The Michaela Way | Katharine Birbalsingh

[Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everyone it's great to see you all here and thank you for having me you know it's funny because I was listening to you when I was thinking well I think you've just explained the Michaela way and the other thing I was thinking was what is it that makes you like this you know I was thinking what makes Manisha like this because I wish I could find more of you you know it's um and the the big difference I think between you and some others is that it makes you angry when you see children being let down and it makes you so angry that you're willing to throw the rule book out and you're willing to do what you're willing to stand up against what everybody tells us to do because unfortunately nowadays uh in Australia in Britain in the whole of the Western World in order to get things right with children you have to go against the grain that that is unfortunately the situation we're in and so it means that all of us everyone in this room has to be able to find enough courage to stand up against what everybody's telling you and when I say everybody I mean the teacher training colleges I mean your friends I mean I remember I once ran in I met this woman at a party and she said to me how she was going to leave London in a year's time because her eldest was 10 years old coming up towards secondary school and so she and her husband and the children were going to leave because um because well they had to get them into a decent school and they were relatively well off I said well you know why don't you think about going to a private school she said oh no no I couldn't do that we'd lose all our friends you know now and that's what I mean about having the courage you need all of us even if you're not involved directly in education we all need the courage to be able to stand up to everyone we speak to because that is what empowers people like us who are on the ground knowing that there are families who want this knowing that there are people in the media who will support us with this knowing that the culture of our society is not one we're having to fight all the time because the problem is is that people like Manisha are rare when I say rare I mean people who are willing to go against the grain when they're on their own and when they're going to be vilified by everyone most principles most teachers just want normal lives they want to be able to pay their mortgage they want to have a car they want to have a couple of kids they want to have normal lives where they go in and they teach and they come back home they don't want to take on the whole world I spend all my time arguing with everybody I'm arguing with them on Twitter I'm arguing with them on the press in the Press I'm a strange person right I'm strange that I'm willing to go out and fight every day most people don't want to do that now our fight began in well it was 2011 in fact I came here to Australia in 2011 and I rang some warning Bells at the time and I went to visit some schools I mean I went to visit schools that you know one school that I supposedly quite shocking in many ways I remember there were a lot of Aboriginal children in the school mainly it was Aboriginal kids and um they were doing a lot of they were playing the guitar you know the teachers are playing the guitar and they were doing a lot of singing and I was there for a while and I was saying so are we going to hear see some maths are we going to see some English and the teachers more or less said to me well you know these kids aren't going to radio amount much you know but let's have fun while we can let's sing some songs and let them enjoy life and uh we were just uh in in is it Tom is it your office yes so it's in Tom's office just there and we were talking about an article that was written about me where I've been quoted saying that people think that I'm mean and I'm mean because I'm the strictest headmistress in Britain and I have rules and I have detentions and things like this and what I think is really mean is allowing a child off all the time never giving him a detention doesn't matter if you haven't done your homework does matter if you can't sit on a chair after all you come from a poor background so I'm going to forgive you this and I'm going to let you go through school and I'm going to sing some songs with you rather than push through with the maths and the English and then when you leave you're going to be functionally illiterate and functionally enumerate for the rest of your life that's what's mean right that is mean and they call it compassion in the moment they say it's compassionate when they say oh but it's all right it's not your fault you don't have a desk at home your little brothers and sisters interrupt you all the time and it's hard for you to do your homework so I'm not going to hold you to account on this well you can do that but you are assuring that child of failure for his entire life and that's the thing that we need people to understand ultimately that being compassionate with a child caring and loving a child means holding the line so I came here in 2011 and I rang the alarm bells and I said look you guys aren't as far along the progressive line as we have gone in Britain I can tell you what it looks like we've been there don't do it is what I said don't go down that Progressive route because you're going to end up failing your kids and your country is going to blow up unfortunately people didn't necessarily listen to me and you have gone down that road and now it's the case that your 70th out of 77 countries for uh Behavior climate in your classrooms as Glenn was talking about with those statistics how Australia has plummeted in the last 20 years and of course the children who most suffer because of this are the most disadvantaged they're the ones that come from Minority backgrounds come from poorer backgrounds and so on and the reason why they suffer the most is because they are entirely dependent on their school to be able to make that difference for them so if you come from a more well-off family the family can make up that difference the family takes you to museums on the weekend they have dinners around the dinner table and talk about the politics of the day they take you away on holiday to various places and your parents whose professor and a doctor you have conversations and they are teaching you all the time but the child that comes from a poorer family they don't have that they're dependent entirely on their