Confidence Trick

I was watching a documentary about Ian Paisley the other evening (as you do.) Among those interviewed were several men who had fallen completely under Paisley's spell. It was hard, from this distance in time and not having lived in Northern Ireland, to understand what it was about Paisley that captivated people, producing in them a fervour that did not seem a usual part of their personality. 

But then one of the men gave me a clue: "He was so full of confidence", he said. 

I know that trick. Boris Johnson had it once, and it worked for him for ages.  More recently, having decided to go to a free talk at the MCC in Budapest, I was disappointed to discover that the same was true of Katherine Birbalsingh. 

Ms Birbalsingh has made a big name for herself as an educator. Her school has adopted the radical approach of being old-fashioned. She is considered to be - or at least touts herself as - a huge success. Her school supposedly helps many many students from less-well-off families achieve stunning exam results, thanks to a no-tolerance policy on everything except hard work.

I wanted all this to be true, but alarm bells started ringing the minute Ms Birbalsingh began to talk. Perhaps, having stepped on stage a full hour after she was scheduled to begin, her decision to continue with her pre-prepared opening joke didn't help - the joke was about how lucky it was that we, her listeners, were on time, as, had we been late, she would have had to give us all detentions. 

After a brief pause for laughter that did not come, Birbalsingh switched on a Power Point presentation. It might have been devised for five-year-olds. The graphic that stands out in my memory was of a shoal of red fish going in one direction and one yellow fish, (Birbalsingh), swimming against the tide. 

She seemed unaware that this sort of stuff was pitching the message rather low, chatting on blithely, sprinkling her observations with reminders that she is known as the strictest headmistress in Britain. 

Following a brief description of her career so far (a description that left out, I later discovered, quite a lot), Birbalsingh sketched out her educational ideas. They seemed to me somewhat crude. Be strict, tolerate no difficult behaviour and come down like a ton of bricks at the first sign of rule infringement. Think Rudy Giuliani and graffiti and apply that policy to young people - zero tolerance of anything unrobotic in a student's behaviour is apparently the secret to a successful school. The idea that a child might have an off day and play up because something in their life has gone horribly wrong and they are crying for help appears not to be entertained at this educational establishment. And the lack of respect expressed for most of the pupils' parents was striking to say the least. 

The central message of the talk it seemed to me was that Birbalsingh - uniquely among educators in Britain and possibly even the world - recognises that all other educators are too soft and that the students of today are in danger from low standards and woke ideas. There is some truth in the latter proposition, but one could have been excused for coming away from Birbalsingh's talk with the idea that the UK education system, apart from her school, is one huge leftist playpen, with her creation, Michaela School, just about the only successful state school left in Britain - and that there is only one prescription, the Birbalsingh approach, that will heal all educational problems. 

When Birbalsingh began explaining her management style, things got weird. Her first rule, she said, is to never write anything down (which might explain why her speech lacked depth and structure - it was just a riff off the top of her head, something that other highly confident soul, Boris Johnson, is also in the habit of). So much does Birbalsingh object to paperwork that she expressed somewhat disgruntled surprise at the fact that the Hungarian authorities had asked her to fill in some forms before visiting their country. She suggested, in possibly not the most diplomatic moment of her life, that this request to put pen to paper was probably due to the fact that Hungary used to be Communist. 

Mind you, Birbalsingh is not against all writing; apparently she is very keen on writing emails. In fact, she builds her team's sense of community by writing them all emails on a variety subjects throughout the course of every day.  For instance, she explained, just that morning she had seen a small piece of news about littering somewhere in England and had sent it immediately to all her staff, observing that she thought the item was proof that civilisation really is on the brink of collapse. One of her staff members had replied that at a school he had worked at earlier there had been dreadful problems with rubbish. Perhaps this is a worthwhile use of their time and hers. 

When Ms Birbalsingh had finished singing her own praises and offending her hosts, questions were permitted. One member of the audience asked about the drop-out rate at her school. "There is none", she asserted. Can this be true? Surely every school has some students who don't find it suits them - but no, she insisted that that doesn't happen at all at Michaela. 

"What about teachers", came another query, "do you find it easy to recruit teachers, given they have, as you say, all been brainwashed by the system in which they have trained?" Again, apparently no clouds at all on the horizon, apart from a shortage of art teachers. They, apparently are all, you know, like, woo woo. 

At this point, my companion, a teacher, showed me her telephone screen. She had searched vacancies for teachers at Michaela. Surprisingly, teachers were being sought in every subject area at Ms Birbalsingh's school. As it turns out, there are almost always numerous vacancies for teachers there, which is not at all a good sign.

Perhaps the Birbalsingh school is as astonishingly good as its headmistress asserts, perhaps she is as brilliant as she believes herself to be. However, I do remember the bouncy labrador phase of Boris Johnson and how hard it was to see beyond the dazzling ray of his immense self-regard. Another figure also kept straying into my thoughts, also a most impressive self-promoter, more colourfully dressed than Birbalsingh but equally convinced of her own rightness, equally persuasive. Camila Batmanghelidjh was, I think, that person's name.