A war is being waged over the future of England’s schools. On one side, Katharine Birbalsingh, the woman dubbed Britain’s strictest headteacher; on the other, Bridget Phillipson, the Labour Education Secretary. Ever since her rabble-rousing speech at the 2010 Conservative Party conference, Birbalsingh has been a vocal (and divisive) figure in English education. She is adored by those who want to see a return to traditional teaching methods, underpinned by knowledge and discipline, and loathed by those who see her methods as dictatorial, lacking in creativity, and overly geared towards exam success. She is unafraid of conflict, whether on social media or in court (last year she won a legal battle over her school’s prayer ban). In 2025 she is leading the fight against the Children’s Well-Being and Schools Bill.
The government’s plans to toughen up children’s safeguarding are largely uncontroversial. Opposition stems from the legislation’s proposed “very significant and wide-ranging changes to academy schools and the rules they have to follow”. Academies are funded by the government, but not connected to a local authority. Introduced by the Blair government in 2000, the academy programme was expanded and accelerated by the Conservatives, particularly the former education secretary Michael Gove. By 2024, more than 80 per cent of secondary schools were academies, and nearly 43 per cent of primary schools.
But Labour now plans to curtail many of the freedoms academies enjoy; freedoms which supporters argue are responsible for raising the standard of education in England over the past 15 years. Academies can employ staff who aren’t formally qualified: proposed legislation would end this. Academies can diverge from the national curriculum: the bill would insist it be followed. The government intends to remove the requirement that a failing school must automatically become an academy, and gives local councils powers to intervene in academies’ admissions processes.
Several academy-chain leaders have questioned what problem Phillipson is seeking to solve. Worried that the measures risk rolling back the “progress made for children by successive governments”, the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, has said she too is “not able to support the measures in the bill as currently drafted”. Labour’s Siobhain McDonagh has also expressed “serious concerns” about the legislation. On 17 January, Birbalsingh entered the fray, publishing a highly critical open letter to Phillipson. A combative second open letter followed on 6 February, just days after the two met face to face.
“It did not go well,” Birbalsingh said of the “heated” encounter when we spoke in her office at Michaela Community School in Wembley, north-west London. Did the pair agree on anything? “No, nothing.” “I asked her many questions. She couldn’t answer a single one,” Birbalsingh claimed. “I was getting annoyed about the fact she wasn’t answering questions, and her position was, ‘Well, we just disagree.’” Birbalsingh said Phillipson is not willing to listen to those who work in schools: “I’ve been doing this 25 years, and I’m obviously very successful at it.” Michaela, with its inner-city, non-selective intake, achieved roughly the same proportion of top grades (9s) in its 2024 GCSE results as Eton. For three consecutive years, the school has had the highest Progress 8 score – a measure of how much a student improves between the end of primary school and the end of secondary school – in England. “Why not ask me how we do that?” Birbalsingh said often in our conversation.
The row between the two women has intensified. While the official line from the Department for Education has been that it “would not comment on what was a private meeting”, a government source told the Daily Mail that Birbalsingh’s account – in the second open letter, published in the Spectator and on her X – was “fiction”. “The Secretary of State doesn’t need lectures from anyone on the importance of a good education for disadvantaged children, she’s lived it,” they said.
Birbalsingh argued when we spoke that “once you take away the freedoms that we have, then we are no longer able to make the judgements that are right for our kids”. On the curriculum, she felt it was “more important that [children] become literate and numerate than [have knowledge of] a whole range of subjects. Bridget Phillipson wants to force our kids to become illiterate.” You can’t honestly believe that, I countered. “She doesn’t believe that, but that’s what will happen.” Some criticise Michaela for being too narrowly focused: it offers far fewer subjects than other, similarly “outstanding” non-selective state schools. For example, Michaela pupils are not offered drama or design and technology as GCSE subjects.
Birbalsingh said Phillipson sought to reassure her the requirement to follow the national curriculum would be less prescriptive than feared. Rather, a “floor” has to be met. “I said to her, ‘What school in the country is not providing a core academic curriculum? Name me one school.’” While academies don’t have to follow the national curriculum, GCSE and A-level examinations are based on it, meaning a certain level of coverage is necessary for any chance of academic success.
“A lot of parents would be staggered to learn that there wasn’t a requirement to be either a qualified teacher or on the path to qualification,” Phillipson told the Times. “It’s a fairly reasonable expectation.” Birbalsingh countered that while the number of unqualified teachers working at Michaela is small, any of them may be a “crucial teacher”.
