlikely sight of well-behaved pupils, aged 11 to 18, achieving high academic standards in a borough marked by drug- and gang-related crime, where two-thirds of residents are from ethnic minorities and more than half of white residents are immigrants.

How has this miracle happened, or perhaps I should say, been permitted to happen? Everything would seem to have conspired against it. In a highly bureaucratized state, a good example is dangerous: it shows that, even among disadvantaged children, poor results, low standards, and antisocial classroom behavior are not inevitable but the product of weak will and flawed methods of teaching and organization. That implication points toward the need for change, which vested interests—above all, teachers’ unions, often politically radical yet stubbornly attached to repeated failure—most fear and resist.

When the school’s headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, founded Michaela in 2014 under a provision authorizing publicly funded schools independent of local government control, teachers’ union members demonstrated outside, handing out leaflets with headlines such as “Michaela ‘Free’ School: Putting Pupils’ Lives at Risk?” and “A Potential Death Trap.” The leaflets and posters made no mention of the disastrously low standards in other local schools—indeed, across the country—or of the borough’s pervasive drug, knife, and gun crime. Ten years after Michaela’s founding, the local council found it necessary or prudent to install special bins where young people could deposit illegal weapons anonymously. Here was the council’s advice to young knife carriers:

Wrap the knife: Place the knife in a sturdy container (e.g., cereal box). Seal it well with tape to prevent reopening.

Transport with care: Ensure the knife is not accessible while transporting. Carry it directly to the knife bin location.

Deposit securely: Place the wrapped knife into the designated knife bin.

Not much more need be said about youth culture in the borough where the Michaela Community School was established, but it is precisely this context that must be kept in mind when visitors are shocked, as most are initially, by the school’s almost military regimentation. Pupils may not speak in the corridors as they move, in single file, from one class to another. Even during free time, they are not allowed to gather in groups larger than four, to prevent the emergence of bullies or gang leaders. They greet teachers individually and politely, addressing them as “Miss” or “Sir,” and in the early grades sit with hands folded on their desks when not writing or otherwise engaged. In this way, distracting agitation is minimized and the teacher becomes the center of attention.

All this may strike the visitor as somewhat drastic, but, as Birbalsingh (of whom more later) observes, the alternative is not well-behaved children floating like butterflies, gathering the nectar of knowledge from the flowers of learning, but utter chaos—in which the teacher’s main task becomes getting children to sit down, pay attention, and not misbehave too violently. Many of her teachers have experienced this scenario elsewhere, and it prevails in nearby schools. Discipline at Michaela is relaxed over time, as self-discipline becomes second nature. The theory is not that children are born with freedom but that they grow into it; in this way, they gradually learn to use it constructively rather than destructively, for themselves and for society.

The next thing that all visitors to Michaela remark upon is the articulacy and confidence—though not overconfidence—with which the children speak. This is far from what one expects of children from such backgrounds, or indeed of children from any background today. Nor do they merely parrot what they have heard or learned, though the school places much emphasis on memorizing and reciting poetry and on rote learning more generally. Discipline, it seems, is not inimical to their self-expression but a precondition of it. By first absorbing the skill from others, they learn how to express themselves.

Michaela exercises no choice over the students it admits. They are not a selected sample from the area, at least not selected by the school, and are therefore of varied abilities. Parents can express a preference for the schools they would like their children to attend, but no guarantee exists that their wishes will be met; the local authority makes the final allocation, and the process offers more of an illusion of choice than choice itself. At any rate, there appears no shortage of parents who want their children to attend the school, which has upward of 800 pupils.

This is important because the school’s rules are made clear before the children enroll. Sixty percent of the pupils are Muslim, but parents know in advance that the school is secular, even if considerable teaching about the Bible takes place—not as religious truth, but as an indisputably important influence on the culture and history of the country. Most parents accept this without demur.

On one occasion, however, a Muslim mother tried to make trouble for the school, claiming that it discriminated against her faith by refusing to allow her daughter and others to pray on the premises. After a legal battle, the courts backed the school’s policy, ruling that the prohibition did not constitute discrimination.

