Katharine Birbalsingh said she was forced to ban Muslims from worshiping after being racially abused by her teachers.
The school leader known as Britain’s strictest headteacher is facing a High Court challenge from a Muslim student over his prayer policy at Michaela Community School.
Commenting on the line for the first time, he warned that “multiculturalism can only succeed when each group makes sacrifices “for the sake of the whole.”
In a statement shared on Wednesday morning, Ms Birbalsingh said the school board had decided to halt the prayer rituals after some students began praying “against the backdrop of incidents involving violence, intimidation and appalling racial abuse towards our teachers”.
Michaela’s school is facing a legal challenge from an unnamed student over Ms Birbalsingh’s decision to impose the ban in March last year.
The high-performing state school in Brent, north-west London, has around 700 pupils, around half of whom are Muslim. It is known for its strict approach to discipline, including silence in corridors and a ban on smartphones.
Prayer policies ‘restored order’
Ms Birbalsingh said the decision to ban prayer rituals had “restored calm and order to the school”.
He said: “We have always made it clear to parents and students when they approach Michaela that we cannot be a prayer room due to our restrictive building and strict ethics code which does not allow children to wander around the school unsupervised.”
We believe that it is wrong to separate children based on religion and race, and that it is our duty to protect all our children and provide them with an environment free from bullying, intimidation and harassment.
“Multiculturalism can only succeed when we understand that each group must make sacrifices for the good of the whole.”
Last year, Michaela’s school was ranked first in the country in the “Progress 8” category, which measures how well a secondary school has helped pupils improve since primary school.
To achieve results, Ms Birbalsingh said, school “must be a place where children all share and buy into something bigger than themselves – our country.”
Students used the playground to pray
The High Court hearing was told that around 30 students began praying in the school’s “wet” and “dirty” garden in March last year, using blazers to kneel because they were not allowed to bring prayer mats.
The school had been targeted on social media with “threats of violence”, harassment, “false” claims about Islamophobia and a “bomb hoax”, but the situation had since “calmed down”, the court heard.
A judge was told the student told him the school’s stance on prayer was “the kind of discrimination that leaves religious minorities feeling alienated from society”.
His lawyers argue that the ban on prayer “uniquely” affects the Muslim faith over other religions because of its ritualized nature and rules surrounding prayer.
Katharine Birbalsingh’s full statement:
We are in court to defend Michaela’s culture and ethos and the decisions governors have made to maintain a successful and stable learning environment in which children of all races and religions can thrive. We want our multicultural and multifaith community to thrive. Ours is a happy and respectful secular school where every race, creed and group understands sacrifice for the good of the whole. We are one big Michaela family.
Michaela is rated Outstanding by Ofsted and has a unique culture that produces young people of outstanding character. Our students achieve excellent exam grades, including the highest progress ever made at GCSE level at a state-funded school, helping them gain places at some of the world’s best universities. We are immensely 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 share something that they all share and embrace something greater than themselves: our country.
We have many Muslim students. Their positive experiences helped increase the number of Muslim students at the school by 50 percent. My grandmother was Muslim. However, the Board of Directors had to decide to stop the prayer rituals when some students started to pray, in an environment where there were incidents such as violence, intimidation and horrific racist harassment against our teachers.
Our decision brought peace and order to the school. We have always made it clear to parents and students when they approach Michaela that we cannot be a prayer room due to our restrictive building and strict policies that do not allow children to wander around the school unsupervised.
In Michaela, people of all religions make sacrifices so that we can maintain a safe secular society. Some Jehovah’s Witness families opposed the inclusion of Macbeth as a GCSE text. Some Christian families have asked us not to hold our GCSE revision sessions on Sundays. Some Hindu families objected to their dinner plates touching eggs. Our Muslim families also registered to the school, knowing that we did not have a mosque. We all eat vegetarian meals so that we can all break bread together at lunch, where children do not discriminate based on race or religion. We all make sacrifices so that we can live in harmony.
We believe that it is wrong to separate children based on religion and race, and that it is our duty to protect all our children and provide them with an environment free from bullying, intimidation and harassment.
Multiculturalism can only be successful when we understand that each group must make sacrifices for the good of the whole. We allow our children all freedoms as long as these freedoms do not threaten the happiness and success of the entire school community. Our children are British, whatever their origins. As a school, we celebrate what we have in common to ensure the success of the extraordinary diversity of cultures we have under our roof.
I will never discriminate children based on their race or religion.