“I had a head of music for three years… She was a lawyer. She would never have taught here had she had to get qualified,” Birbalsingh said. She also said the policy is “outrageous” when teacher recruitment and retention is a national problem: “Why would anyone do this?”
Birbalsingh has repeatedly accused Phillipson of being a “Marxist”, and having “an unreasonable and unwarranted dislike of academies and free schools”.
“What she’s doing is she’s taking away all of the freedoms that the academies have, because she believes that the centralised state should make the decisions about what we do… At the meeting, she asked me at the end… ‘Why do you continuously call me a Marxist?’ And I said, ‘Because this whole meeting has been about Marxism, everything you are saying is filled with a Marxist ideology.’”
Phillipson denied such motivation, and said she recognised that academies “have been at the forefront of driving improvements across our school system”. Birbalsingh is unconvinced: “If you take away academy freedoms, you are making them into local authority schools.”
Before I sat down with its headteacher, I spent several hours at Michaela. It was unlike any school I had ever seen. When I visited, it was two days before the school’s internal exams. It struck me that these children never stop learning – not in the corridors, nor at lunchtime. As I waited to join the Year 7s for lunch, I stood in front of a group of pupils, quietly queuing on the stairs. Talking isn’t allowed in corridors at Michaela (unless it’s to acknowledge teachers or guests: men always referred to as “sir”, women as “miss”). An impromptu revision session began. “Who can tell me the difference between an animal cell and a plant cell?” a teacher asked. Every hand shot up. The detail in the answer was astonishing. “What’s special about the root hair cell?” The hands shot up again.
Michaela’s approach to discipline – demerits are handed out for forgetting a pen – and its regimented approach to learning are well known. It was remarkable to observe. Lunch began with what can only be described as a “drill” (the recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s “If–”), led by a staff member. The children were expected to be both word-perfect and tempo-perfect. Deviations from the correct speed were identified – the left side of the room was too slow. They went again. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs,” the pupils shouted in unison. The choice of poem, like everything at Michaela, is deliberate. The key lesson, Birbalsingh told me, is in the “two imposters” of triumph and disaster. “You don’t go crazy when you win. You don’t get depressed when you lose. You have the agency to be able to be in control of your own life.” Another poem to be recited by heart is William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”.
When it was time to sit down to eat, I copied others. “Go” was our cue. Even then, we did not have free rein to chat, but were provided with the topic of conversation: Stonehenge. None of the six children on my table had visited, and were impressed that I, Miss Hannah, had. Throughout lunch, the teacher who’d led the poetry performance would raise her arm, each time providing the cue for the children to stop, sit up straight and do the same. I didn’t finish my lunch – there wasn’t time.
Part of the anger felt about the Schools Bill is down to teachers dealing with the unknown. The content of the curriculum that academies will have to follow isn’t yet decided. Birbalsingh argued that Phillipson is “hoodwinking” the schools sector.
Becky Francis was handed responsibility for reviewing the curriculum in July 2024. Francis, who is CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, has repeatedly said she will focus on “evolution, not revolution” and that the review “will be rigorously evidence- and data-informed” and “recognise the hard work and successes of those working in education”. She is also committed to ensuring “the curriculum is inclusive and accessible for all our young people” and that the work is viewed through a “social justice lens”.
In Francis’s 2006 co-authored book – Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement – the preface reads: “Our intention is to help lever social justice concerns back into mainstream educational debates that have been dominated by the neoliberal language of ‘quality’ — in which concerns with ‘equality’ have been evacuated and consigned to the margins.” The then Labour government apparently had an “obsession with academic achievement”.
Birbalsingh is always animated but when confronted with this text she expressed genuine horror. “They’re going to destroy our schools,” she said. “That’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever heard. The revolution in education that has happened over the last decade and a half, which I’ve been so proud to be part of… the two of them [Francis and Phillipson] are going to destroy all of that.
“What she means by [social justice concerns] is we should have as our aim equality of outcome,” Michaela’s head said. “I’m not aiming for equality of outcome. I’m aiming for them to be qualified,” she said of her pupils. She cites ED Hirsch, the American thinker who is considered the father of the neo-traditionalist education movement. Hirsch argued all children should learn a common body of “core knowledge” and do so in a structured way. “There’s the assumption that kids will just develop this stuff naturally,” Birbalsingh said. “They’re not going to. Everything kids learn, they are taught.”