Visitors share lunch with the children. Like everything else, the meal is arranged with almost military precision. The children serve and help clear away plates. No disorder is permitted, though the discipline is entirely moral, not physical. Here again, it must be remembered that, just as 10 percent of pupils arrive unable to read properly (none leaves in that lamentable but common condition), so a large proportion of British children (especially from poorer areas) do not eat meals with other members of their household, but instead eat like domestic hunter-gatherers, foraging for what they can find whenever they feel hungry. Social habits such as waiting one’s turn and sharing with others must therefore be taught and learned—and children, so malleable for both good and ill, learn quickly.

I sat at a table with six children, aged 11 and 12, who had been at the school only a few months. I cannot say how my table was chosen from among the many, but there was no white child among them. All said that they wanted to be doctors, though one hoped first to be a footballer before studying medicine. A large boy—both tall and overweight—sat next to a small one, whom he could easily have squashed, but I doubt that bullying gets much chance in this school.

These children were already able to speak in articulate sentences. I had no impression of enforced homogeneity—except in their uniforms, which they are required to wear neatly and which may help suppress the pathological narcissism of small (and educationally unimportant) differences that so easily emerges without uniforms. The children do, however, wear various badges that no doubt confer prestige; but these are awarded for accomplishment or activity, so that distinctions are earned rather than arbitrary. I was not able to examine these children’s backgrounds in depth, and so cannot say whether they were above, below, or at the median, or more or less gifted than others. But I saw no difference between their behavior and that of the other pupils.

After lunch, two student guides took me on a tour of the school. They were of Indian descent. Aged 12 and 13, they asked which lessons I wished to see. At my request, I visited classes in art, French, and history. In art, the children are taught to draw, on the theory that without technique no self-expression worthy of the name is possible; in French, among other things, the children repeat words and phrases to acquire a good accent; in history, they learn facts, without which opinion on human affairs is worthless, but which can serve as the basis for further knowledge if desired.

Lines from W. E. Henley’s famous poem “Invictus” are inscribed on the walls of the school—the same poem that Nelson Mandela found so inspiring during his imprisonment on Robben Island. All Michaela pupils learn it:

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody but unbowed.

It ends with a line that might almost summarize the school’s philosophy:

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

This is no mere expression of Victorian moral piety or uplift; it reflects the attitude with which Henley confronted his own terrible suffering. The young boy showing me around the school said that he liked the poem very much. I asked him what he knew about Henley.

“I know he had two legs amputated.”

“No—only one. The great surgeon Joseph Lister saved the other.”

He was interested, and I would have liked to tell him more. It would have been, I think, the kind of pedagogy of which the school approves, for it teaches that what we enjoy today had to be discovered and developed by the efforts of our forebears, to whom we owe gratitude, not indifference, disdain, or denigration. The school is, in fact, keen to instill gratitude, no easy task in a culture that treats resentful victimhood as the highest moral condition.

Headmistress Birbalsingh, now possibly the most famous teacher in the country and often called its strictest headmistress in the press, is firmly of the opinion that children, from whatever background, should receive a strong grounding in English literature and British history—for most will spend the rest of their lives in the country, and if contented integration, rather than permanently aggrieved separation and hostility, is desirable, then there is no other way to achieve it.

Though they live less than half an hour away by public transport from the heart of London, many of the pupils have never been there. They have not seen its sights, and know nothing of its grandeur or its glory, its history, or even its ignominies. The school therefore takes them to visit the city, to expand their horizons rather than confine them within the narrow compass of the life they already know, which happens to be the malign, if unacknowledged, purpose of making education “relevant” to children’s lives.

Birbalsingh is well-placed to insist on incorporating these children into British life without facing the criticism that, say, the son of an English earl might attract for advancing the same ideas—namely, that he was a white supremacist or xenophobe. She is the daughter of a Jamaican nurse and an Indo-Guyanese academic, both politically of the Left but culturally conservative, a combination that was once by no means unusual.

Birbalsingh has received her fair share of bludgeoning, but her head remains unbowed. She is a formidable public speaker, brilliantly amusing on the low standards that educational bureaucrats have imposed on schools—for example, science exams with official pass marks set at 20 percent! What is really being fixed is not the standard required to pass but the proportion of pupils who do so. This moral and intellectual corruption enables the bureaucracy to claim success amid catastrophic failure. Though she can make an audience roar with laughter at the absurdity of it all, she clearly regards the problem as deeply serious, a betrayal alike of the pupils’ and the country’s future, a willful race to the bottom.

