What Katharine Birbalsingh gets wrong about secularism

Katharine Birbalsingh is back in the papers again. The head teacher at Michaela, a free school whose outstanding academic record and ultra-strict behaviour policy have made it a culture-wars lightning rod, tells the Sunday Times that she and her staff have been getting death threats ever since her board of governors imposed a policy banning any form of prayer on school grounds. 

Until not all that long ago, the story runs, pupils were permitted to pray in the playground at break. This policy of tolerance worked fine for a bit, but only because none of the kids wanted to. It was a purely theoretical rule. But last March, a girl knelt on her blazer to pray during break time, and 30 other pupils joined her. Miss Birbalsingh says that at once, ‘the culture’ of the school changed. ‘We saw that Muslim kids who did not want to fast in Ramadan, did not want to pray or wear a hijab, were then intimidated into doing so.