What I learned from my meeting with the Education Secretary

Dear Secretary of State, thank you for meeting me and one of my deputies on Monday. You will have noticed in our meeting how disappointed we were with your responses to the questions teachers have about the government’s proposals. I assure you, we are not alone in that feeling.

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As teachers, we often hear politicians say how much they care about education. One of two things follows: either they turn out to be that rare politician who is truly interested in schools; or they are that all too common politician who simply wants to appear that way. Our meeting confirmed that you are firmly in the latter category.

Politicians who truly want to raise standards for our most deprived communities would ordinarily be interested in hearing from the people who know best how to do it: teachers.

Take our own school, Michaela. Last year, pupils at Eton College (fees £60,000 per year) received 53 per cent grade 9s across all their GCSEs. Michaela (a non-selective state school in a converted office block in Wembley) achieved 52 per cent. Anyone who thinks that black and brown kids from the inner city are destined to be underachievers  are wrong. They should meet our children. And with the right values, the right leadership, the right school freedoms, we prove them wrong every time. One would have thought a secretary of state keen to spread aspiration across the country would want to ask how this is done. How can standards be raised everywhere? Yet when we spoke of our successes, you were not interested in finding out how we achieve what we do.

There are other schools which show that seemingly ordinary kids from seemingly ordinary homes are anything but ordinary when they are given the power of a great education. We asked you which of the schools you have visited do you believe to be models of excellence. You could not answer.

We asked you to explain why it is that academies were able to drive up standards. Since you are removing their freedoms, you clearly don’t believe those freedoms lead to success. So what does? You could not answer that either. We asked you to name any single school that you believed is raising its standards. You spoke for a long time but, again, couldn’t answer.

Academies tailor their curricula to the communities they serve and are only able to do this because they have the freedom to set them for themselves. You insisted that some schools were not meeting your ‘floor’ curriculum requirements. We asked you to name one school that does not offer a core curriculum to its pupils. You could not name a single one.

There are pressing problems in education that every headteacher is dealing with: provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities, absence, recruitment shortages and others. You are doing nothing to solve any of these.

You have said that you want to address recruitment. But you are making it harder for schools to hire new staff. There will be fewer maths teachers in our classrooms because of your butchery of the Advanced Maths Support Programme. You are removing schools’ ability to hire teachers without the mountains of bureaucracy that your state-sanctioned, centralised stamping requires.

You are passing a law that we must all follow a brand-new curriculum, before you have even told us what it is. Every teacher knows what this means: more money spent on new resources – such as textbooks – and thousands of man-hours ploughed into a fresh curriculum that hasn’t been finalised and might be changed. Time away from children means time away from raising standards. We tried to explain this, but to no avail.

I believe your lack of clarity and interest unfortunately stems from a deeper problem. It became apparent to me when we met that you do not appear to know your own bill.

When we asked you to explain how the recruitment of new teachers would function, you said that this detail was covered in the bill. When we read to you the relevant extracts from the bill, you said that it would be clarified elsewhere. But when we looked elsewhere, we didn’t find any answers to our questions.

When we asked you to explain how the changes to published admissions numbers would function, again you did not appear to understand. This rule change means that local councils can deliberately reduce the capacity at popular, good schools in order to force families towards less good schools which are undersubscribed. When we asked what you would say to a mother desperate for a place for her child in a successful school, who misses out because the capacity at these institutions has been deliberately reduced, you were unable to answer.

Your party has had 14 years in opposition to prepare for this. You were the shadow education secretary for three years ahead of the election. It should not be left to school leaders to point out the holes in this bill.

So why do all this? Why claim to love academies when you are in fact turning all academies into the equivalent of local authority schools? The reality is that your record in parliament reveals what you really think of academies, which is that you hate them. You repeatedly voted against academy reforms from 2010 to 2016. You claim to be a great believer in the high standards which academies have brought, but we saw you twist your face with disgust every time you said the word in our meeting, repeating that the worst schools ‘are, in fact, academies’.

You are pretending to like academies now that you are Education Secretary, because it is hard to openly oppose them in the way that you have done throughout your parliamentary career, in the face of such obvious success. You don’t want school leaders to have the freedom to innovate and do what is right for their children. You want the state to have control, which is not much of a surprise; I’ve repeatedly pointed out your Marxist leanings. You should stick to your convictions and admit that you do not believe academy freedoms are a good thing and that you believe central government is the answer. At least that would be honest.

You should have higher ambitions for our children. You should show more respect to our teachers. As I said at our meeting, take a few hours away from Whitehall and visit our school in Wembley so that you can see what I mean. Or you can stick by your Marxist beliefs and debate me on a public platform. Which is better for our children: school leaders who make the decisions for our schools, or you in central government?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Katharine Birbalsingh

Headmistress, Michaela Community School