Super head Katharine Birbalsingh isn’t just fighting for her school, her spat with hardliners could alter Britain
KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH has fought and won many battles as one of Britain’s most brilliant teachers.
Today she is engaged in the fight of her life, not just for the school she turned into the best in Britain but arguably for the future of Britain.
The doughty headmistress is being dragged into the High Court by a pupil over her right as a Muslim to hold prayer rituals during school hours.
This is no petty clash of cultures or religion.
The outcome could decide whether Britain remains an allegedly Christian country or, as violence erupts in Gaza and the wider Middle East, takes its first step towards a militant form of Islam being allowed to dominate in its public bodies.
Michaela Community School in Brent, North West London, where Ms Birbalsingh rules with iron discipline, was already a target for the educational left because of its extra-ordinary academic achievements.
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It raises hackles by proving a well-run school, despite tensions with a mixed Muslim and Hindu register, can deliver the best A and A* results in the land.
Most go on to a top university.
It has achieved this spectacular success by resolutely leaving religion at the school gates.
Once inside, pupils must obey strict rules about mixing, sharing and tolerance.
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Children play together in groups of no more than four.
Silence is compulsory in corridors and children must show respect to teachers.
Phones are banned.
Disputes over food — beef or pork — are resolved with a vegetarian menu.
This balance of give and take has been upended by Hamas’s October 7 horrors.
Michaela’s path to the High Court — funded by around £150,000 in legal aid for the child — has been marked by violence including bomb threats and intimidation of teachers.
Staff now avoid public transport for fear of attack after a brick was smashed through a teacher’s window.
Turning a playground squabble into a courtroom drama has alarming implications.
Victory for a right to pray would crash Michaela’s system of live and let live.
Nor is Michaela the only school where children have been weaponised by extremists.
Barclay Primary in East London had to close early for Christmas over false claims an eight-year-old boy was “bullied” by teachers for wearing a Palestine badge.
TikTok rumours were deleted after teachers denounced them as “malicious fabrications”, but not before protests forced the school to shut.
Anger and intolerance is fast becoming a way of life in parts of Britain.
Mass protests by masked Hamas supporters are a weekend fixture.
Met police anti-terror chief Matt Jukes reports a sharp increase in terror probes by the secret services since October 7, especially among youngsters.
Even Labour, which relies on Muslim votes, is not immune from attack.
Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy was howled down on Saturday by protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.
Alarm over such incidents inevitably sparks cries of “Islamophobia”, giving hard-liners cover as a protected species under our blinkered Equalities Act.
Yet ordinary, peace-loving Muslims are just as alarmed by zealots who bully girls as young as four into wearing the hijab, fasting during Ramadan and five-times-a-day prayer rituals.
Thanks to the feeble ministry of Archbishop Welby and his clueless clerics, there is precious little resistance from the Church of England, supposedly the nation’s established religion.
Even part-time churchgoer Prince William last week rejected his duty, as future King, of upholding Christianity as Defender of the Faith, a holy role dating back 500 years to Henry VIII.
Parts of our major cities have become majority Muslim enclaves.
In London’s East End, shady Mayor Lutfur Rahman flies the Palestinian flag over his sprawling “Islamic Republic” of Tower Hamlets.
The bullies have forced Katharine Birbalsingh into a legal wrangle which should never have reached court.
It could cost her school hundreds of thousands of pounds.
To her credit, she refuses to submit.
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“We would definitely appeal if we lose,” she told our sister paper, The Sunday Times.
“I will not divide children according to race and religion. It will not happen under my watch.”