I attended a staff meeting at which I discovered that the great majority of the teachers were white and that there were far more men—mainly in their thirties—than I had expected, only 35 percent of secondary school teachers in England being male. They were smartly dressed, in shirts and ties. You cannot demand neatness of children while being slovenly yourself. It was also clear that, for the educators at Michaela, teaching was more than a job, not something to be endured each day until the weekend brought temporary relief. (I had a number of secondary school teachers as patients, most of whom dreamed constantly of early retirement or of securing an early pension on grounds of illness. From what they told me of the children’s behavior in their schools, I could sympathize.)

One thing that struck me, in retrospect, after visiting Michaela was the absence of racial tension. No doubt some would cavil at the fact that the authority figures there (apart from the highest authority) were white, while the pupils were nonwhite; but I would put it differently. The teachers’ deep and personal concern for the children’s welfare and future was unmistakable. They treated them as individuals, notwithstanding the rigid discipline—or perhaps because of it, for it made true, non-morbid individuation possible. At any rate, the children would learn, implicitly, that they were not living in a country hostile to them, that white people could be benevolently disposed toward them, and that obstacles to their advancement, while sometimes encountered, were not so great as to ruin their prospects. The school is thus a vaccine against that worst and most ruinous of mind-forg’d manacles—resentment, the very emotion that so much in the general culture seems eager to promote.

Certain questions remain. The school’s academic results are excellent, all the more remarkable for a school that draws its pupils from underprivileged backgrounds. On the measure of improvement in pupils’ mathematical ability between their arrival and departure, Michaela is the best in the country. It is among the best in other subjects, too. But what are the lasting effects of this schooling on pupils’ subsequent lives? Perhaps it is too early to say, but it would be surprising if the effects were not better than those of pupils in neighboring schools.

A harder question is whether the results of this school are reproducible elsewhere. Of course, there are those who would not want to reproduce them, accusing the school of, among other things, suppressing the children’s natural creativity and ability to think for themselves. I think this is false. First, creativity—at least creativity of any value—is not natural, though some children may be more naturally creative than others, and the ability to think for oneself first requires knowledge of something, some substrate to think about. Second, I was, in any case, impressed by the older children’s ability to think for themselves when I gave an impromptu, unscripted talk to a class on the concept of personal responsibility. The pupils asked important questions about the statistical regularities found in human behavior (crime and poverty, for example), and a discussion of the distinction between association and causation soon followed. Far from closing the children’s minds, then, the teachers seemed to have found a way both to discipline and to open them, without the deadening effects of indoctrination.

The principal obstacle to reproducing Michaela may be that its founder possesses exceptional charisma. I cannot answer this definitively, but the greater the politico-bureaucratic support for proper teaching, the less such charisma would be needed for it to become routine. Moreover, Katharine Birbalsingh, wonderful though she is, is not the first charismatic teacher in history. I also find it reassuring that people like her (and others at the school) can still be found for whom teaching is a vocation—and, I would add, a noble one.

As a onetime traveler in the former Communist world, where I was subjected to many propaganda tours, long and short, I confess that during my visit to Michaela I sometimes wondered whether I was not like one of those useful idiots, led like sheep to find Arcadia in the midst of mass murder. Even in less totalitarian countries, visitors to institutions can have the wool pulled over their eyes. I have seen it done in institutions in which I worked.

I don’t think so in this case, however. The school has been running long enough, and Birbalsingh has made enough enemies in the education world—who don’t want to concede that school disorder and student failure are not the inevitable results of poverty, discrimination, and the like—that any supposed ill effects of its methods would have become evident and been widely publicized by now.

I confess also to continuing qualms about the regimentation I observed among the younger pupils, which stem from my own anarchic nature and preferences. But then I think of the pupils at the school in the small and not impoverished town where I live, almost none of whom come from ethnic minorities. By the age of 12, the girls often look as if cheap prostitution were their fondest ambition. The boys take pride in their unkemptness, imposed by social pressure and countered by none. The children scream obscenities at one another in the street at the tops of their voices—the girls being worse in this respect than the boys—and they frequently leave a mess behind them, dropping trash as casually as cows relieve themselves in fields. Fights, often between girls, regularly break out, and one senses, as in a bar full of drunks, that violence is never far away. Adults shrink from the children, partly in disgust and partly in fear, and never dare correct them.

A country that goes in fear of its own children does not have a bright future.