Women and Equalities Committee
Oral evidence: Pre-appointment hearing with the Social Mobility Commission, HC 782
Wednesday 20 October 2021
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 October 2021.
Members present: Caroline Nokes (Chair); Theo Clarke; Philip Davies; Kim Johnson; Anne McLaughlin; Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
Questions 1 - 41
Witnesses
I: Katharine Birbalsingh CBE, Government’s preferred candidate for Chair, Social Mobility Commission.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witness: Katharine Birbalsingh.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to this afternoon’s meeting of the Women and Equalities Select Committee and the pre-appointment hearing for the chair of the Social Mobility Commission. Good afternoon, Ms Birbalsingh. During the course of the meeting, are you happy for us to refer to you by your first name? That was a nod. Thank you very much. The individual Committee members will ask you questions in turn, starting with me. Can I thank you for taking the time to attend this afternoon?
I wanted to start off with a question about time commitment. We understand that you are planning to remain as headmistress of the Michaela Community School, and you are also CEO designate of the multi-academy trust and a trustee of the New Schools Network. This is a lot of roles. How much time are you planning to devote to the commission? Do you feel that that will be enough?
Katharine Birbalsingh: That is a good question, and one that I thought about myself before applying. I have given up the position with New Schools Network deliberately. I would not have applied for something like this maybe three years ago. The school started in 2014 and it was much more of a hands-on job for some years. What I mean by that is that I would be in the lunch hall, dismissing children and that sort of thing. I do not do that any more. I have a very strong team of middle leaders and senior leaders, so a lot just works on clockwork. So it seemed like a good time to be able to do it.
It is hard to say, but I would not be applying for it if I did not think I could do it. When you say I am CEO of this multi-academy trust, we are not a multi-academy trust yet. We sort of are, in that we are opening up a new school, but the new school has not been opened, so there is only just this one school at the moment. My deputies are really very good, so I am not too worried. It will be fine.
Q2 Chair: You will be aware that the outgoing chair said last year that they felt it was a full-time role. What are your thoughts on that?
Katharine Birbalsingh: If it is a full-time role, you need to be advertising it as a full-time role. You have advertised it as something that takes a few days a month, which I think I can dedicate to it. I suppose we will have to wait and see. I plan to do it in a few days a month. I hope that the advert has not been misleading.
Q3 Chair: It is slightly unfair to suggest that I have advertised it.
Katharine Birbalsingh: When I say “you”, I do not mean you. I mean—
Chair: The Government.
Katharine Birbalsingh: Yes.
Q4 Chair: You bring a phenomenal wealth of experience in the education sector to this, as a teacher, first, and a headteacher. Do you have any concerns about some of the wider social mobility remit within employment or enterprise that you feel that your experience might be a bit too narrow for?
Katharine Birbalsingh: Yes. I do not have huge experience in employment, but that is what commissioners are for, and the kinds of conversations that I will have with people. The CEO of Co-op has written in to the committee with all sorts of ideas and support for social mobility and I thought, “Brilliant. I would love to have a Zoom call with them”.
It would be odd to have someone in this position who had experience in all fields that pertain to social mobility, because it would be very hard to find someone like that. What is key is that you have someone who has demonstrated commitment to the cause, who has evidence that they can do that sort of thing in their field—in my little corner—and someone who is willing to learn, is open to ideas and recognises, as I have just said, “I am not an expert in all of it and I want to learn from others”. That is what I would say.
Q5 Chair: Education clearly underpins social mobility. Your experience has been in secondary. Where does it start? Where should social mobility begin? What age?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It should begin from the moment they are born, really. I am sure all of you may have seen my interview with the Telegraph at the weekend, where I was talking about the importance of parents and family. One of my key interests is in the family and in helping parents to do the best job that they can do. My experience over decades has shown me that lots of parents just do not know. They do not know, necessarily, what is best to do with their children.
That is something I would really like to focus on in this role, not just for secondary-school children but from the moment they are born, right up to age 16 and possibly even 18—what children need from their parents to help them succeed. That is something that interests me hugely.
Q6 Chair: We know that Alun Francis is to be appointed your deputy chair and one of the commissioners. How do you think his experience is going to supplement your own?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I was going to mention him. The fact is that he is just brilliant and I am so excited about him, because he complements me perfectly but he is also so open-minded. We have had a few conversations on Zoom and he is fantastic. He is the principal of an FE college in Oldham, and so, in many ways, completely the opposite—here I am in a secondary school in London.
The things he tells me are exactly the things that I have fought against all my life. It is a college, so children at 16 and 17 are coming to him and he is saying, “Gosh, they are not able to sit on a chair, they are not able to bring a pen and they are not able to turn up on time. We have to spend so much time at the college trying to sort that out. If only they came with those skills, we could really concentrate on the stuff that they need to be able to get into the workplace”. That was a really interesting conversation.
I was speaking to him this morning on Zoom and he was talking about apprenticeships and the difficulties that there are with them. He knows so much about those entries into the workplace. We said that I am not so familiar with them. I am a little bit familiar, but nowhere near as much as he is. I find it really informative and exciting talking to him, because he is able to give me a completely different perspective.
Also, there is his geographical position. For instance, he was talking about a really interesting point. He has Pakistani and Bangladeshi students and then he also has white students. He was saying that, for whatever reason, the apprenticeships are more commonly taken up by the white students and less so by the Pakistani and Bangladeshi ones. He does not really know why.
That is something that is so interesting. In this position, we can then try to explore those kinds of things: why are some people interested in this and why are some others interested in that? What are the reasons and how can we make it so that we open up interest for everyone across the board, so that all doors are open for them later on in life?
Q7 Chair: How much does it matter to you that you have a diverse range of commissioners to work with? Do you envisage being involved in their recruitment and selection?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I hope I am involved. It is really important. It is important to have diversity of views and experience. It is like I just said: I do not know much of the business side of things, so I need some people on there who have that as their expertise, so that they can help me with that. Diversity of views and diversity of experience are really important.
When you have diversity, people challenge you in interesting ways and they challenge what you already think. They make you consider things. You go away and think, “No, I do not agree”, and you come back and say something else and then they make you think again.
I would say that is very much what has happened with our school. People often misunderstand our school and think that I had this blueprint in my head and then we established it and the way that it is right now, in 2021, is exactly as it was when it opened in 2014. I always think I would have to be some kind of genius for that to be the case. The school is certainly not my creation. It is the creation of many staff who work here now and who have worked here. It has been through many conversations where we have argued with each other and discussed, and then we have done one thing and changed our minds and done something else, and then found out, researched this and changed that, and so on.
That is the sort of attitude and enthusiasm that I would want to bring to the post. I would hope that the commissioners would all feel similarly. To do that, you need a variety of people.
Q8 Chair: Can I ask a quick question about geography? I am very conscious that the Michaela School is in Brent. Alun Francis is up in Oldham. How do you think you are going to tackle the various challenges of social mobility across the whole country, encompassing rural as well as urban areas, seaside towns—some of those pockets of real challenge that the Government are so focused on?