Birbalsingh found the phrase “obsession with academic achievement” similarly galling. It’s a “luxury belief”, she said, using the phrase coined by the American conservative writer Rob Henderson. “There are so many kids leaving school who are functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate.” Academic achievement “means you learn how to read. It means you learn how to write and how to count your change in the shop. It means you learn how to have a discussion with somebody and how to think critically.”
Education has become an ideological battleground. In her 2010 party conference speech, Birbalsingh argued that the changes needed in education required “right-wing thinking”. What did she mean? Must education be overtly political? “If I was to say it now, I would say small-c conservatism,” she said. “Small-c conservatives used to be right wing and left wing.” A Blue Labour view, one might say. “It’s only more recently that the left has moved away culturally from those small-c conservative values.” Among these, Birbalsingh counted personal responsibility, rejection of victimhood (which she claimed the left “totally embraces”), and “being grateful for what you have”. Michaela pupils practise “appreciations” daily. “I would like to give my appreciation to Miss Hannah for taking the time to visit us,” one of my lunch mates declared. “Two claps on the count of two. One. Two.” Clap, clap went the hands.
Birbalsingh did not deny the existence of racism and sexism. She’s a realist. But, she said, “If I want to change the lives of disadvantaged children, if I harp on about their disadvantage and about how unfair life is and nurture a culture of grievance, instead of pumping up their agency, teaching them the skills and the knowledge that they need to make a success of their lives, then they will never be able to compete.” This is the Hirschian idea underpinning Michaela. It too has a social justice argument: if teachers don’t tell children what they need to know, it’s left up to others. That may be fine for privileged children, but not for all.
Critics insist Michaela pupils are over-controlled, drilled with facts, and without room for creativity or real thought. “The only way you can think is if you have knowledge in your head,” Birbalsingh said. “Drilling only lends itself to some knowledge. You want to drill times tables; you want to drill French verbs; you want to drill historical dates. You don’t drill Macbeth. If people think that we’re just drilling, we couldn’t do well in the GCSEs.”
On the day I’m at Michaela, I was one of 13 visitors. Seven were adults, mostly working in education (including abroad). The other five were ex-pupils, who had left the school a couple of years ago. They were greeted warmly: “Hello gentlemen – you look so grown up!” Jayden, who had just turned 18, told me how college life compared to Michaela. You don’t get the “hand-holding”, he said; you’re on your own. It was different, he laughed. What did he miss about Michaela? “The sense of community.” Having lunch at school was like having lunch with family, he said. The real world outside Michaela was harder. But this young man could certainly cope. He could talk confidently, shake my hand, and was unnervingly polite.
What did Birbalsingh make of her moniker – Britain’s strictest headteacher? “Strict means love as far as I’m concerned. It means you love them enough to keep your standards high.” Every pupil I met was confident. The delightful Year 8 girls who showed me round told me approvingly that at Michaela “they control you more”. The discipline and the rules, they say, help them to be better people.
Would the Michaela approach suit everyone? No. But Birbalsingh is not trying to impose it on others. “While I believe in a knowledge-rich curriculum, I would never want the state to just say you must do this across the whole country,” she said. “I believe in schools doing what’s right in their communities.” People need convincing, Birbalsingh acknowledged. “So I open up the school and I try to persuade people. I do not think you can pull a lever in Whitehall and make everybody do it. Bridget Phillipson thinks she can, and that is fundamentally the difference.”
As the interview ended, I asked if Birbalsingh had a conciliatory message for Bridget Phillipson. “Well, as I said to her at the end of the meeting: come and see our school. Ask me some questions. Be interested in how we’ve got the results. Not just us… Go and see the successful schools.” She wants a change of heart.
And what if a compromise can’t be found? If the government sticks to its plans and curtails the freedom of academies? “There’s always the option of saying no,” Katharine Birbalsingh said defiantly. “I don’t know what they’ll do to me… [But] if they’re going to make me do things that will harm my kids, I’m not doing it.” I for one, wouldn’t bet against her.
Update: In response to this piece, a source close to Bridget Phillipson told the New Statesman on 12 February that the Education Secretary and her team disagreed with Katharine Birbalsingh’s account of their meeting on a number of points. They said Phillipson asked Birbalsingh to share her views on what was working well at Michaela and how she had improved standards. This conversation happened “immediately after welcoming her to the department” and was “the very purpose of the meeting, which was private and offered, after Katharine Birbalsingh requested it, in good faith”. The Education Secretary has visited a number of schools with a variety of attainment records, the source added; during their conversation, Phillipson told Birbalsingh that these visits were a matter of public record.
[See also: Labour’s Reformation]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation