‘Britain’s strictest head’ lashes out at Labour’s ‘scandalous’ school plans in furious rant
Katharine Birbalsingh, dubbed ‘Britain’s Strictest Headteacher’ has furiously hit out at Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson over proposed school reforms.
The headteacher of the Michaela School in London accused her of “destroying” academy freedoms which she says “allowed us to climb the international league tables”.
Phillipson has recently lashed out at criticism of her plans, saying they are often London-centric and people who oppose them should leave the capital to gauge the true extent of the problems schools face in Britain.
But Birbalsingh warned the bill will “badly affect schools that are trying to improve”.
She said: “One big way in which schools improve their behaviour is to use uniforms and deal with small things, and that way the big things take care of themselves.
“That is how you improve behaviour in the school and how all school leaders have done it. Bridget Phillipson is about to deny us the possibility of having more than three branded items of school uniform, which basically means you don’t have a uniform.
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“Any school that has challenging behaviour, the main way of turning around that school and making it better is being taken away from us.”
She continued: “She’s going to require all teachers to have a teaching certificate. People might think, ‘that seems to make sense.’ I can tell you right now, it is not.
“It is to deny a particular route that we can use to bring in teachers into the profession. Right now, there’s a huge recruitment crisis.
“I have a young economics teacher. He went to the LSE and was planning to go into the city to earn a ton of money with his friends, having done an economics degree, but he decided to go into teaching. Now he’s teaching with us and he’s doing brilliantly.
“Had he had to do the bureaucratic work that you’ve got to do to get that certificate, he would never have gone into teaching. There are so many young people in that position and she is going to deny those people a route into teaching.
“There’s just thing after thing where she is basically going to destroy the academy freedoms that have allowed us to climb the international league tables.
“It’s scandalous what’s going on, and people don’t seem to realise because normal people don’t read political bills, which I totally understand.
“The thing to remember is the reason why academies need freedoms is that different schools are different. My school in inner city Wembley is very different to a school in the Cotswolds.
“Different school leaders need to make different decisions for their children.”
The changes will see sweeping changes to state schools – academies and those runs by councils – to ensure they all follow the same pay and conditions framework.
Academies currently have the freedom to set their own pay and conditions for staff, meaning some exceed the national pay scales for teachers.
The new bill would bring all teachers onto the same core pay and conditions framework.