Katharine Birbalsingh: That is a good question. Partly, I do not know. I am not an expert on rural areas. That is something that we need to look at, research, analyse and think about. I would not say I have a definite position on that.
Having said that, social mobility is all about children, and I know children. Whatever colour, background and so on they are, children are children. They need a certain amount and type of support from their families and their schools. The adults in their lives are so crucial, from the moment that they are born right through to 16 or 18. Children, wherever they are, need the same sorts of things. They need consistency. They need the adults in their lives holding really high standards for them.
Sometimes that can be hard for us as teachers or as parents, because sometimes we come under pressure in feeling awkward and a bit unfriendly if we hold our standards high, because we do not want to tell our children off. We do not want to tell the class off. We feel like it is better just to push it under the carpet. Actually, I think it is better to hold your standards high and insist that the children rise to those standards, whether they are children at Alun’s college in Oldham, or kids at my school, or two and three-year-olds at home right now with their parents.
That is about holding the line as adults and leading your expectations and the learning. From a teacher’s point of view, you are leading the learning. From a parent’s point of view, you could be leading the learning but you would also be leading other things. You are leading the dinner table. You are leading what happens in the evening. You do not leave it to the children to lead, because children need guidance and they need to be led. That is for children everywhere.
As I said earlier, there is a lack of knowledge out there. For instance, it is a bad idea to give your toddler a phone to occupy him; it will make it much more difficult for him to read later if you do that, because a book cannot compete with a phone. A phone has all sorts of flashing images, colours, adverts that pop up and so on, and they break your attention span. If a child has had that from a very young age, it is then very hard for them to find a book, which is black and white and flat, interesting. Sometimes parents can say to themselves, “She never really took to reading”. Actually, had they done things differently, maybe she would have taken to reading.
That is just one example. It is no one’s fault. It is just that people do not know. I would really like to work at getting that kind of information out across the country to everyone, so that parents stand a better chance of better supporting their children, in order to enable social mobility for them.
Q9 Chair: You have put a lot of focus on parents. We know that some of the most challenging starts in life are for those children who are in the care system. How would you best steer local authorities to make sure that the state is as good a parent as it can be?
Katharine Birbalsingh: The children in the care system also have parents, the parents who step in. They may not be their biological parents but it is the people and families who are bringing them up. Frankly, for people who are the actual biological parents or the ones in care, parenting advice is needed throughout the country.
Of course, it needs to be the right parenting advice and how you make that happen is complex. I would not want to speak too soon and say, ”What we need are parenting classes happening everywhere, and that is what we will get happening”, because it is hard. It is hard to give the right advice.
My initial thoughts are that I would like some national campaigns on things like phones, for instance, and not giving them to your toddler. I would love it if we could get to a point where we know it, in the way that we know you should eat four to five fruits and vegetables a day, or we know that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. It is interesting because, whenever I quiz the children here to find out what they know about things, they do not know lots about lots, but they know you are meant to eat four to five vegetables a day.
That is because the campaigning has been so clear and it has happened over time, years and years and years. It is everywhere, so it just becomes part of the national consciousness. I would love it if things like “Do not give your child a phone” were to become part of the national consciousness. That will help people with parenting and that will help people with teaching.
I would not want you to think I am just talking about parenting. I am talking about people who are the adults in a child’s life. Teachers are a huge part of a child’s life, which is why I have spent my whole life working in education. I love children, and I love having a positive impact on their lives. It is the reason why I have fought my whole life to make the education system better. One thing that we have done here at Michaela is we have set up this school, which I think is a great school, and you all are very much invited to come and have lunch with the kids. If you want to come, just let us know. Come and have lunch with the kids. Have a tour with the children. You will see the school, and I can explain to you the things that are relatively radical about it, or different.
We now get 600 visitors a year. These are mainly teachers from across the country and across the world. We get Americans, Australians, Germans—all sorts. I suppose they hear it through the news, social media, word of mouth and that sort of thing. We have written two books. Why do we do that? We do that because we are trying to persuade people. People come and take ideas from the school, and they have implemented these ideas back in their schools. I have had headteachers who write to me and say, “Gosh, it is amazing how much difference this had made to our school”. In fact, just today we have a teacher in who is joining us in January. In her current school in Nottingham, she was telling me how they do line-ups outside—they have copied so many of the things that we do here—and how it has completely transformed the school for the better.
It is so exciting. I hear these stories all the time. I believe very much in trying to win hearts and minds. I realise that people might not imagine that that would be true, because they look at me and they think, “Oh my goodness, she says outrageous things”, but I would always say, “It is because the press always like to misquote you, put it out of context or whatever”. It is also because it is hard to persuade people in a 30‑second soundbite on the news. It takes years.
I often have people come up to me and say, “I have been following you on Twitter for four years. I used not to like what you said, but now I have been persuaded, having watched you for years”. There are people who have come to the school once, and two years later they come back and say, “I never used to like anything you said, but now I see it. I have come back and I see it. We have taken some of those ideas and implemented them in our schools”. I have so many letters. I have letters from teachers, not necessarily in management, who have taken ideas and put them in their classrooms, and their classrooms have changed. I am really excited about trying to win hearts and minds and trying to give teachers and parents alternatives to what they have been doing.
Q10 Kim Johnson: Good afternoon, Katharine. I wanted to pick up on a response to a question from the Chair earlier on. You said that social mobility was all about the children. From my point of view, you have kind of painted a picture of a panacea of a child living in this well-constructed and loving family. We know for a fact that that is not the situation for lots of children. That has become very evident during the pandemic, in terms of digital poverty, the increase in domestic abuse and the increase in neglect. How would you respond to some of those families who do not have what it takes to support their families?
You just mentioned care-experienced children. I was at a Select Committee yesterday, with the chair of the virtual school heads, who said that he felt that local authorities were failing as a corporate parent. It would be interesting to hear what you say in reflection to what I have just said.
Katharine Birbalsingh: Local authorities have it really hard. We are being a bit harsh on them when we say they are failing. They are doing a very difficult job, dealing with all sorts of issues. Obviously, the local authority and the police need to get involved in legal matters, issues of abuse and so on, and deal with those situations. I am talking about the vast majority of people, where that is not the case.
You talk about the digital divide, and this is one of the ways that there has been a bit of a misunderstanding in the country. The assumption is that the more digital access you have as a family, the better off you are in terms of accessing education. I do not think that is true. There is a lot more to accessing education. I do not think the solution is providing more laptops for families. I voiced a concern over phones being given to toddlers.
I know anecdotally, from many people in the profession, that over the pandemic, children may very well have had access to lessons and so on but they did not necessarily choose to engage with them. That is because children engage with learning when they have an adult who is in charge. That is why I say adults are so important—both teachers and parents—in a child’s life. When I say “parents”, it does not have to be parents. It can be an uncle. It could be a cousin. It does not matter. It is the adults in their life.
