FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
LONDON — They know her as “the strictest headmistress in England”: Katharine Birbalsingh is a well-known and controversial figure, no stranger to controversy – from which she does not shy away at all – but this time she has raised a fuss whose repercussions risk being very far-reaching.
She runs the Michaela Community with an iron fist, a school in one of London’s deprived suburbs, where the vast majority of pupils belong to ethnic minorities, many do not speak English as their first language and one in four comes from families below the poverty line . Katharine has imposed an inflexible discipline that makes her school look more like a military camp than an educational institute: cell phones are banned, students are commanded to walk in silence in the corridors, for the slightest transgression they are punished with solitary detention .
Yet the results are astonishing: Michaela students academically beat many of the most prestigious private schools and 82% of them manage to enter the Russell Group universities, the club of elite British universities. Birbalsingh has become the idol of the right and the bogeyman of the left, but families queue to enroll their children in her school, even though the selection – on the basis of individual merits – is extremely rigorous. Also for this reason, the government had appointed the “iron principal” responsible for the task force for social mobility (a position from which she later resigned).
Now, however, a student has dragged Birbalsingh to the High Court for religious discrimination. It happened that last year a Muslim student – half of the students enrolled at Michaela are of Islamic faith – started praying during the break, using her jacket as a mat: soon dozens of other students joined her and so in the end the principal decided to ban all forms of prayer, citing the fact that the other students felt uncomfortable and under pressure. At that point tensions exploded: Birbalsingh reported death threats, intimidation, bomb scares and bricks thrown against the windows. Until the student at the origin of the case reported the school for violation of religious freedom and discrimination against Muslims.
The problem is that the government guidelines on the matter are ambiguous: schools are not obliged to authorize prayers but they are warned against discriminatory behaviour. The principal, for her part, claims to have the right to run a secular school and states that multiculturalism, the principle which inspires Great Britain, works when “each group makes sacrifices for the good of all” and that it does not they can let separate communities develop. It is a debate well known in other countries, especially in France, but which until now Britain had avoided in the name of maximum tolerance. Now the iron principal has blown the lid off.