Podcast
Culture
Education
Original sin
S&U interviews
5 min read

My conversation with... Katharine Birbalsingh

A stubborn hopefulness drives Katharine Birbalsingh. Belle Tindall reflects on her conversation with the controversial headteacher for the Re-Enchanting podcast.
A head teacher sits at her desk, holding her hands in a gesture in front of her.

Listen now

Watch now

I’m finding it very hard to sum up my conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh, to place it neatly in a mental box. But I’m wondering if that’s the value of it.  

Katharine has infamously been dubbed ‘Britain’s Strictest Headteacher’, and after spending an hour in her company, I can understand why – it’s as if an air of authority was baked into her DNA. She is the founder and headteacher of Michaela Community School in Wembley, a school which has garnered a huge amount of attention not only because of their outstanding success, but also because of the ‘clear ethos’ that Katherine accredits the success to.  

Michaela School has silent and single-file corridors, meaning that transitions between classes tend to take ninety seconds. Turning around to talk to another child in class is immediately punishable by detention, children are taught to stand for Katherine when she enters assembly, and lunch times have set conversation starters. When Katharine says, ‘I believe in strictness’, she really means it.  

It’s safe to say that Katherine has both avid admirers and passionate critics, and perhaps many people who can’t quite decide which camp to pitch their tent in.  

What struck me the most about Katharine’s approach to education during our conversation was the why behand the what. It seems to me that these behavioural expectations are not for their own sake. She defined her approach this way, 

‘It’s holding them (the pupils) to high standards, and loving them enough to do so… People don’t like strictness, but it’s a way in which you can support the most disadvantaged children’.  

Katharine’s educational philosophy is driven by a stubborn compassion, a stubborn hope, a stubborn confidence. Michaela school, a school with no kind of selection process, refuses to underestimate a single child that flows through it. Katharine has made the decision to give her life to helping children, particularly those who are so often overlooked, reach their full potential, and therefore, happiness. And who can fault that? Her school may be extreme in its methods (although I’m sure she would refute that), but I find the reasons that undergird its culture hard to find any kind of fault with.  

Another thing that I can fully agree with is Katharine’s palpable admiration for teachers, something which she believes to be lacking in common consciousness,  

‘People who aren’t teachers don’t realise just how much teachers have to give; how exhausting it is, how much energy it requires, and how intellectually demanding it is. I think that being a teacher is the biggest privilege and the hardest job. And people who haven’t done it, they just don’t realise… they don’t realise how clever you have to be, how skilled you have to be.’ 

I, like you, know and love enough people who are/have been teachers to be able to wholly agree with these words. We are not nearly thankful enough, and we need more teachers to tell us so.  

So, this was the arc of the first half of our conversation with Katharine, we were able to soak up her obvious passion for her job and the children that she spends her days with. I found myself thankful that Michaela School exists, but equally thankful that my parents did not send me there.  

Katharine is a campaigner by nature, and so the second half of our conversation with Katharine seemed to focus on some of her more controversial views on wider culture. It is at this point in the episode that you will undoubtedly be reminded that she has become quite the polarizing figure. There is plenty to admire about Katharine, there is also, as you can imagine, plenty to disagree with. I’m willing to place my own cards on the table and admit that there was much that Katharine said that I do not agree with. While there is no need to go into the specifics (what you think about her views because of this conversation is of far more importance), on reflection I have noticed that there is a theme that ties together the places where we differ in opinion and conviction: the theme is binary characterisation.  

When surveying the cultural landscape, there is a tendency (amongst us all) to place people into binary categories in a way that I’m not convinced is actually happening within the cultural landscape itself (at least, not to the extent we are assuming). There is nuance to us all, I’m afraid it is an inescapable by-product of humanity, we are not 2D creatures. And so, there is nuance to our political and cultural ideas, our convictions, perceptions, hopes and fears. Any characterisation of us that strips away such nuance is doomed to be a caricature, a mischaracterisation.  

I found her reference to ‘original sin,’ and the way she uses it as a means by which to regard children as inherently ‘naughty’ particularly interesting, not least because she does not believe in God. The whole theological concept of ‘original sin’/’the fall’ (as Marilynne Robinson refers to it on a previous episode of Re-Enchanting), isn’t binary. The Genesis literature, from which Katherine is drawing her thesis, is intent on answering the question of why good and bad seem to co-exist, why we aren’t all one-dimensionally-good, why goodness prevails in some cases, and evil is triumphant in others. Why, to borrow a phrase, what we want to do we do not do, but what we hate we do.  

Beauty and brokenness are neighbours within us, living in astonishingly close proximity – and that, as I understand it, is the reality of ‘original sin.’  

Perhaps this is where our tendencies to place people into rigid cultural categories, to treat each other as if we come with some kind of moral package-deal, comes from: what we believe about human nature becomes what we perceive when interacting with it.  

Nevertheless, interviewing Katharine from her desk in her school, with the ‘pips’ that signify the end of class as our backing track, I was reminded that Katharine is a person who lives out her convictions, and I am sure her pupils are profoundly thankful for that. Sure, she seems to make herself many an enemy whenever she stands on a national platform, but far more of her life is spent behind the doors of Michaela School, serving her community with her disposition of stubborn hopefulness.  

And so, there they are – my anything but neat reflections on my conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh, you can listen to her episode of Re-Enchanting now.  