Children learn best when the adult is standing over them, saying, “Come on, you have to do this. You have to do this now. You have 15 minutes. Come on”. Then, at the end, you say, “Well done” when they have done it. When they do not, you say, “No, that is not good enough”. You might take away their favourite chocolate bar or you might put them in a detention at school—whatever it is. You have set them a task and you expect them to do it and to fulfil their responsibilities as a child.
That can only happen in a school, actually. When I say, “in a school”, with regard to learning, I mean that during the pandemic, we were all kidding ourselves that there were these extraordinary Zoom lessons going on and children could learn via these laptops. There was some learning going on—I am not going to knock all of it—but the fact is that there is nothing better for a child than being in a good classroom with a good teacher.
On Zoom, you are unable to test them. You cannot quiz them regularly to test whether they have committed any of this to memory. You are unable to hold them to account for their learning. Children need to be held to account for their learning, whatever their backgrounds. That does not happen during a pandemic, so there is lots of catching up to do, which I know schools are currently doing. It is hard. It is hard for us; it is hard for everybody. We just need to do our all on that.
With regard to the children that you are talking about in abusive situations, the police need to do their very best to get them out of those situations and to improve their lot. I am not sure that the local authorities are failing, necessarily. They are doing the best they can.
Q11 Philip Davies: Hi, Katharine. I want to congratulate you on what you have done at the Michaela Community School, which is brilliant, and I love your enthusiasm. I very much welcome your appointment. Following on from what Kim has just asked, do you think that the lockdown has impacted social mobility a lot, in the sense that it has impacted kids from poorer backgrounds a lot more than kids from wealthier backgrounds? If so, how do you plan to change that?
Katharine Birbalsingh: This is the thing. It is absolutely 100% the case that the pandemic has been a disaster for disadvantaged children. That is not anyone’s fault. I understand why Government pushed out laptops and I understand why the whole country started talking about the fact that laptops were what was required in order for these children to achieve, but that is to miss the nuances of learning. It is to miss how a child best learns. I do not blame Government, because I get it. They did not really have any other choice. What else could they do?
Like I say, we need these children to be in classrooms. There is a disparity between more well-off children and poorer children. You might have a stay-at-home mum who is able to be on top of the children. You might say, “Some of them had mums at home all the time then”. Possibly, but what if there are several children? What if mum does not speak English? What if they are trying to get odd jobs here and there, wherever they can? It is not as easy when you are from a disadvantaged family.
If you have that support at home, you are far more likely to get a lot more out of a Zoom lesson. It is all dependent on how supportive the environment at home is for your learning. That is why there is that huge disparity between how children will have fared who are from more well-off families compared to less well-off families.
What do you do about it? It is a good question. I know, for instance, Government have put some money into the idea of getting children extra tutoring and so on, which can help. To be honest, I think the best way is to improve our teaching in our schools. How do you do that? When I say “improve our teaching”, I mean make it so that more schools are achieving more, so are getting a higher Progress 8. Progress 8 is the measure that we use to determine, let us say for secondary school, the progress that they make in the time from the beginning of key stage 3 to the end of key stage 4.
How do schools increase their Progress 8? There are two big ways. One is in terms of behaviour. I spoke of that earlier. It is about having really high expectations. You might say, “That is obvious. Just have high expectations. Why not?” The reason why people shy away from having high expectations is that teachers do not like giving detentions. They do not like saying, “Right, your homework is not done. It has to get done”, because it seems a bit mean and nobody likes being mean.
The number one thing I have as a thing at Michaela is I have to support and encourage my staff at holding the line and making sure that they hand out those detentions when the homework is not done. What can often happen sadly, and well-intentioned people do this, is that they see a child is from a poorer background and they think, “Poor little Johnny. It is not fair of us to expect that extra homework from him, because he has a difficult home background and I do not know if we can expect that of him”.
One reason why people can be very critical of me is that they say, “Ms Trunchbull over there is insisting on little Johnny bring in that homework when she should be more compassionate and allow him off the homework because he comes from a difficult situation at home”. I always say that it is not easy for me or for any of my staff to insist on that homework being done, or for any of the staff at other schools who do the same things. I would not say it is everybody, but there are lots of staff out there that do what we do. It is never easy, and we too have the same thoughts about poor little Johnny.
The thing is, if you keep letting Johnny off on that homework, eventually, when he finishes school and is functionally illiterate or functionally innumerate, he will then not be able to go out into the workplace and succeed. It is for us, as adults in his life, both parents and teachers, to hold standards high when it comes to discipline. That is the first way. I promise you, if we were to have excellent behaviour across all our schools suddenly—if we could just wave a magic wand and go “bam” and it happened—we would all catch up on the losses from the pandemic very quickly.
I should not just say it is the behaviour; the second thing is the teaching. Over the last 50, 60 or 70 years, teaching in this country, but I would say also across the western world—certainly in the anglophone world—has become far less teacher-led and much more child-centred. That means that it used to be the case that the teacher would stand at the front of the class, the desks would be in rows and the teacher would lead the learning. There was the idea of the teacher being the authority in the classroom, where the children would look to the teacher and the teacher would say, “Follow me into battle. We are going to learn about the Second World War. Come on, everybody. I am going to teach you”.
That happens less and less nowadays. It is much more about desks being in groups, with children looking at each other, and then children being given a task that they should get on with, while the teacher moves among the desks like a facilitator of learning and keeps them on task. That is what is called child-centred learning, where the child is leading the learning.
That has happened over decades, I suppose because people feel that it engages the child more. They shy away from the idea of the adult being the authority in the room. Parents, too, shy away from being the authority. They want to be more friendly with their kids. The teachers want to be more friendly. It is very important to have relationships now with children; I am not saying no relationships. The children need to feel like you love them, you are interested in them, you know stuff about them and you can connect with them. When they are coming into your class, you say, “Hey Johnny, expecting great things of you today” and that sort of thing. They need to know that you are on their side, but they need to know that you are going to hold those standards high and that you are going to grab the lesson, charge ahead and they are all going to come with you.
Ultimately, the teacher knows more than the children. The teacher has a degree and teacher training, and has been teaching for years. The teacher knows the normal pitfalls that children make in their learning, so the quality of explanations needs to be crisp. You need to be able to break it down into detailed segments so you can build. You teach that one, then you build that one, then you build that one and so on.
These are skills that need to be learned, but they also need to be desired. Too often nowadays, there is more of a child-centred focus, because we think that that makes things more interesting. I would argue that children can find anything interesting, whether it is physics or Shakespeare, as long as it is broken down for them in such a way so that they can understand and as long as the teacher is the authority in the classroom.
You will notice I am talking a lot about culture. I am talking about values and I am talking about culture. That is because I think, as a society, we underestimate how much culture has an impact on our expectations of children and our expectations of ourselves, and how much that has changed over the last few decades. That is no one’s fault. It is just something that we need to address head-on. It can be difficult to address those things, because people do not necessarily like it. It can ruffle some feathers. My interview at the weekend about telling parents to take responsibility made some people go, “Who is she to tell me to take responsibility?” so people do not say it.
