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Katharine Birbalsingh

Katharine Birbalsingh

KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH CBE, the headteacher of Michaela Community School in Wembley, is dubbed “the strictest head mistress in Britain”.

According to the academic, her disciplined approach to teaching is the key to achieving success. It includes a boot camp where kids are taught to keep their shirts tucked in, pick up crumbs after eating and learn how to “behave in the Michaela way”. The school also has a strict detention programme, with students told off for things such as lateness, not having the correct equipment and breaking uniform rules.


Birbalsingh said this ultimately turns “rude, surly and miserable” kids arriving in Year 7 into more “well rounded” individuals when they leave. In October last year, Birbalsingh has been appointed as the government’s new Social Mobility Commissioner. She got the spotlight at the Conservative party conference in 2010, where she gave a speech about Britain’s “broken” education system. Birbalsingh received a huge applause but also created a political stir, for which she lost her job.

In 2014, she founded Michaela free school. The school has been described as outstanding” in all areas by Ofsted inspectors. Also in 2019, more than half of all GCSE grades were level 7 or above.

Birbalsingh was born in 1973 in Auckland, New Zealand, the eldest of two daughters of Frank Birbalsingh, an academic of Indo-Guyanese origin, and his wife, Norma, a nurse from Jamaica. Birbalsingh’s father and grandfather were both educators.

Her paternal grandfather, Ezrom S Birbalsingh, was head of the Canadian Mission School in Better Hope, Demerara, British Guiana.

Her father (born 1938 in Berbice in what was then British Guiana) obtained his MA in English in London in 1966, specialising in Commonwealth literature, and worked as a supply teacher in Birmingham and London.

Birbalsingh grew up mostly in Toronto, with brief periods in Nigeria and France, but moved to the UK at age 15 when her father was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick (1989–1990).

She graduated from Oxford University after reading French and philosophy at New College. At university she was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and read Living Marxism.

While at Oxford, Birbalsingh had visited inner-city schools as part of a scheme the university runs to encourage state-school pupils to apply, and after graduation she decided to teach in state schools herself. From 2007 she wrote an anonymous blog, To Miss With Love, in which—as Miss Snuffy—she described her experiences teaching at an inner-city secondary school.

In 2010, she was the assistant head of Dunraven School, Streatham, south London, and that year she joined St Michael and All Angels Academy in Camberwell, also south London, as vice-principal.

Birbalsingh is the author of two books, Singleholic (2009) and To Miss with Love (2011), and editor of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (2016) and Michaela: The Power of Culture (2020). She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 Birthday Honours.

In 2017, Birbalsingh was included by Anthony Seldon in his list of the 20 most influential figures in British education, and in 2019 she was awarded the Contrarian Prize as well.

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