Britain’s “strictest headteacher” has said there will be despair among many parents and children at her school if a prayer ban is overturned, and pledged that she will not divide children according to race or religion.
Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School in Wembley told the Evening Standard that she and her teachers were “nervous but hopeful” about the outcome of a legal challenge to the school’s ban on prayer rituals.
The ban was brought in against a backdrop of violence, intimidation and racial harassment of teachers in March last year, Ms Birbalsingh said, and it restored calm and order. But a pupil has launched a High Court challenge to the ban, which she claims is discriminatory.
Ms Birbalsingh said the school went to great lengths to ensure children from all backgrounds mix, but allowing children to separate at lunchtime to pray would impact the ethos of the school.
Speaking on Times Radio on Monday she said: “When you have a multi-cultural community you need to actively encourage the children to cross those racial and religious divides… I do not want to divide children according to race and religion. And because of our building… because of our ethos, I would necessarily have to divide them. I would have to send all the Muslim kids upstairs and all the non-Muslim kids downstairs. I don’t want that.”
In a separate interview on Unherd.com she said: “If it’s the case that after lunch the non-Muslim kids are sent outside and the Muslim kids are all sent upstairs to run around the corridors to go into random classrooms to pray, it would mean total chaos.”
Asked by the Standard whether many people, including parents and pupils at the school, would feel despair if the school lost the case, she agreed. Ms Birbalsingh confirmed that it remained open as normal and morale was still happy, adding: “As soon as we banned prayer rituals last March, things returned to normal, and have remained normal ever since.”
