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Friday, March 29, 2024

Katharine Birbalsingh: Head teacher quits as social mobility adviser

Katharine BirbalsinghGetty Images

The government’s social mobility adviser has quit, saying she was doing “more harm than good” in the role.

Katharine Birbalsingh, who has been dubbed Britain’s strictest head teacher, has attracted controversy since being appointed in November 2021.

She said her “propensity to voice opinions that are considered controversial” was putting the commission “in jeopardy”.

She added she had become increasing cautious about what she said.

“Instead of going out there to bat for the team and celebrate our achievements, I am becoming a politician,” she wrote in Schools Week magazine.

“And I can’t bear the idea of ever being a politician. It just isn’t who I am or a skillset I wish to develop,” she added.

The government said Alun Francis, the principal of Oldham College, would replace Ms Birbalsingh on an interim basis.

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Ms Birbalsingh set up Michaela Community School in London, which has been described as the strictest school in Britain, in 2014.

She was appointed chair of the government’s social mobility commission, tasked with monitoring progress on improving life chances and devising policy ideas, by then Equalities Minister Liz Truss.

She first came to prominence in 2010 with an outspoken speech to Tory conference about the “broken” education system.

She came under fire last April for saying girls are less likely to choose physics A-level because it involves “hard maths” – later admitting her remarks had been “clunky”.

In her inaugural speech in her social mobility role last year, she said the debate on social mobility was too focused on “rags-to-riches” stories of people from poor backgrounds getting into top universities and elite professions.

Answering questions after the speech, she said: “The reality is that we have a variety of children with a variety of different talents.”

In her Schools Week article, Ms Birbalsingh said the remarks had been misconstrued in the press, who “insisted that I personally believe ‘working class people should stay in their lane'”.

“Other interesting points were then lost amid the outrage,” she added.

In a letter accepting her resignation, equalities minister Kemi Badenoch praised her “fresh approach to social mobility”, which had moved away from the idea “that it should just be about the ‘long’ upward mobility from the bottom to the top”.

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