school and on their teachers and if they're teachers through what they believe to be compassion are constantly letting that child down by not holding them to account that child has nowhere to go and in the end they end up in prison they end up on welfare they end up in some dead-end job and then we say well they were poor what else could they do but it's not true it's us who have failed them we in the education sector have failed them because in the moment we feel so uncomfortable about doing the right thing you know I think it's really interesting Manisha I was watching you and I think I was thinking isn't it funny that you and I are the same skin color because you know what we're not white we don't carry the guilt that white people carry all the time for feeling so uncomfortable about their privilege that they can't possibly hold a brown child to account they won't put a brown child in detention because well I'm rich or I'm white and I feel uncomfortable so I can't do this but who loses out in the end the brown poor child who is not held to account the brown poor child who ends up functionally illiterate functionally enumerate and then spends his whole life trying to catch up and he can't do it we need somehow to be able to see beyond the guilt that look I get it I get that the guilt is forced on us it's forced on us all the time and I always think to myself gosh you know I'm so how difficult must it be to be a a white rich person how difficult must it be I promise you I I I feel for you I feel for you I feel for you in this climate because on the one hand they're making you feel bad and then what do you do you then say okay okay don't have the detention okay okay I I feel awkward about who I am so do whatever you like and then you got people like me coming along saying no that's really what is is harmful to the child that's actually what's racist in that moment because you are letting certain children down because you feel guilty about your own privilege and that is what we all need to be able to see beyond now in 2011 I came here and said all that it was at the same time that we I had the idea about Michaela and we started setting it up and the fight in Britain was massive at that time it's much easier now to set up a free school a free school is a school that's a normal Public School in terms of How It's funded and so on but you know and in terms of the admissions process but it you can set it up yourself and you can apply through the department for education in order to set up your school it took us three and a half years to open our school because there was such a fight and when I say such a fight we would we would have uh events like this where families would be invited I would go along in Brixton Market hanging out handing out flyers about our school and mums would say this is such a brilliant option I'm coming along to find out and all of these ethnic minority moms would be sitting in the audience like this listening to me speak about this possible new school and they would bus people in from outside of London into so they would sit amongst the parents so that when I would get up and speak about the possibilities of a new school with all these mums who were desperate to have a new school um and when I say when you want to talk about ethnic you know the moms were ethnic the people being busting were white from outside of London would sit amongst the crowd and then they would stand up and shout at me in order to drown out not just me but what me and my my group were saying in order to set up the school we had to move to three different areas eventually in London to eventually open up in Wembley but we started in South London and we were chased from place to place until eventually by really some kind of Miracle we managed to open our school in 2014. we opened with 120 children we have been growing ever since we've now got a full School we've now a couple of years every year we send our few off to Cambridge into Oxford but it's not just that we've also got other kids who might become plumbers and hairdressers and so on but they turn up on time they know how to stand up and how to sit up straight they know how to bring their equipment they know how to say good morning and good afternoon sir and Miss as they walk down the corridors they are happy and this is the point you are happy when you are successful you are happy when you know what what who you are and what you can deliver um just recently in the last few days we uh progress eight scores came out in Britain for schools and the progress eight score is essentially how much progress have you made from when you joined at the end of primary to when you leave at the end of secondary school and so these are secondary schools that are that are analyzed in this way and we got this year the top progress eight score in the country which thank you with which was great to see it was great it was great to see and great to know just how much of a difference so to give you a sense we've got this progress eight score of 2.27 which means that on average kids that go to our school end up with two grades higher more than two grades higher than they would have done had they been to another school now that on the one hand you think wow and people then the detractors say it's not about results you know results don't matter and you know what I would agree with them to a certain extent I mean results aren't the only thing that matter but they do matter we need to remember that however the thing I am most proud with our school is the children who they are and that's what you were talking about who they are they're polite they're decent people they have Traditional Values when I say traditional they believe in personal responsibility they believe in having a duty towards others we've taught them to be grateful and one of the reasons we were talking earlier about how one of the reasons why families love us is that suddenly they're the kids at home are thanking their mums for making them dinner you know and the parents think well this is quite nice actually my my child suddenly understands all that I do for him we teach them these values we teach them gratitude because when you are grateful no matter how little you have you are a a happier and better I would say better person and so Traditional Values we have traditional discipline and when I say traditional discipline I mean we expect children to be polite we expect them to go the extra mile to help someone else out in in the canteen and in ordinary schools in the inner city in