The Michaela Community School in Wembley, North London is, by many metrics, a success story. But right now the school and its erudite headteacher, Katherine Birbalsingh, are facing renewed criticism, intimidation and legal challenge after a conflict with pupils over group prayer “rituals” at break time.
The Catholic onlooker at this drama is left in a precarious position and with mixed loyalties. To explain why we can understand the grievance of both the children and the school, and yet find the course of action taken by each side’s representatives undesirable, the particular case of Michaela and 21st-century Britain must first be unpacked.
Having opened in 2014, the school achieves consistently high grades and defies expectations and statistical averages attached to children the from lower income and deprived backgrounds that the school typically takes. Around 80 per cent of its sixth form students go on to the country’s best universities, and it has been lauded with praise by Ofsted and the government. Accordingly, its pupils have achieved better progress in their learning than any other school in the country.
Noted for its unorthodox methods by contemporary standards – which in fact follow a more traditional approach – Michaela prioritises discipline, silence and authority. Birbalsingh has been dubbed “Britain’s strictest headmistress” because her students walk mutely in single file around the school and students’ eyes have to be fixated on the teacher during lesson time. Random socialising is strongly discouraged – there is no group work; groups who gather at break-time are capped at a maximum of four people.
It’s quite something. And its results are hard to disagree with. Indeed, while it must be pointed out that a truly Catholic philosophy of education would never sanction an approach whose sole focus was to robotically churn out little Oxbridge students for the single-minded and avaricious acquisition of wealth and knowledge – thereby gaining kudos and Ofsted points for the school – there is much in Michaela’s approach that can be legitimately praised.
The Church has consistently supported (and built upon) the liberal arts approach historically. That Michaela’s students are mandated to read Shakespeare and learn poetry by heart is one heartening aspect of the school’s methods. True education is in no small part about inculturating – the adaptation of Christian teachings and practices – and civilising the person.
But there are clearly issues with the school’s approach, hence the current contentious business. Students all eat vegetarian meals at lunch – to avoid conflict. And Jehovah’s Witness children are forced to read literary materials with the class which contain magic: something they’re typically not permitted to do.
Muslims reportedly make up some 50 per cent of the school’s pupils. The problem over prayers started when during one break time a group of students followed the lead of one pupil who began Islamic prayer in the playground; soon thirty had joined her and the partakers began to pressure, allegedly (though I daresay likely enough) by shame and intimidation, others into joining them.
By the stage other Muslim pupils began to be told they were “bad Muslims”, the school intervened. The KC trial lawyer defending Michaela in the current court case later described how “the school observed a child starting to wear a headscarf who had not previously done so. A little girl dropped out of the school choir as she was told by one of the other Muslim children that this was ‘haram’ [forbidden] during Ramadan.”
The school decided to ban “prayer rituals” and what followed by way of protest against that decision included a bomb threat, a brick thrown through a teacher’s window, and a number of personally aimed threats which left some teachers “fearing for their lives”. A disciplinary suspension was issued, then the court case began.
The story caught the headlines. Polly Toynbee at the Guardian called for the removal of all elements of religion from the education process as an apparent solution, while GB News waxed lyrical about the cultural importance of preserving our supposedly proud tradition of secularism. Both perspectives missed, it seems, that the contemporary school system is a relatively new and strange innovation in the history of the human race; meanwhile religion is not.
We have become accustomed to the slightly unusual fact that generations of children are raised by complete strangers and programmed with doctrines according to a “syllabus” their parents, in the overwhelming majority of cases, had no say in at all. Parents have never had less control over how their children are raised; strangers have never had more power over the raising of other people’s children. According to nature, parents have such rights over their children, and not the State. And many parents would have their children religiously raised. It is not the State’s place to deny them that.
Moreover, the Times released a list of the top non-independent schools in the country towards the end of 2023. Of the top ten, nine were religious (four were Catholic). So even on a utilitarian level the Toynbee prescription won’t do.
We can and ought to empathise with the Michaela pupils – up to a point. The Church defends the concept of natural religion, which is to say, religion according to the natural law. Nature and reason, Catholic philosophy contends, reveal the existence of a Creator – and we owe thanksgiving and worship to that Creator. Prayer, therefore, and the virtue of religion are part and parcel of being a just human being.
And yet the prayer and religion in question are not our own. Our Lord’s injunction to ensure that when you pray you go into your room, close the door, and pray in secret (Mt 6:6) – lest, we are warned, we be hypocrites: praying for the exterior show – might have avoided this whole drama. Nick Timothy, former aide to Theresa May, in a Daily Telegraph article addressing the Michaela conflict entitled “Multiculturalism is becoming a Trojan horse for Islamist domination”, argued that Islamic shows of ostensible public piety are frequently designed as “expression[s] of power and intimidation”.
There is something to this concern. My own father lived in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran; he describes the aggression of the public penitent marches as frightening. As does a young Iranian-Catholic convert I know.
It’s true: public demonstrations of piety, as Our Lord warned, can all too easily become a form of virtue-signalling which doesn’t correspond to sincerity and conviction.
Islamic attitudes to prayer are different. Public prayer is encouraged, as are prayer mats, and there is a requirement to perform it five times a day. One of these times, Zuhr, is mandated for just after noon – a time when pupils are at school, which inevitably causes problems for a school like Michaela.
Michaela was founded in light of the inevitable difficulties of a society already multiracial and multi-religious. By stressing integration, it achieved success. Parents knew what their child would be subjected to when they tried to acquire a place there. Michaela is compared to Singapore – it achieves a tenuous peace and order amongst disparate and perhaps naturally opposed groups through the hand of firm and persistent authority. It’s legitimate for the school to want to repair (and certainly not exacerbate) existent and worsening segregational divides in its surrounding community and our country. So the school’s efforts to curtail this divisive phenomenon, which threatened to upend the school’s precarious harmony and unity, is understandable.
But the Christian might be still left legitimately hoping that maintaining this tenuous peace should not require the attempted exclusion of God in education. For, ultimately, is a peace without God even desirable? The calls for enforced secularism in education in the wake of this drama seem hardly fair. Is it right that Christian students and parents should lose their religious liberty thanks to others who abuse it?
Of course, in an entirely Catholic civilisation and society (the ideal) none of this would be (or used to be) a problem. The Angelus might be prayed at the midday chime without controversy. But as Britain and other historically Christian countries take in newcomers from disparate parts of the world, such conflicts are inevitable, and are highly likely to become more commonplace.
The concerned Catholic student at Michaela might find solace and the solution to this dilemma over prayer and school duties in the wisdom of Dorothy L. Sayers and her commentary on canto VII of Dante’s Purgatorio. As Henry III of England, despite his immense piety, is placed by the great poet in Ante-Purgatory due to his imprudent and potentially slothful misgovernance, Sayers writes: “The fault which he is expiating…may be the neglect of his kingly, through preoccupation with his religious, duties (since to pray when one ought to be working is as much a sin as to work when one ought to be praying).”
For Muslims things are a little more complicated, admittedly. The Michaela students shouldn’t be banned from praying, but the school has the right to maintain order and focus when adherence to prayer becomes a matter of tyrannised exterior and public submission, rather than a matter of internal conscience.
That may well sound inconclusive and even unsatisfying. But we are confined to such confusion and contradiction when we have forfeited the solid and societally cohesive structures of a monocultural and monoreligious society. We have made our bed. Now we must lie – and try to pray – in it.
Photo: A young girl wearing a muslim headscarf stands in line talking with other children before going out for recess play time at Featherstone Primary school in Southall, London, 9 December 2003. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images.)
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