In fact, Government after Government never talk about the responsibility of parents. That is because I do not think there is anything in it for them. They want to gain votes. If they go around saying, “You parents need to do X, Y and Z”, those parents will not vote for them. I, however, am not looking to be voted in by anyone, and I am very passionate about the things that I think will improve the chances for disadvantaged children in our country. I am very passionate about it. I did not say I was totally decided on various things, and there are certain things that I am not an expert at—we talked about entry into the workplace, and so on. I am very much looking forward to being able to find out more and having an impact on our culture as a country and on our value systems.
Q12 Philip Davies: I appreciate the full answer, although we might want some more concise answers, perhaps, or we could be here all evening. At the Conservative party conference in 2010, you said that the existing education system was broken for a number of reasons, including the fact that it keeps poor kids poor. Do you think that has changed, or is that still the same, 11 years on?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is a really good question and really interesting. I have noticed that there is a small revolution going on in education here in Britain that has not happened elsewhere in the rest of the world. It is really exciting. In the last 10 years, things have come on a lot.
When I first said that and talked about these ideas, they fell on to deaf ears. Now, we get 600 visitors a year coming here, mainly teachers and mainly from our country, coming to change things in their own schools. We are winning. We are winning the argument and we are winning hearts and minds. Teachers, not families—I would like to expand that into families now—are changing their minds about things because they are seeing the excellent examples in various schools that have high standards of discipline, where the teacher is leading from the front, with a knowledge curriculum, making knowledge central in your classroom and teaching from the front.
Yes, things are very different from the way they were in 2010. Having said that, there is still a very long way to go. That is one of the reasons why I want to do this position.
Q13 Philip Davies: In an interview with Good Morning Britain, you argued that talking about white privilege all the time actually undermines black children because it tells them that the establishment is against them. Do you want to expand a bit more on what you mean by that?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is the same for poor kids or anyone who is disadvantaged, whatever the reason why they might be disadvantaged. If you go on and on about the fact that the establishment is against them, a child is likely to give up. I find it unhelpful, because I have always worked in the inner city. Many of the children at my school, and at my schools before, have been ethnic minority kids. If you are telling them all the time, “You cannot get these jobs because you are black. You cannot do this because you are brown”, it is very hard for a child to be able to see above that.
That does not mean I think we should all bury our heads in the sand and say there are not any issues. There are issues of racism, sexism and so on. I witness them first hand myself all the time. I am not saying they do not exist, but I do not think it is helpful.
With the children, I will do an assembly on Serena Williams, for instance. I will say, “This is where she grew up. This is the family she came from. This is what she has done. How did she get here? Through hard work”. Then we listen to some video of her talking about her routine, how nobody is ever going to get her down and where she is going to go. It is the same thing.
Sometimes I tell them about myself. I say, “What do I do?” Last week I did an assembly on one of our teachers who just ran a marathon. I said, “Look, he just ran a marathon in 4 hours and 16 minutes. Oh my goodness, for me, after 16 minutes on my treadmill, I am tapping myself on the back. When I am running, I say to myself, ‘Right, if Sir can do 4 hours and 16 minutes, I can do 16 minutes’. What do I do? I dig deep and I keep on going”. That is the thing. Those kinds of ideas are what we need to be telling our children, whatever obstacles lie in front of them.
I do not mind the media talking about it sometimes, but when you feel like that is all you ever hear, it undermines the good work that schools are doing. That is a point I made about white privilege, but I could have made it about poor kids. I could have made it about any child who is considered disadvantaged.
Q14 Philip Davies: A table in the Social Mobility Commission’s report in 2020, “The long shadow of deprivation”, highlighted a number of areas that were named as some of the least socially mobile places in the country: Chiltern, Hyndburn, Gateshead and Bradford, which is where my constituency is. What do you propose to do in your role to ensure places like Bradford, where I am, do not get left behind?
Katharine Birbalsingh: When it comes to schooling, there is an interesting academy chain school there, Dixons Trinity, which I went to visit and which is doing a fantastic job; there is brilliant work there. The question is how we get more schools to do it like that. It is an interesting question, and it is something that I cannot tell you right now. That is the whole point of the position: to talk to people, to have the commissioners, to discuss and to think, “How do we expand that?” There is good work going on everywhere; we just need to find ways of pushing that out.
That is just in terms of education. There is little point, of course, in talking about ways into the workplace if there is not much work to go into. That is something that I am not an expert at right now, but I would want to look into. It is great to have apprenticeships and the apprenticeship levy, but what is the point? It will not help in areas where there are not many businesses to pay the apprenticeship levy. That is something that I would love to look into. I would love to have commissioners who could help me with that and see about making it so that children across the country have the opportunity to get into a variety of jobs.
Q15 Philip Davies: I have two final questions. First, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report in March 2021 said that white children on free school meals lagged behind every other group in Progress 8 attainment levels at secondary school. They are also the least likely to progress to university. Poor white groups, and especially poor white boys, do badly in the education system everywhere. Is the underperformance of white working class boys in the education system something that you would want to focus on in this role?
Katharine Birbalsingh: Once upon a time they talked about the black Caribbean boys. Now they talk about the white boys. The reason I say that is because what then happens is that everybody thinks the failure has to do with their whiteness, or their blackness, or their poverty—their this and their that. Actually, it has to do with all the stuff that I was talking about.
They need to access adults who are themselves in a position of authority, who give them the right sorts of values and who are able to reject this narrative that comes from elsewhere, “You are bound to fail, because the system is racist, or the system is against poor kids, or the system is against northerners”, or whatever it is. The adults need to be able to reject that narrative, protect the children and their self-esteem from that and build them up so they feel powerful and are able to take on the world. Ultimately, that is what we are doing, as adults, with children. We are trying to build them up so that at 18, they can go out there and do their thing. You send your little birdie off and they go and fly.
That is the case with all children, whoever is failing. I would not want to say, “It is about their inherent whiteness. It is about their boyhood. It is about their northernness”, or whatever it is. It is about all the stuff I was saying that will help all children. I just return to that.
Obviously, I am looking at that. That is not something I want to ignore, but I would not want to interpret it in the way that we often interpret this sort of data. That is what I am saying.
Q16 Philip Davies: Finally, in a statement you highlighted that your main priority would be developing a sound evidence base from which change can flow. I wondered if you would be willing to share what particular evidence it is that you are hoping to gather.
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is what I just said. On some things I have said, “I do not really know. I cannot say on that. I need to do some research and analysis”. We need to look at things, talk and interview people and so on, and gather some evidence. I have my own anecdotal evidence, but I know that my own experiences are relatively narrow. I have always worked in the inner city in London, for instance. I have always worked mainly with ethnic minority children. I have only worked in a secondary school. I need to build on the anecdotal evidence that I have so far.
I certainly would not want to go marching off and making suggestions for the Government to do X, Y and Z when I do not have that evidence base. It is really important to have evidence, partly because I would want to win hearts and minds, and partly because I would not want to give the Government direction that was misguided.
Q17 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Following on from that, you have been an educator for a very long time. Is your experience that white privilege, racism and people just generally being disadvantaged is discussed a lot in classrooms up and down the country, and that this being discussed holds the children back? I find it really strange that there is this view that young people are being talked at about this all the time, but you would know better than me.
