The newly appointed head of the government’s Social Mobility Commission has suggested schools could recover learning loss from the pandemic “very quickly” if behaviour was excellent across the board.
Speaking at a pre-appointment hearing with the Women and Equalities Committee, free school head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh also told MPs that closing the digital divide would not lead to disadvantaged pupils accessing a better education.
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Ms Birbalsingh, headteacher at Michaela Community School in north London, which has been described as Britain’s strictest school, said: “The reason why people shy away from having high expectations is that teachers don’t like giving detentions.
“They don’t like saying you know ‘Right your homework isn’t done, it’s got to get done ra ra ra,’ because it seems a bit mean. And nobody likes being mean.
“And so the number one thing I have is a thing at Michaela is I have to really support and encourage my staff at holding the line and making sure that they hand out those detentions when the homework isn’t done.”
She added that “well-intentioned people” could see that “little Johnny” was from a disadvantaged background and assume he could not be expected to do extra homework.
“And one of the reasons why people can be very critical of me is that they say, ‘Well, Miss Trunchbull over there is insisting on little Johnny bringing in that homework when she should be more compassionate and allow him off the homework because he comes from a difficult situation at home.’”
“I promise you, if we were to have excellent behaviour across all of our schools suddenly if we could just wave a magic wand and go bam, and it happened, we would all catch up on the losses from the pandemic very quickly.”
Ms Birbalsingh also told the hearing that the country had been “kidding” itself over the effectiveness of learning over Zoom and that improving the digital divide would not mean poorer pupils accessed better education.
“There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding in the country which is that the assumption is that the more digital access you have as a family the better off you are in terms of accessing education, and I don’t think that’s true,” she said.
“I think there’s a lot more to accessing education and I don’t think the solution is providing more laptops for families.
“I think we were all sort of kidding ourselves that there were these extraordinary zoom lessons going on and that children could learn via these laptops - there was some learning going on I’m not going to knock all of it but the fact is that there is nothing better for a child than being in a good classroom with a good teacher.
“On Zoom you’re unable to test them, you can’t quiz them regularly to test whether or not they’ve committed any of this to memory,” she added.
“Children learn best when the adult is sort of standing over them saying ‘Come on you’ve got to do this you’ve got to do this now, you’ve got 15 minutes, come on,’ and at the end you say ‘well done’ when they’ve done it and when they don’t, you say ‘no no no that’s not good enough’”.
