Britain’s Strictest Headteachers

One of Britain’s strictest headteachers has blasted ‘gentle’ middle-class parenting tactics for eroding traditional child-rearing methods and destroying working-class families.

Katharine Birbalsingh, who co-founded and leads the Michaela Community School in Brent, north London, said that parents should embrace being authority figures and stop giving their children choices in food and clothes.

Speaking in The Times, Ms Birbalsingh said it was impossible to find traditional parenting books that gave parents permission to tell their children what to do and teach them right from wrong.

Instead, modern methods focused on ‘understanding the child’ and ‘communicating with their needs’, rather than how to ‘teach them right from wrong’.

During her harsh criticism, the prominent headteacher, who did not reveal whether she was a parent, also criticised those who did not teach their children to read and count.

‘The culture and the language that’s being used means parents feel that they’re not in a position of authority over their child,’ the 52-year-old said.

‘The stuff you’ll get nowadays will be much more along the lines of gentle parenting, being friends with your children, not holding them to account. It will be written from the point of view allowing them to choose to lead their own feeding.’

The headteacher has made headlines for her controversial opinions on ‘woke culture’ in schools – such as suggesting that some people from the most impoverished families should set their sights lower.

When discussing parenting books from decades ago, Ms Birbalsingh said parents were given more agency and more of an understanding of ‘having dominion’ over their child. 

But modern parents had ‘been infantilised’, she claimed, and were now not able to ‘take ownership of their own child’.

Ms Birbalsingh said middle-class parents ‘might get away’ with this ‘gentle parenting’, but believed this was not the case for ‘families that are under financial pressure, social pressure and don’t have two parents in the home’.

‘And the culture that is created by this literature, written by middle-class people—they don’t realise the absolute destruction that it causes for the working-class family,’ she said.

Ms Birbalsingh often comments on social media about parenting and posts videos she deems wholesome, especially those relating to fathers and daughters.

She also added that fathers have a big influence by being stricter than mothers but are also more fun and adventurous. However, she suggested that either parent could take that role.

Ms Birbalsingh said she was regularly told by parents that it was the ‘teacher’s job’ to deal with their child’s social media use, a position she described as ‘mad’.

When defining the perfect parenting culture, the teacher described ‘one of learning all the time in the household’.

In January, Ms Birbalsingh accused Labour’s Education Secretary of showing ‘her Marxist outlook in every decision’.

Speaking on the Planet Normal podcast, the outspoken teacher said Bridget Phillipson has Marxism ‘coursing through her veins’ as she hit out at government education policy.

A new bill under review by Parliament would ensure all state schools had the same pay scales, followed the national curriculum, employed only skilled or qualifying teachers and limited uniforms to three branded items.

Speaking to the Planet Normal podcast, Ms Birbalsingh said: ‘I do see a sense of Marxism that is coursing through the veins of the [new education] bill.

‘Bridget Phillipson is looking at this in a manner that is just not very informed. You see her Marxist outlook in every decision that she’s making.

‘Social mobility is not something that you can just place upon children, you need to inspire them to take ownership of their own lives and jump over the obstacles that are in front of them.

‘They need to feel like they belong to their school and wear their uniform. They need to work hard to get grades at GCSE that will compete with the boys at Eton.

‘They need to own their lives and push themselves forward. It’s about self-empowerment, it is not about holding your hand out to the state and saying: ‘Please give me more.’

You seldom get to have a perfect child that’s just born good, kind and intelligent. Our job as parents is to infuse those characteristics in them to secure them a more promising future, not just for them, but for the family they too will create in the future.

Most children of my generation in the 1960s and before knew their numbers, alphabet, nursery rhymes and how to use a knife and fork before they started infant school. Nowadays it’s like babies are starting school, literally babies with some still in nappies. It’s not the teacher’s job to do everything – parents need to take some responsibility.

The problem is that now, for a lot of children, English is not their first language, and there lies a lot of the problem. That is our children’s downfall and immigration is impacting our children at school as well.

The pivotal word here is ‘authority.’ This does not mean a reign of terror, but guidance sometimes in the smallest measures. Like brushing teeth before bed, no matter how exhausted. Small steps, but with the general message, there is someone who can tell right from wrong.

Children might feel like life is problematic, but they need someone to turn to and guide them because parents who let their children discuss and decide all the time have given up their leadership, leaving their children to get lost.

Of course, some children will reign terror once they become teenagers but hopefully, those little embers parents installed into their children when they were younger might survive and turn into good ones later on in life.