Katharine Birbalsingh: Certainly not in 2009 and so on, when I was in various schools, but things have changed quite a lot in the last few years in the country. It is interesting how things are interpreted.
Let me give you an example. I was on a panel for a teacher training institution where there were some 600 or 700 teacher trainees there. There were a few of us teachers talking about how learning should take place. I said that I thought it should be teacher-led, like I just explained to you, and the reasons why. One of the women on the panel, a white woman, said, “No, it should not be”, and her explanation for this was, “I am a white woman, so I cannot possibly lead the learning in various instances”, say if they are reading a novel that has to do with ethnic minorities, for instance. She was saying, “I could not possibly lead the learning”, and that it was wrong of her, as a white teacher, to assume that she should take that position of authority.
That is an example of the ideas that have, I would say, come about in the last three years or so. It is a recent thing. These ideas have been seeping through, where it has become perfectly normal to think in that fashion.
Q18 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I suppose the question was more on whether this is what is being talked about in classrooms. We are talking about under-attainment, and that is a major issue right across working-class people, regardless of whether they are black or white. The idea is being bandied about that this is what is said to them on a daily basis. I suppose your example is about a teacher. Do you have any examples of that being done in classrooms?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I am not suggesting on a daily basis. I have no idea. When I say, “This is being said all over”, I do not necessarily mean in schools. I mean by the media. I am saying that it is part of our public discourse now. It is hard to open a newspaper where you do not see that conversation happening. It is hard to listen to the radio where people are not talking about that—where race is not being brought up.
I am talking about our culture, society-wise. That is why I bring her up. I am saying that we are immersed in a culture that has changed quite radically over the last few years, in a way that is not necessarily helpful to ethnic minority children, even though we think it is helpful. It is like the laptop point. We think giving laptops is helpful. We think talking about race often in the media and so on, generally speaking, is helpful.
It is talked about now. Ten years ago, it just was not discussed like this. It is very different. There was a television programme I was involved with on BBC, Roots, that came out in the 1980s. It was aired in 2006, or something. I heard it the other day, and it really brought me back to 2006. I thought, “Gosh, how different it was then, doing a radio programme then about roots, and talking about black people and transatlantic slavery, and all this”. It was such an unusual thing then. We are now in a very different space, culturally. That is all I mean.
Q19 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Do you agree with the commission’s report that child poverty has been a key driver of poor social mobility? What can we do to fix that?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is the case that life is going to be harder for you if you come from a poor family. It is the case that it is not fair. The question is what we can do, as the state, to help that child have a better chance at having more opportunities available to them. There are two main ways.
There is the last way, which is pathways into the workplace when they get to the end. Throughout most of their childhood, it is about the adults who are around them. It is about the quality of their education at school and the support that they might get from the other adults in their world, like the parents, the uncles, the aunts and so on.
We must not underestimate the power of culture, as I said before. Often people do with their children what the community does—the people around them. Do you buy an educational toy for your child, or do you go to the library? When I say educational toy, it does not need to be something super-expensive. It could be at Oxfam. Oxfam sells books for 20p and 50p that you can buy. You can also go to the library. Is that something that you do, or is that something that it does not occur to you to do, because the people around you are not doing it, and because there is not any kind of national campaign like we do around fruits and vegetables, and drinking eight glasses of water and so on, that allows them to access that information.
My experience of working with families for decades has been that when I give them advice about what to do at home, they have not heard it before and they are very grateful. They are really grateful for that advice. That is where I would want to start. Of course, I do not know enough about the welfare systems, what we do, how much means you are considered to be under that poverty line and so on, and what is and is not reasonable. We can talk about that sort of thing.
Q20 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I suppose what I was trying to get to is this. If poverty is a major factor of social mobility and there is an issue with poverty at the moment, as the commission has said, does that in some way make your prospective role redundant, in that we cannot have increased social mobility if we do not first resolve issues of poverty?
Katharine Birbalsingh: No, I disagree with that. However poor you are, there are all sorts of things that can be done to help a child succeed. There are the things that I have been talking about, about being more of an authority with the child, about reading to the child, not giving them a phone and that sort of thing. In terms of the schooling, obviously we can improve the schooling across the country, so no. Everything could stay exactly the way that it is and we could have impact on culture, values and habits. It is about the habits that all of us, as adults, have, and our expectations of children.
We cannot underestimate the power of culture and how that influences a child in terms of the expectations that he sets for himself and what he imagines is possible. Our children come from disadvantaged backgrounds here at Michaela and they all want to go to Oxford and Cambridge. Most of them will not go to Oxford and Cambridge, but if you reach for the moon you land among the stars. The thing is that it is not fair. I get that it is not fair, but we want to make it so that they have a chance. If you say that we cannot fix it until we fix child poverty, then we will never fix anything. We have to grab the bull by the horns and do what we can.
Q21 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: How do we go about changing the system, it not being fair? Is there nothing the state can do to make it stop being unfair, so that everybody can advance in the same way? I believe that is what social mobility is about. Perhaps we should have got your overview of what you though social mobility was in the first instance, but that is what I am trying to get to. If we do not tackle the issues of inequality, can we still have social mobility?
Katharine Birbalsingh: You can have inequality and still have social mobility that is much better than it currently is. It is unfair, but you can open up more doors to these children by improving schools. Imagine I could wave a magic wand and make all the schools have a really high Progress 8, including the schools where there is a disadvantaged intake. Suddenly, those children are empowered in a way that they were not empowered before.
They are not leaving school functionally illiterate or functionally innumerate. They are leaving school with some decent GCSEs, some real knowledge of the world and basic knowledge of history, geography, science and so on. They know how to sit on a chair, turn up on time, bring their equipment, and so on. They know how to conduct themselves through an interview. They will then be able to have more doors open to them to make something of their lives.
Social mobility is about children having doors open to them. Too many doors are closed to children from disadvantaged backgrounds because they have not had the adults around them, at home or at school, who have been able to instil a sense of love of learning, of commitment to it and a determination to work hard and then succeed. That has not happened around them. It is either that, or it is just the school quality. The quality of their school has not been able to teach them.
The state should catch the families who have not been able to support their children properly, but that requires the state to have really great schools everywhere. The state needs to address its schools, but we, as the state as well, can try to get information out there to help empower the families. I do not think much is done on empowering families at the moment, which is a shame. They are the No. 1 thing that is going to help the child to enable social mobility for that child. That is the No. 1 thing that will make it happen. The things that I have been talking about are how I would answer your question.
Q22 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: This is my final question. I know that you did not really want to talk about employment because you did not feel like it was your speciality, but you have mentioned in your supporting statement that current apprenticeships and work placements are woefully inadequate. We all know that, as well as what you know, it is who you know that seems to drive people in a certain way in our society, in terms of social mobility. How could you improve that for young people? How do you aim to push that forward?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is interesting that you say, “We all know it is about who you know.” I have no idea whether that is true. I am not saying you are wrong, but I do not know.
