Birbalsingh: a national hero

Katharine Birbalsingh is a national hero. It’s time we treated her accordingly.

By Connor Boyle

It’s not popular in conservatism today to give any credence at all to those associated or involved with the Bush Administration (2001-9). To be fair, this is not without reason. In many ways the Bush-Cheney era showed the worst face of conservatism. The crony capitalism, the corporatism, the big state mentality of federalising issues which out to be left to the community or the fifty states (take the No Child Left Behind Act). The cherry on top is of course the glee with which the Bush-Cheney Administration, and their Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld went galloping off to the Middle-East. In Afghanistan, excusably in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, but Iraq however, was a different ball- game altogether. Looking at the makeup of the top of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy team - Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell - it is not an inexcusable thought that George Bush the younger was, in Iraq, finishing the job his father was persuaded not to complete in the early 1990s. After Bush the elder had successfully pushed Saddam out of Kuwait in the Gulf War, he was persuaded not to send forces into Iraq to take him out completely. The son was determined to see daddy’s will done finally. For these reasons, not to mention the leaving present of the 2008 great financial crisis, the Bush dynasty is not held in high regard by many of today’s conservatives. Conservatives, however, ought to put education at the heart of our mission for the future. Education is the biggest driver of social mobility, and social mobility is something we conservatives should be driven by. Giving people the tools to improve their lot in life; allowing them to get on and do better and better in life is a core conservative principe. Nothing allows us to achieve this better than education. 

And on education, the second Bush Administration had a lot to say. It was George W. Bush who coined the phrase that low expectations for poor and ethnic minority children in schools is “little more than soft bigotry.” He was undoubtedly correct. There is a belief in the educational establishment that teachers cannot be expected to turn out brilliant results in the case of every child. The idea goes that certain children, by way of their circumstances, cannot be educated. This disgusting attitude permeates the educational “blob”, and is cheered on, in-fact hammered home, by the teaching unions whose only purpose, it appears to me, is to protect the bad and lazy teachers, at the expense not only of all parents and students, but of the many great teachers too. Take the issue of pay. The unions detest the idea of payment by performance in teaching. They do so because they are incensed that the bad and failing teachers may lose out to the teachers who actually bother to put the effort into educating our children. The result is, of course, that there is no incentive to go above and beyond for their students, and the children suffer under the system that teaches the teachers themselves that extra effort is just a waste. Similarly, on the issue of school inspection, where they refuse to entertain the idea of no-notice inspections or the dismissal of failing teachers. Go into a school, I dare anyone, and threaten to listen in on a lesson without a few week’s notice or propose that a teacher who fails their students be sacked, and watch as the union card is rushed out of a pocket with threats of industrial action of some sort or another. Who, though, does this help? Apart from the dead wood of the teaching profession, no one in society is a beneficiary of this behaviour. Our schools are too important to just be a source of employment for the lazy or unwilling, but the unions do their best to make it so. I have never met a “failing child”, the idea is alien to me; a failing teacher however, I have seen. There is no excuse for a child leaving school ill-prepared for life, the orthodoxy of the educational establishment would have us believe that some children just end up being the margin of error, no big deal. Wrong. Or that some children require too much effort, or the best of all; 'some children just can’t learn, they can’t retain information. I shouldn’t be held accountable for their exam performance.’ If the establishment in education spent half as much time putting the effort into educating the nation’s young as they do making excuses, maybe we’d be in a much stronger position strategically as a country. 

Another key architect of the W. Bush Administration, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, gave a wonderfully inspiring speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. She talked about how while you can’t control your circumstances, you can control your response to your circumstances. On this she is correct. I will not deny that some circumstances of birth are mind-numbingly challenging. It is the job of conservatives in politics to design a system whereby these conditions of birth matter less and less to your prospects of life. This is where education becomes the biggest and most important issue we can grapple with. But even without this, in the classroom at least, it is wrong to suggest that less can be expected of those who are born into a trying existence. On a purely sociological point, it is, in the long-run, cruel. Giving young people an excuse in school, on account of being, let’s say, impoverished, will give a child a cushion on which to fall back onto. Give children the credit they deserve; they are quick learners, they will realise that they can fail and rely on their plighted circumstances to explain away their poor performance. This, by the way, is not their fault. It is the fault of the system and operators who allow it to persist. A child who lives in poverty fails their spelling tests every Friday, say. The teacher doesn’t come down on the child like a tone of bricks in the same way he might for a middle-class child, because, well, it’s not fair is it. Compassion at work here, isn’t it? Well of course, the attitude of, ‘awk, well he’s deprived’ won’t be the there for the child on the day he leaves school functionally illiterate, innumerate and devoid of any skills. What happens to the child then? Where does he go? 

Rice also said that “self esteem comes from achievements. Not from lax standards and false praise.” When I was sitting in my room watching this convention speech on a tiny phone, hearing this line I had to fight back the urge to stand up and exclaim in concurrence. Lowering standards for anyone, for whatever reason, will not help them in the long run. The simple truth is that the big bad world on the far side of the school gate is, at times, cruel and ugly, and there will be no hand-holding for those who cannot keep up. The job of the education system, so we thought, was to get everyone caught up by the time we’re sent out into the world. 

One woman who is doing just this is Katharine Birbalsingh. She has confronted the elite in education by proving them wrong every day of the week between 8:00am and 3:00pm. Her free school, the Michaela Community School, is proving that no child is unable to succeed. By demanding high standards, using traditional methods of teaching, emphasising personal responsibility, instilling a sense of community, high achievement and a strict regime of discipline, she admits a highly disadvantaged intake and churns out a highly qualified (some of the best inspection reports, not to mention being the fifth best in the entire country for progress 8 scores), highly talented, respectful and prepared flock of young adults. She fights the fight every day, and for the seven-hundred children blessed enough to be taught in her school, she makes an incredible difference. What a pity it is that others have not joined her in the crusade of excellence. Her work in education is truly heroic, she does a service to the nation by educating some of our most disadvantaged to levels we had been told was unattainable. This service has gone, shamefully, unrecognised. More children need the benefit of this ethos in teaching. The conservative movement must be there to help fight the crusade of excellence, and in doing so recognise Katharine Birbalsingh for what she really is; the classroom equivalent of Admiral Nelson.

Connor Boyle (The Whip) is a second-year undergraduate reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics at The Queen’s College.