Article
Belief
Creed
Spiritual formation
6 min read

The young are sold jumbled nonsense in exchange for their spiritual birthright

Is our religious Compare the Market selling us short?

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A perplexed looking woman hold her cheeks up with her fingers.
Sherise Van Dyk on Unsplash.

There is an old joke that goes around the Church of England. It concerns a parish that was having problems with bats who had nested in the roof of the local parish church. The vicar calls up the Archdeacon to ask for advice on how to get rid of them. The Archdeacon replies drily: “Just get the bishop to confirm them. They’ll leave the church pretty soon after that.” 

Thia joke came to mind when reading of a recent report by the Pew Research Centre which suggested that 36 per cent of those raised as Christians in the UK now no longer self-identify as Christian. 

As a bishop, I regularly go round parishes leading confirmations, a service where people make a public commitment to living as a Christian. With adults or older teenagers, I'm usually fairly confident they are serious about their faith because it takes some swimming against the tide to make such a counter-cultural move. When I confirm younger children - 10- or 12-year-olds, perhaps - I confess to a little niggle of doubt in the back of my mind. I’m sure some have a sincere faith. Yet in many parishes or even schools it can be a bit of a rite of passage, the kind of thing everybody does, which ironically takes more courage to resist than to go with the flow. The joke stings when I meet adults who were confirmed as kids, yet who left the church as adolescence kicked in, never to darken its doors again. 

The detail of the Pew report reveals a more complex picture. In a list of countries where adults have changed religious categories from the one they grew up in, the UK comes sixth, behind such countries as South Korea (where the number is 50 per cent), Spain and the Netherlands. It’s about the same in the UK as in Australia, France Germany and Japan, which all come in at 34 per cent. 

In other words, what we have here is a global trend of people, mainly in western, or western-influenced countries, exploring different religious options from the one in which they were brought up. Two factors lie behind this trend. The first is that in countries like the UK, where religion is in decline, you’re unlikely to face ostracism if you change faith, as you might if you stopped being Christian or Muslim in certain parts of the Philippines, Sudan, Pakistan or Indonesia. In the west, the pressure to remain is just not there. In places like India, Nigeria, Israel and Thailand, places where either religion is core to national identity, or where there is severe religious tension, 95 per cent of adults say they still belong to the religious group that they were raised in. 

The second factor is that in western cultures, individual autonomy, the right to choose, is paramount. We are used to shopping as one of our primary activities. The right to shop around for spiritual alternatives, in a kind of religious version of Compare the Market, is hardly surprising. 

Put this survey next to another recently published by OnePoll, suggesting that Gen Z people (in their teens and twenties) are much less likely than their parents to be atheists, and more likely to describe themselves as ‘spiritual’, and a more interesting picture emerges. 

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs. 

Most of the switching, says the Pew report, involves people moving to the ‘unaffiliated’ category. Rather than changing from Christian to Muslim, they're changing from Christian to, well, nothing. Or perhaps everything. People are moving away from fixed forms of religion to a more general and diffuse sense of spirituality. The 20-something, brought up nominally Christian, now feeds her own inner life by enjoying nature, reading Tarot cards, shopping for crystals or buying a mindfulness app on her phone rather than going to church. It’s do-it-yourself religion, perfectly fashioned by an acquisitive age that wants us to be restless and dissatisfied so we buy more things that we think will make us happy. 

It‘s common to find forms of ‘spirituality’ these days that chooses the bits it likes from a number of spiritual traditions of the past, while leaving aside the less attractive parts. It’s like a fruit smoothie mixed in a blender – a statue of the Buddha, a little Native American wisdom, a touch of feng shui, a whiff of incense, all mixed together to make you feel peaceful and more in tune with the world. The goal of all this is usually some sense of personal serenity or calmness. Yet this is typically far from what the spiritual traditions of the past had in mind. 

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs. You might prefer French nouns to Latin ones, but the result will be highly idiosyncratic and not make a great deal of sense. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, religions operate like a language in having a set of practices that make sense in relation to one another and to the underlying beliefs that hold the thing together. Each spiritual path has an integrity within itself which doesn’t work if you try to blend them all together. 

To think we know better than the ancients who over centuries developed the spiritual traditions of prayer found in the different methods of religious practice is, not to put too fine a point on it, a trifle arrogant. Whatever we come up with might bring us a sense of momentary peace, but it is unlikely to have the long-term effect that the deeper traditions of spirituality were meant for. 

Prayer was never meant to be a technique to de-stress, to find personal tranquillity. It was not a way to find yourself, but to find God, and then you might find yourself – and the tranquillity - as a by-product. It was not a way to reassure you about your familiar ways, but to disturb you into new ones. 

If spirituality is about finding personal peace, confirming us in our own individuality, endlessly stimulating new desires and longings, then swapping a Christian upbringing, with its insistence on attending church, and sitting next to awkward people who aren’t like you, confessing sins and learning to pray, for this kind of jumbled, personal spirituality seems very attractive. But what if spirituality is about learning practices that focus your mind and heart not on the trivialities of TikTok videos or Candy Crush, but on the true source of all goodness, beauty and truth? What if it is about learning the counter-intuitive skill of loving your neighbour as much as you love yourself? If so, then the kind of communal practices lying right under our noses, learned in a place like Church with all its flaws - a tried and tested spiritual path laid out for us by those experienced in the spiritual life in generations gone before, might just offer the most benefit in the long term. 

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.
If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.
Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief