Well, ‘sent home’ actually, which is some clever pseudo-legal way of avoiding immediate suspension while the (Executive) Head Teacher and Governing Body of the St Michael and All Angels Academy in Camberwell decide how to deal with having a Conservative-supporting deputy headteacher in their midst.It must be awful for them.
In a highly-unionised, Labour-dominated, Socialist-obsessed profession, having a repentant former-Marxist in the staffroom must be like marking with the enemy.
Or formulating schemes of work with a traitor.
Or discussing continuing professional development with a socio-political retard.
Miss Snuffy, aka Katharine Birbalsingh, an Oxford graduate and teacher of French, ‘came out’ at the Conservative Party conference two days ago, where she disclosed: “I have come here today to expose some of the truths about the education system. My experience of teaching for over a decade in five different schools has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the system is broken, as it keeps poor children poor.”
She got a standing ovation from the conference.
But has been stamped under foot in her school.
La Leçon aujourd’hui, mes enfants, is that telling la vérité will get you into a whole load of merde. You will be humiliated (look it up) and ostracised (don’t bother); your professional reputation will be ruined and you might even be sacked.
Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning.
What a burden it is.
Ms Birbalsingh is now facing potential disciplinary action and even dismissal for daring to speak out about the shambolic state of state education. She has been made to ‘work from home’ after her (executive) headteacher, governors and sponsors consider whether or not she has brought her school into disrepute.
Pray, how does a deputy headteacher work from home?
She’s only been in her position for three weeks.
But her truth-telling has caused ‘negative publicity’, you see, by talking of ‘leftist ideology’ and a ‘broken system’.
And so she had to go.
Even though she was not criticising her colleagues, her employer, her school or her pupils at all, but the system which binds them.
One can scarcely think of little else that the school could have done to establish the truth of every word Ms Birbalsingh spoke. To send her home is an outrageous reaction, and by it they bring themselves into disrepute.
Ms Birbalsingh loves her school, she loves children and she loves education – enough, it seems, to die for it. All she wanted to do was to highlight the barriers that stand in the way of improving education in Britain.
But God forbid a that a teacher might exercise freedom of speech.
Unless that speech is Marxist, leftist and statist.
How does a deputy headteacher who has blown the whistle on a sclerotic culture of excuses, criticised low standards, derided arbitrary targets and league tables, disparaged political correctness and poured scorn over the pervasive ‘leftist ideology’ in state education ever again command the respect of a staffroom populated with pathological Socialists?
The unenlightened pedagogues will say there is no redemption: the heretic must burn.
But His Grace will show them a better way.
They must respect the foundational liberties of the nation; understand the Christian settlement upon which state education is based; appreciate that Plato’s academy curriculum is founded upon the primacy of epistemology; and open their minds to challenge the limitations of their own myopic worldview.
If they cannot do this, then they forfeit the right to participate in the development of the minds, bodies and spirits of the children to which their professed vocation has drawn them to dedicate their lives.
Those educators who spit on Katharine Birbalsingh are those who inflict perpetual harm upon the nation’s most vulnerable.
Those who despise and reject her are the very ones who dedicate their lives to keeping the poor children poor.
Perhaps this is too much truth for St Michael and All Angels Academy.
And so Ms Birbalsingh sits ‘working from home’, while her governing body considers whether or not her Toryism is as perverse as theft, cheating in exams or allegations of paedophilia. Certainly, by sending her home, they equate speaking at a Conservative Party conference with gross professional misconduct.
The (Executive) Headteacher you can perhaps forgive: she too is a victim.
The Governing Body you must humour: they are, by definition, amateur.
But the sponsors are the Church of England.
And His Grace will be having words.
Very serious words indeed with any meddlesome priests who presume to sit in judgement in this case.
And if they dare to despise and reject Ms Birbalsingh simply for telling it like it is, His Grace will have such revenges on them all,
That all the world shall - he will do such things -
What they are, yet he knows not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!
You mess with Miss Snuffy; you mess with His Grace.
You have been warned.
