This week, Katharine Birbalsingh (arguably the most controversial head teacher in the country) has come under further scrutiny for banning prayer rituals at her school, Michaela Community School, in north-west London.
The details of the ban were revealed in a two-day hearing in the High Court – the case was brought by a pupil who has deemed it discriminatory and is seeking to have it overturned. Birbalsingh has said she had to introduce the ban after a number of pupils began praying in the playground, against what she described as a backdrop of “violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment of some of our teachers”.
As a Muslim secondary school teacher, I am alarmed that a school would seek to curb the rights of students and staff this way. And yet, what is ostensibly more worrying is the language that Birbalsingh has publicly used to defend it.
Posting on social media on Wednesday, Birbalsingh has referred to her role as “defending the culture and ethos of Michaela” and spoke of the school as a place in which “children of all races and religions buy into something bigger than themselves: our country”. To me this creates the unspoken assumption that certain things are acceptably British and certain things must be sacrificed in the name of patriotism.
Birbalsingh’s comments do not appear in a vacuum. They are part of a long-held and deliberate political agenda to use schooling as a vehicle through which to push a myopic ideal of traditional Britishness that forces those of us on the outside to either acquiesce or be ostracised as not true Brits.
Take the government-mandated entrenching of “British values” in the classroom – which, ironically, means we must teach about the freedom of expression and belief whilst apparently retaining the power to curb our student’s own freedoms through prayer bans. Or the prioritisation of British writers in the GCSE English Literature curriculm – as though the only voices of worth are those hailing from these isles.
Many would argue that the prayer ban hits Muslim students hardest. Whilst the classroom forms the battleground for a number of culture wars, for me it is often Muslimness that the state saves its toughest assaults for. For example, the way in which the Prevent programme criminalises Muslim children for expressions of faith, to the the recent intelligence-gathering by the Metropolitan Police in London schools in response of the Israel-Gaza war.
Birbalsingh claims that in the name of cohesive multiculturalism, we must all sacrifice something so that we can all belong. But as a British Muslim, all this tells me is that Britishness is so fickle and paranoid that it cannot handle any notion of true diversity.
Not just as educators, but as a society at large, we must consider the message we are sending to the next generation about what Britishness really is. If a top performing school run by an establishment figure can defend banning Muslim prayers in the name of multiculturalism then what are we saying to young British Muslims except that Muslimness is by default incompatible with Britishness? After all, the type of multiculturalism that accepts a brown face but demands we shed the fundamentals of our faith does nothing but tick boxes and fill quotas. It does nothing for us.
Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London