Q23 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: For example, before I became a Member of Parliament, I worked for another Member of Parliament, which made it easier for me. I am sure you have links to the Conservative party, as far as I know; they are the current Government and we are now confirming you for this particular role. The reality is that the circles that people move in have a natural impact on what they end up doing. How can we create that situation for as many people as possible?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I was a teacher in a school and I wrote a blog. I was not born into that. You are saying that I know people in Government. I was not born that way. I am an example of how if you work hard and do things, you are in a position where doors are open to you. I take issue with this idea. I do not know whether it is true. You may very well be right that everybody gets a job according to who they know.
Q24 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: It is more that it helps. Internships and all these other things help, in terms of the experience you have and who you have known to enable you to get into a particular volunteering role, or anything like that. How do we create those opportunities for more young people?
Katharine Birbalsingh: We get them to do some more volunteering, do we not? Lots of people will go out of the big cities and get a position somewhere that is not well known and does not have big status, but they will do that for a little while so that they meet somebody who will then recommend them to something else. They work hard. There are all kinds of routes like that that people take, but that advice needs to be given to young people. If they are not being given that advice, they will not know.
Your position is an interesting one. You worked for another MP. You had to do that first before you got to this one. People do not necessarily realise that. I find your question interesting, because I do not really know how much it is because people know each other. Perhaps that is something we could look at, in terms of the evidence that I talk about, to see how prevalent that is.
I agree with you that networking is a good idea. I have always thought to myself of having large networking events that young people of all different kinds of backgrounds can be invited to, and where they are given an explanation of how things work. You need to get out there, know people, make contacts, talk, be personable, and know how to shake somebody’s hand and look them in the eye. That is something that we teach the children here at Michaela all the time, because we know how important that first impression is when you are meeting somebody.
No doubt there are people who are super-rich and have everything handed to them on a plate, I suppose. I have never worked with those people, so I do not know. Because I come from a relatively humble background, I do not know what that is like. It does not deter me. I do not look at that and think, “Gosh, this is all so hard. We cannot do anything about it”. I think, “We have to make it so that we take responsibility and ensure that we surround these children with as many adults as possible who are going to keep their expectations high”.
I come back to what I was saying before. We need to teach them the things they need to be taught. Some of that would be how to network, how to write an email—that is one thing they struggle with, for instance—and how to come across coherently. A number of disadvantaged children will struggle to write sentences, for example. Why? It is because they are not reading enough. Why are they not reading enough? It is because they have a phone and are on screens too much. How do we make sure that families know not to put them on screens so that they can read more?
These are the sorts of things that hold many children back and that we would be foolish to ignore, because it would not help the children. They need to be able to write those emails with coherent full sentences to be able to get in the door. Of course it is more difficult, but they need those basic skills to get in the door.
Q25 Theo Clarke: What is your view of the effectiveness of the commission to date?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is interesting, given the questions before and saying I know of politicians. That is the only reason why I know of the Social Mobility Commission; otherwise I would have never really heard of it. I had not really heard of it, and I am somebody who deals with social mobility all the time and has dedicated my life to improving social mobility. It is nobody’s fault, and it is not its fault, but it is a shame that there has not been the media focus on it that would be preferable for the country to engage with the discussion that ought to be had in order to improve social mobility across the country. While it has written lots of reports, it is sad because those reports have just been written and put up there, and nothing has really happened. That seems a bit of a waste.
I would not want to be writing lots of reports. I would want to do some videos and podcasts and discussions. I would like to make it a bit more modern and a bit more accessible, because I want to have impact. I do not like doing things that waste my time. I do not want to write lots of reports that just get stuck on a website. I want to have impact. My whole approach will be more about campaigns, spreading knowledge and empowering teachers, headteachers and families, in order to set children in the right direction so that they can have all doors open to them when they are older.
Q26 Theo Clarke: Which aspects of its recent work will you be most keen to follow up on?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is interesting. I was reading a couple of the reports, and they do take a different perspective to the one that I have. I have a meeting—I think it is tomorrow—with the current chair, so it will be interesting to see what they say. I know that they have been trying to move things more towards the levelling-up agenda—concentrating on those white working class communities in the north who have been left behind—and that is something that I would want to continue with, looking at that and seeing how to help those communities.
I know that sometimes people worry that looking at that means that you then do not look at people’s protected characteristics, such as race, gender and so on, and the inequality that can come from that. I certainly would not want to take my eye off that. I would want to do both, mainly because my experiences and my own background have always been working in the inner city, so those protected characteristics are important to me. Yes, I suppose I would want to continue on with their work in terms of levelling up and the north.
Q27 Theo Clarke: Obviously the commission can advise Ministers, on their request, and it is required to publish an annual report. I am concerned that there is no requirement for the Government to respond. Do you think you have sufficient teeth to make a real difference?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I do not know. I have a lot of teeth and I shout a lot. Lots of journalists know who I am. I tend to tweet something and then suddenly all these journalists say, “We want to interview you about X, Y and Z”, or they just publish things and I think, “What on earth? I did not really say that”, so I do tend to make a bit of a splash. In many ways, I have a lot of respect for this happening. Liz Truss had to sign this off.
The fact is, in many ways I would imagine that the Conservative party would be really quite wary of me. I have always been very clear that I am not a Conservative. I am somebody who speaks my own mind and I am not a yes-man. I am not gaining personally from this position. Financially the money would come to the school, so I am not gaining in any way whatsoever from this. I applied for it because I thought to myself, “You know what? If you want to make a difference, doing that through the state is the best way of having impact”. I have worked for the state all my life, and I have had an impact in a big way at our school and also through teachers coming and learning from us. This is another way in which I can have an even bigger impact and get the right kinds of idea, as I see them, out there.
From the Government's perspective, they have no idea what I think or what I am going to say. I can imagine that they might even think of me as a bit of a risk, so I have a lot of respect for Liz Truss signing this off, because I would be worried if I were her, and I would be worried if I were the rest of the Government. I am looking forward to my independence, my experience bringing something to this role, and also bringing commissioners together so that we can really hash things out and make our recommendations. It is possible the Government will ignore me, but I tend to make it very difficult to be ignored.
Q28 Chair: Can I just follow up, just out of interest, really: where did you see the role advertised as being vacant? What first drew you to it, if you do not think it has that many teeth and you think you are going to have to use Twitter to get your message across?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is interesting. My PA saw it advertised. She brought it to me and said, “You might like to do this”, and I said, “No, that is ridiculous. I would not want to do it”, and she said, “No, I think you should, because you have done so much good here at the school and for our kids, and you can spread your ideas widely and tell everyone about the sorts of things that we do here”.
In fact, I have even set an essay competition for our kids, and said that they need to let me know what they think would benefit all children everywhere in terms of enabling their social mobility. After half-term they are bringing in their essays. I have this lovely postcard here from one child who said, “I would like to thank you for giving the year group an opportunity to try to consult Boris Johnson on how the country could improve, social mobility-wise. I will definitely end up writing an essay, because this is a very rare occasion”.
