Britain’s strictest headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh has spoken about the bomb threats, attempted break-ins and racist abuse her teachers and school faced following a backlash after prayers were banned at Michaela Community School.
She told Patrick Christys how she noticed an increase in some pupils ‘intimidating’ others into following the stricter practices of Islam and confirmed she would take her case to the Court of Appeal should she lose in the High Court.
Speaking to GB News Ms Birbalsingh said:
“Our Muslim families, they're very happy. They understand. They’d prefer a prayer room, obviously. But people weigh up when they're choosing a school. Do we want this, do we want that?
“You don't ever like everything in school, but you choose it because most of what they're offering is what you want.
“But we've always said they could pray in the yard if they wanted to, and for eight years they never did. Then last year during the Ramadan time, a few children decided to pray. And that then grew over days; more and more children were, which is fine, that's not a problem.
“And the reason why that's not a problem, and the prayer rooms are, is because of our strict ethos and our silent corridors and our family lunch, which you'll see is a very specific thing. The children all eat together like family, they have set roles around the dinner table. We all eat vegetarian food, for instance.
“When last year they started praying, there was more segregation happening because they were crowding around that area.
“At lunchtime, we very much socialise the children. So if there's a child who is being left out, we bring them into the fold. We make sure that the kids are in mixed groups where there aren’t enclaves being created. And that's something that as a multicultural society and country and school, I think we need to think about.
“A campaign started online, which was demanding prayer rooms – or a prayer room.
“I understand this was people from the outside. Certainly all the people who were stirring it up, were from the outside - not pupils here, or parents.
“Thousands were involved in the petition. Now, this never made it to the main press and we were very grateful for that because we were very worried because we were getting all kinds of death threats. We had we had a bomb scare; the police had to come and search the school for bombs.
“One of my black teachers was so badly racially abused, she was called the N word and the C word and compared to a monkey and all kinds of horrible things.
“This is all online and emails were being sent to the school where we got death threats and the bomb threat and so on.
“You can imagine that everyone was terrified. One of my staff had an attempted break in at her flat. One of my staff had a brick through her window. We had bottles thrown into the yard and all because of the prayer situation, so it was horrible.
“My staff were terrified. That member of staff who was being attacked, she had to take lifts in the school, so did I because we were worried about our safety.
“That was the kind of aggression that was coming from outside. But the inside of the school changed too. The culture of the school changed.
“During Ramadan, there's a variety of different Muslim children. Some of them want to fast some of them do not want to fast. Some of them were praying, some of them were not praying. We have Muslim children who wear the hijab, some of them do not.
“What we found was that one of the children, one of the girls started wearing a hijab. Some of the Muslims who were more devout as it were, were standing by the break hall food table and intimidating Muslims who wanted to eat into not eating or intimidating them into praying.
“One girl dropped out of the choir because music is haram. She'd been in the choir for ages before that, so who is going to protect those Muslim children who do not want to do those things? Who's going to protect the staff who are being racially abused or all of the school community who are getting bomb threats and death threats?
“That's my job as headmistress. It's also the case that the governors are in charge. So the governors took the sensible decision, in my opinion, to ban prayer.
"Our school, we behave very much as a collective. We do not separate children according to race and religion.
“Our normal, happy, joyful school returned: That was the other thing that was interesting. Once prayer stopped, everything returned to normal - instantly.
“All kinds of people have objected to us in the past. They don't like what we do. And I've had to fight all of them. I'm continuing to fight to preserve what we are because I believe in what we are here and so do the vast majority of our families and children.
“The thing is, people underestimate the importance of schools. They don't realize that schools socialise children and create the future adults of the country. They are the future to any country.
“And what we do here, we try and do as best we can, to make sure that our multicultural environment works and that the children are able to be friends across racial divides, across religious divides,
We're just friends together and we're one big happy Michaela family.
“We all need to recognise that all of us need to make sacrifices for the betterment of the whole so that we can all get on and that schools play such an important part of this.
“It they say we need to open up school and have prayer rooms and that we need to abandon our ethos, we would obviously go to the Court of Appeal, if that happened.
“I've always fought for what we are. We've always had people trying to undermine us and stop us from doing what we're doing for a whole variety of different reasons. I've always fought back because I believe in what we're doing.
“I also believe in our children and our families, and our families will be devastated if we had to lose the school.
Ms Birbalsingh described the impact of the petition as “awful” adding" “I’m having to support staff right now.
“They come and see me very frightened. They're really scared.
“Gosh, last year, my goodness. I mean that that was the worst.
“It's not right that a head teacher, or teachers, should be put under that kind of stress because they're just trying to do their jobs. They love the children. They dedicate so much to the children and to what we do.
“I feel for my teachers. They’re 22, 23 years old.”
Speaking about the bomb threat, she said:
“We got this email and we caled the police and then the police came and did a search. This was very early in the morning, and so the children could come in and we were okay. But yeah, it's scary.
“I'm just trying to run my school. That's all I want to do is run our school.
“My thing is always to hold the line and that you got to know what you believe and that you’ve got to fight for it.
“But I do understand you know, the pressures that heads are under, and that teachers are under that it can be very difficult to do that.
“I think all of us should give thought to how multiculturalism can work. What I find is that the left says, ‘Wow, multiculturalism, everybody's free to do whatever you want isn't it great,’ The right say ‘Multiculturalism’s failed. There's nothing we can do about it.’
“And I'm saying, ‘Look, we're all in this together."