London and we are in the inner city with a very normal inner city intake if in the canteen a child drops a plate in a normal inner city school they drop the plate what happens in a normal canteen is that all the kids start shouting and banging on the table and going that is the kind of thing they do our kids somebody drops a plate five or six of them run to help them pick it up and pick up the food that's dropped on the floor though that is the kind of the kind of people that I want our children to be so Traditional Values and then traditional behavior and discipline and then as you spoke about Manisha explicit teaching and this we spoke about at research Ed yesterday I spoke to the teachers there trying to give advice about how to make explicit teaching work 20 20 30 years ago it was normal it was normal for every teacher to just teach from the front as you're looking at me now right imagine you're looking at me now and you're listening to what I'm saying it's much easier to do that if you're looking at me but in most classrooms these days you wouldn't be looking at me you would be facing each other right imagine if I was giving this lecture and instead of looking at me you were looking at those books and you were looking at the mirrors by the the windows back there I mean it's a bit weird looking in that direction and yet I'm standing over here but that is the this is the reality of our classrooms that special needs children are looking at the back of the wall when the teacher's at the front and the reason that's happening is because the teacher isn't leading the learning right the teacher has been taught by the teacher training agencies that they shouldn't lead the learning the the the the teacher feels guilty what I was explaining yesterday is that we have been taught that teaching is cheating that's what we think so we genuinely teachers think oh no I mustn't tell them because that somehow to give them the answer so I just have to talk in this way that's slightly mysterious and try and draw it out of them because somehow it's going to be in them how are they meant to know that this is a triangle and this is a square unless you tell them you have to tell them and once you've told them you can then ask them a little bit later tell me which one's the triangle which one's the square if you have never told them they can can't possibly know it and yet I say that that seems obvious I promise you in the education sector nowadays it is not obvious we are all taught that somehow this information is inside them and that we need to draw it out and as I was saying yesterday the story I always settle is when little Amy is sat at the front and you're asking a question that you ask a question and you haven't told them the answer you haven't taught them this you're imagining you're drawing it out of the child and every time you ask an answer little Amy goes you know why because when she goes home in the evenings she sits around with her parents and talks about the politics of the day and reads the books in her father's mother's bedroom and she has a lovely time going to museums and art galleries and so on so every time you ask a question little Amy knows the answer Little Johnny at the back of the classroom has no idea and he thinks to himself gosh how come Amy always knows the answer I must be really dumb because what Johnny doesn't think in that moment is I must be from a different socio economic background he doesn't think that what he thinks is I'm dumb and then he misbehaves and he keeps on misbehaving over and over again because his self-esteem takes a hit every time the teacher asks the question he doesn't know the answer to and then eventually he gets sent out of class and then he gets a special needs a stamp on him which ruins him forever and when he leaves School functionally illiterate and functionally enumerate for the rest of his life we say it was because he was poor but it isn't because he was poor it was because we never taught him properly all we need to do is have Traditional Values traditional discipline and traditional teaching I say that's all we need to do the problem is that this is so simple and yet it is impossible to make happen it's a fascinating situation where something so very simple that 50 years ago we all took for granted and yet now it's a fight and it cannot just be our fight it can't be it has to be all of our fight because you and I will lose if it's just us we need all of you and all of us need to understand your country Australia lies in the palm of your hands right now and you can turn this around you can but it requires all of us to make that effort it requires all of us to believe that you can change your country the children really are the future that I never understood why people don't take education more seriously children are the future to any country and if you care about Australia if you love Australia you need to be courageous enough to stand up and be counted because if you're here today it's because you want to hear this stuff you want to hear the truth and to refer to what you were talking about the truth you know Thomas Soul a great you know hero of mine he African-American uh social theorists and Economist he has a quote that I always love to to quote on my wall which says if you want to help someone you tell them the truth if you want to help yourself you tell them what they want to hear I've come here to Australia in order to tell you the truth however uncomfortable it makes us feel but the fact is the old adage is free is true only the truth will set us free so thank you very much for having me for decades CIS has been a fiercely independent voice working hard to promote sound liberal principles to be notified of our future videos make sure you subscribe to our Channel then click the notification Bell we rely solely on the generosity of people like you for donations to advance our classical liberal cause check out the links on screen now to see how you can get involved [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 9,638

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, AusPol, Australian politics, On Liberty, Classical Liberalism, freedom of speech, Liberal Policy, Classical Liberalist, Education, Michaela Community School, Katharine Birbalsingh, Worlds Strictest Principal, Schooling, Schools, Teaching, Teachers, Teaching Standards, Classrooms, Student Behaviour, School Kids, Schools Students, UK Schools, Australian Schools

Id: RR6L1TdtmpQ

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2022