by Katharine Birbalsingh has said she was forced to ban Muslim prayers after teachers faced racial harassment.
The school’s headteacher, known as Britain’s strictest headteacher, is facing a High Court appeal from a Muslim pupil over the prayer policy at Michaela Community School.
Commenting on the dispute for the first time, he warned that “multiculturalism can only succeed” when each group makes sacrifices “for the good of the whole.”
In a statement shared Wednesday morning, Birbalsingh said the school’s governing body decided to stop prayer rituals when some students initiated them “against a backdrop of events that included violence, intimidation and horrific racial harassment towards our teachers.”
Michaela School is facing a legal challenge from a pupil, who cannot be named, over Ms Birbalsingh’s decision to introduce the ban in March last year.
The high-performing public school in Brent, north-west London, has around 700 pupils, about half of whom are Muslim. He is known for his strict disciplinary approach, including silence in the hallways and a ban on smartphones.
Prayer policies ‘restored order’
Birbalsingh said the decision to ban prayer rituals “brought calm and order back to the school.”
She said: “We have always been clear to parents and pupils that when they ask Michaela that due to our restrictive building combined with our strict ethos which does not allow children to wander around the school unsupervised, we cannot have a prayer room “.
He added: “We believe that it is wrong to separate children based on their religion or race, and that it is our duty to protect all our children and provide them with an environment free from harassment, intimidation or bullying.
“Multiculturalism can only be successful when we understand that each group must make sacrifices for the good of the whole.”
Michaela School ranked first in the country last year in “Progress 8,” a measure of how much a high school has helped students improve since elementary school.
Birbalsingh said that to achieve its results, the school “must be a place where children buy into something that they all share and that is bigger than themselves: our country.”
Students used the playground to pray
Around 30 pupils began praying in the school’s “wet” and “dirty” courtyard in March last year, wearing kneeling jackets as they were not allowed to bring prayer mats, a High Court hearing was told. .
The court heard that the school was attacked on social media with “threats of violence”, abuse, “false” accusations of Islamophobia and a “bomb hoax” but that the situation had since “calmed down”.
The student said the school’s stance on prayer was “the kind of discrimination that makes religious minorities feel alienated from society,” a judge was told.
Their lawyers claim the prayer ban “exclusively” affects the Muslim faith more than other religions due to its ritualized nature and rules around prayer.
Katharine Birbalsingh’s full statement:
We are in court to defend the culture and spirit of Michaela and the decisions that governors have made to maintain a successful and stable learning environment where children of all races and religions can thrive. We want our multicultural and multi-religious community to flourish. Ours is a happy and respectful secular school where every race, faith and group understands self-sacrifice for the good of the whole. We are a big family Michaela.
Michaela is rated Outstanding by Ofsted and has a unique culture that produces young people of exceptional character. Our pupils achieve excellent exam grades, including the highest progress ever recorded at GCSE level in a state-funded school, helping them gain places at some of the world’s best universities. We are extremely proud of what we do to transform the lives of young people, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds. To achieve all this, our school must be a place where children of all races and religions buy into something they all share and that is bigger than themselves: our country.
We have a large number of Muslim students. Their positive experiences have helped increase the number of Muslim students at the school by 50 percent. My own grandmother was Muslim. But the Governing Body had to make the decision to suspend prayer rituals when some students started them, against a backdrop of events that included violence, intimidation and terrible racial harassment against our teachers.
Our decision restored calm and order to the school. We have always been clear with parents and students when requesting Michaela that due to our restrictive building combined with our strict ethos that does not allow children to wander around the school unsupervised, we cannot have a prayer room.
At Michaela, people of all faiths make sacrifices so we can maintain a safe secular community. Some Jehovah’s Witness families have opposed Macbeth as the established GCSE text. Some Christian families have asked that we not hold our GCSE revision sessions on Sundays. Some Hindu families have objected to dishes touching eggs. And our Muslim families have signed up for school knowing that we don’t have a prayer room. We all eat vegetarian food so we can break bread together at lunch, where the children are not divided by race or religion. We all make our sacrifices to be able to live in harmony.
We believe that it is wrong to separate children based on their religion or race, and that it is our duty to protect all of our children and provide them with an environment free from harassment, intimidation and bullying.
Multiculturalism can only be successful when we understand that each group must make sacrifices for the good of the whole. We allow our children freedoms of all kinds, as long as those freedoms do not threaten the happiness and success of the entire school community. Our children, whatever their origin, are British. As a school, we celebrate what we have in common so that the extraordinary diversity of cultures we have under our roof can succeed.
I will never separate children according to race and religion.
