Katharine Birbalsingh and France’s own secularism battle

The row that has erupted at Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela school in north London highlights the difference in how Britain and France confront Islamic conservatism in education and wider society.

Birbalsingh has displayed courage in imposing a blanket ban on all ritual prayer in the school, but nonetheless in France such displays of religiosity have been outlawed for more than a century.

Initially this was to curb the influence of the Catholic church, but in recent decades it has been Islam attempting to undermine the secularism of French schools. It began in the autumn of 1989 when three teenage girls arrived at their school in a suburb of northern Paris wearing headscarves. They were sent home. The furore that followed made global headlines, particularly in the West, still disorientated by the more radical Islam that had emerged from the Iranian Revolution a decade earlier.

In excluding the three girls from his school in Creil, the headmaster, Ernest Chenieres, told reporters that ‘patience has its limits…I will not permit these three young girls to continue to disrupt this school’.