My PA kept saying to me, “Come on, come on”, and then I thought, “You know what? She is right. She is right, because I have a duty. I have a duty to my country. I have a duty to our children. I have done great things for social mobility for the children here, and I can spread that word more widely”. You will all know this, because you are in positions of public service. You know that you do not earn a fortune and you know that lots of people hate you. All of you will be hated from various different areas, because that is how it is when you are in public service. People might look at you and think, “Why do you do what you do?” You do it for the same reason that I do it: so that when you are 85 and you look back on your deathbed and you say, “What was my life?” you can say, “I contributed. I did something to change the world”.
That is why I am doing this; I want to continue to help change the world, and to change the world, in particular, for the better for disadvantaged children.
Anne McLaughlin: Hello, Katharine. It is very interesting to hear your thoughts on these things. If things do not change, many of the children that we want to be able to help will never make it to anywhere near 85. That is a fact, but I know you were just generalising. I have a few questions for you. You have given quite comprehensive responses so far. I am very happy if you give fairly short responses, because I have quite a few that I really want to hear about. It has been very interesting.
Katharine Birbalsingh: Sorry; I talk a lot.
Q29 Anne McLaughlin: You have given some very firm views today about how education should be done—I know that is grammatically incorrect—and how education should serve children. You have very strong views on that. There are many successful schools that take a very different approach. Your role in this would be to lead, but would you say you are also able to listen and learn from them? Do you accept there is no one way that is the right way, that it is a combination of things and that other people have different views?
Katharine Birbalsingh: When it comes to high standards of discipline, I do not know. I do not think I have ever met any teacher who does not believe in high standards of discipline. They all want it. I just do not see that. It is certainly the case that when it comes to teaching methods, yes, people disagree about that. That is where you have to look at evidence. You have to look at cognitive science. You have to look at how the brain learns, how children learn and how they best learn. It is true that if you have a very dedicated team of people you can get lots out of the kids, even with methods that are not the best, because kids will work hard for you if you love them and you believe in them and so on. Cognitive science is quite clear about how the brain learns and how to get the best out of children, so I would want to push those ideas out all over the country.
Now, there are some small schools that might do things differently, where they have such a committed body of staff that they are able to do that in their particular context. I would not want to denigrate those. I do not want to denigrate anyone, really, because people do not necessarily know. It is what I said earlier about not knowing, so I want to get ideas out.
Q30 Anne McLaughlin: You are very clear about the way to do things. As we have talked about today, the other thing is that you have said some things that other people would consider controversial. We have talked about the issues of race and teaching concepts such as white privilege. You said earlier that you are not looking for anyone to vote for you, but you will have to work collegiately with colleagues and other stakeholder groups who might have extremely different views on some of those sensitive issues. Do you feel that you are able to do that, or are you just going to say, “No, you are wrong. This is the right way to do it”? Do you feel confident that you will be able to work with them?
Katharine Birbalsingh: As I said earlier, what we do at the school here has come from discussion and changing of ideas. I have changed my mind about all sorts of things. I am always open to changing my mind. We are all learning every day. The key thing is to have discussions with people and then come to a conclusion.
It takes a long time. I am obviously trying to persuade all of you, right now, of certain things. I know I will not have managed it because it is such a short period of time. I would need you all to come to the school, then I would need to sit down with you and talk again, and then you would need to be able to say to me why you did not think these things and so on. We would go back and forth for a while. I am always open-minded about having conversations. I am always open to changing my mind. I come back to the evidence; let us look at the evidence and see what it says.
Q31 Anne McLaughlin: It is just bearing in mind that there are different views and you have your own personal views, and you have come to those conclusions for good reasons. When I say “good reasons”, I do not want it to be mistaken for me agreeing with some of your views, but you have come to those conclusions yourself. You are also quite active online; we have talked today about you tweeting to have your voice heard, and your blog. Do you intend to continue commenting publicly, in a personal capacity, while you are chair of the commission? If you do, how are you going to maintain a distinction between your personal views and those of the commission?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I can always put on my Twitter, “These are my personal views”. If I were commenting from the commission and what the commission has discovered, that would have to be very clearly from the commission. I do not know the ins and outs and how we distinguish that, but we will have to distinguish that, because that is important. I understand that difficulty.
It is interesting that you say that I have come to my views with good reason. I come to my views through discussion, through talking to people and through hearing what they say. Ten years ago I did not think the things I think now. I have changed my mind on so much, hugely. I have a quote up on the wall here from Muhammad Ali: “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life”. I am all about changing my mind. That is one of the reasons why staff really love working here, because I listen to what they say, we discuss and things change.
I do not blame you for being worried, in the sense that the image that is portrayed out there is one of me being someone who does not change her mind, but actually it is just not true. In fact, if you were to look through my tweets since whenever I opened the account in 2011, you will find that things have changed quite a lot. In fact, if you read our books, in our second book I say how we got certain things wrong in our first book and that we should not have done it this way; we should have done it that way. I am the first person to admit that I am wrong. I also admit when I do not know. I said, “I do not know” to one of the first questions you asked me. I am not as blinkered as perhaps my reputation would suggest.
Q32 Anne McLaughlin: A key part of your role as chair of the commission will be to realise a more defined role for the commission in public life. I just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on that more defined role at the moment. You do not have to have, but if you do, how would you intend to achieve that?
Katharine Birbalsingh: As I said, I do not want to be churning out report after report that no one reads. I want to do videos and podcasts, discussions, bringing in different people with different ideas, with the diversity that we spoke about earlier. I want to make this more accessible to ordinary people, so that it is not the case that no one has ever heard of the commission.
Q33 Anne McLaughlin: I am absolutely all for making everything more accessible to ordinary people. I have one more question, which goes back to a question that Philip Davies asked you earlier. You were talking about little Johnny and not letting him off the hook for having not done his homework, simply because of his home life. Okay, you did express sympathy for his home life, but his home life—I am just looking at this scenario—could be that there is very little heating when he goes home and there is very little food. His parents are absolutely stressed and it is a really difficult environment for him to do his homework in.
I am just really keen to know, in your teaching methods, what does “not letting him off” constitute? It can either constitute addressing the problems at home—I do not imagine the school can do that—or it can constitute your relationship with him. What do you do to Johnny to not let him off the hook and to make sure that he does his homework the next time?
Katharine Birbalsingh: We have a compulsory homework club after school, so if you are somebody who has not been completing your homework and has struggled to do so—it could be because of your home life; it could be for any number of reasons—you go to that compulsory homework club and you have to do your homework in there. It means that every day you get your homework done. That requires real organisation from the senior team and us really being on it, but that is what we do.
You tapped into a really interesting point there. It is important to have high standards for children, but it is also important that we scaffold them so that they can meet those high standards. We are really hot on the discipline here at Michaela. When they first join, we spend a whole week with the year 7s, just teaching them how to behave and helping them meet those standards. It is really important, as I said, to enable them to succeed. You do not just want to say, “This is how you need to be. Get up there and it is up to you, and if you fail you fail”. You have to support them so that they have a real chance of making it.
