Dan Proft spoke with Katharine Birbalsingh, co-founder of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, London, and host of the new podcast Strictly Education, about the school’s academic results, its approach to discipline, and remarks she made this summer at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference on how Western history is taught in schools.
The interview followed a segment in which Proft played portions of Birbalsingh’s ARC speech, in which she argued that history curricula in British schools increasingly frame the subject through the lens of oppressor and oppressed, focusing heavily on topics like the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism while giving comparatively little attention to Britain’s role in ending the slave trade or to other historical slave trades outside the West. She argued a similar framing has taken hold in museums and cultural institutions, and said the shift reflects a broader trend she described as harmful to how young people understand history and their own agency.
Birbalsingh said Michaela, which she noted enrolls a typical inner-city, non-selective student population that is roughly sixty percent Muslim, has produced some of the top exam results among secondary schools nationally by emphasizing traditional discipline, structured routines and what she called small-c conservative values, including personal responsibility and gratitude. She said the school deliberately avoids emphasizing racial or religious identity, flying only the British flag and asking students to sing God Save the King, and argued that shared national values rather than group identity are what allow students from different backgrounds to get along without the racial tension she said is common elsewhere.
Proft noted a City Journal write-up on the school by Theodore Dalrymple that highlighted the absence of racial conflict at Michaela despite its diversity. Birbalsingh attributed that to the school’s focus on common values over group identity, drawing a comparison to the role she said the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance once played in U.S. schools. She said the school draws roughly a thousand visitors a year, including educators from the United States, and that some early critics of the school’s approach have since changed their views after seeing its results firsthand.
Birbalsingh closed by discussing her new podcast, which she said will focus on both the state of Western civic culture and practical advice for parents, arguing that a shift toward what she called gentle parenting has displaced more traditional approaches involving praise and consequences.