Q34 Kim Johnson: My questions are on levelling up and equality. My first question is about the fact that the commission used to sit under the Department for Education, and it has now moved to the Cabinet Office's Equality Hub. Do you think there are any benefits for the Social Mobility Commission moving to the Cabinet Office?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I do not really know. I do not know how government works. I know the DfE. I do not know; I could not tell you. You all have a better idea than I do of why it moved. When it comes to social mobility, education is hugely important. Perhaps it was the idea that it is not just about education; it is also about work. It is also about, as I said, early years and family and so on. Perhaps that is why. I do not know. It would not really matter to me. It could be in either place. I would still want to look at the issues as I have laid them out this afternoon.
Q35 Kim Johnson: You just talked about parents. We used to have really thriving Sure Start programmes in areas of deprivation. They were very much focused on levelling up and supporting parents and children from cradle to grave, almost. What do you think needs to happen to develop similar programmes to look at some of those issues that you have raised this afternoon?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is a really good point. One of the things I would love to do is really look at Sure Start in detail and see how it was focused, the culture and values around it—because culture and values are so important—where it succeeded, where it failed and in what ways. I do not know. It would be really interesting to see that, and then we can build from there. I am really looking forward to that in particular. I have a particular interest in that.
Q36 Kim Johnson: We have heard an awful lot about levelling up in the last couple of months. I would be interested to know what it means to you. What is levelling up, and how you will use your position to progress levelling up across the country?
Katharine Birbalsingh: It is what I said earlier. We still need to be looking at schools, the inner cities and so on, but it is good to be looking at different geographical locations as well. I take the idea of levelling up to mean concentrating on some of those geographical locations, looking at the socioeconomic disparities that exist there, and trying to figure out how you make it so that those communities have more of a chance.
As I said, it is all very well trying to open opportunities in terms of getting into the workplace, but if there is not much work available, that is a problem. That is something that I would want to look at. I do not know very much about it, but it is something that I would want to look at. The stuff that I said with regard to how children can improve nationally, whatever your background, applies. There are parents all over the country who would benefit from knowledge of all sorts. I gave the phone as an example. Schools across the country would benefit from, for instance, higher standards when it comes to behaviour. That is just one example.
That is what I take levelling up to mean. I am sure the Government probably mean something else, but that is how I interpret it.
Q37 Kim Johnson: How do you think that 11 years of austerity has impacted the educational attainment of children during the last 11 years, because of the under-resourcing of schools right across the country?
Katharine Birbalsingh: I will never say no to more money. More money is always very nice, but I would also say that what is important is the power of ideas and how much you can change by changing ideas, by changing culture and by looking at the values of any institution. More money is always nice—I am not denying that—but if all we do is concentrate on wanting more money, we miss out on the impact that culture has and that ideas have.
The ideas that we have managed to embed here in Michaela are excellent. I would like to talk about them more widely. I would like to talk more widely about the ideas that Alun has spoken to me about with regard to his college and what he does there. That does not mean that money does not matter. It does. As I say, I will never say no to it, but we must not allow our desire for more money to distract us from the power of ideas and the power of culture.
Q38 Kim Johnson: Do you think that more needs to be done in terms of levelling up other than geography, particularly looking at people with protected characteristics?
Katharine Birbalsingh: Yes. I do not want to forget about them. I like the fact that we are looking at the north, but I know, from having worked in inner London all my life, that all children across the country need adults in their lives who embrace the idea of authority. I would not be just looking to think, “We put that here and not over here”. It is everywhere. All children will benefit from the teacher at the front of the classroom. All children will benefit from teacher-led learning, great discipline and so on. I just come back to the same thing that I have been saying.
Kids are kids, and too often we look at them and we see a black kid or a white kid, or we see a poor kid or a rich kid. Yes, it is important to talk about those things, but children are children. They benefit from love and from us holding the line with them. That is what I want to try to encourage to happen across the country.
Q39 Kim Johnson: I have not been in a classroom for a long time, but it has always been my assumption that teachers did teach and lead from the front in schools. I would be interested to know, from your point of view, whether that is not a consistent approach across all schools.
Katharine Birbalsingh: You are very welcome to go and look at the primary schools. You will not find desks in rows. You will find them in groups, where the children are looking at each other. Even in secondary schools, every now and again you will find a teacher who has their desks in rows, but generally speaking you will find the desks grouped together where the children are looking at each other. I realise this may sound odd but I promise you this is how it is.
There is a small group of teachers out there—hundreds—who think, in a more traditional fashion, that the teacher should lead the learning and the desks are looking to the teacher, but that is more rare. It is becoming more and more popular these days, but it is more rare. That is a change that has happened over the last 50 to 60 years in the country, and one that I do not think has been for the better.
Q40 Chair: What would success look like for you, and how long do you think it would take to achieve it?
Katharine Birbalsingh: That is a really good question. I do not know how long. I cannot say. Success for me would be to have impact on our country’s culture. I talked about the four to five vegetables a day and so on. People could start talking differently about their roles as parents, as adults in children’s lives, as teachers and the idea of adults being an authority. It could be the case that everybody thought, “Do you know what? I am not going to give my phone to my toddler. I am going to get them reading a book instead”. I say everybody; I mean more people. How many more, I do not know, but it could become more embedded in our culture and I could see more items in the newspaper.
You were saying earlier, “What do you mean that race is everywhere?” and I was saying, “I mean that it is in the papers. You turn on Channel 4 and there is a programme about the school that tried to stop racism. They are dividing the white kids from the black kids”, and so on. What I mean is, instead of seeing that, I could see us all talking about adult authority and the importance of it, or at least debating it. I may be being too ambitious to think that we would all be talking about it and embracing it, but at least we could be debating it.
These are ideas that have lost their way a bit in 2021, and I would love for them to come back. I realise that is not a hard target. You are meant to have a smart target that you can tick off and say it has been done. That is the problem with culture. That is the problem with values. It is very difficult to quantify. That means many of us ignore culture because it is so difficult to quantify. Government after Government ignore these kinds of things because they cannot prove to the country, “Look, it is now better because we have achieved this and we have achieved that”. That is wrong. I am in this to make things better. It is hard for me to answer that exactly, but I will know it when I see it.
Q41 Chair: Will you stick with it? If you do not see success, will you, like the last chair, be off?
Katharine Birbalsingh: She went off quite quickly. I do not give up easily. It took me three and a half years to establish this school. Everybody was fighting me. I had people protesting with banners, insulting me. We had to hire a bouncer because of all the violence that might ensue at one of our parents’ meetings, just trying to tell parents about a possible school that we were setting up. I have had death threats coming my way. The idea of me not being resilient enough to stick at something—I have everything; I have a whole list of evidence of a lifetime of demonstrating resilience.
Chair: Can I take this opportunity to thank you very much for spending so much time with us this afternoon and for your very comprehensive answers? We will, of course, be providing a report to the Minister. Thank you very much.
Katharine Birbalsingh: Sorry to go on. I apologise to everybody, but hopefully I have persuaded a few of you of a few ideas in there.
Chair: Thank you very much.