Katharine Birbalsingh
Katharine Moana Birbalsingh  (born 16 September 1973) is a British teacher and education reform advocate who is the founder and head teacher of Michaela Community School, a free school established in 2014 in Wembley Park, London. Politically, she identifies as a  small-c conservative. The daughter of an Indo-Guyanese academic, Birbalsingh was born in New Zealand and raised in Canada until she was 15 when her father began lecturing at the University of Warwick. She cultivated an interest in education when reading French and philosophy at New College, Oxford and, after graduating, went into teaching at state schools in south London. She began hosting a blog, To Miss with Love, in 2007 under the moniker Miss Snuffy and later offered her support to the education policies of the Conservative Party and the reforms made by Michael Gove during his tenure as Education Secretary. Birbalsingh is the author of two books, Singleholic (2009) and To Miss with Love (2011), and editor of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (2016) and Michaela: The Power of Culture (2020). She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 Birthday Honours. In October 2021, Birbalsingh was appointed chair of the Social Mobility Commission. Education and early life
Birbalsingh was born in 1973 in Auckland, New Zealand, the elder of two daughters of Frank Birbalsingh, an academic of Indo-Guyanese origin, and his wife, Norma, a nurse from Jamaica. Birbalsingh grew up mostly in Toronto and was educated at Victoria Park Collegiate Institute, with brief periods in Nigeria and France, She graduated from the University of Oxford after reading French and philosophy at New College, Oxford. At university she was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and read Living Marxism. Career

While at Oxford, Birbalsingh had visited inner-city schools as part of a scheme the university runs to encourage state-school pupils to apply, and after graduation she decided to teach in state schools herself. From 2007 she wrote an anonymous blog, To Miss With Love, in which—as Miss Snuffy—she described her experiences teaching at an inner-city secondary school. In 2010 she was the assistant head of Dunraven School, Streatham, south London, and that year she joined St Michael and All Angels Academy in Camberwell, also south London, as vice-principal. In 2014, she established Michaela Community School, a free school in Wembley Park, London. Birbalsingh is a supporter of the traditional teaching methods described in E. D. Hirsch's The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1999). She writes that the book "opened [her] eyes" to what was wrong in schools, and argues that education should be about teaching children knowledge, not learning skills. Responding to the removal of Michael Gove as education secretary in 2014—Gove was also a supporter of Hirsch—she said it was a tragedy that his work would not be completed. Conservative Party conference

Birbalsingh came to national prominence in October 2010 after criticising the British education system at that year's Conservative Party conference, and speaking in support of the party's education policies. Referring to a "culture of excuses, of low standards ... a sea of bureaucracy ... [and] the chaos of our classrooms", Birbalsingh told the conference: "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, because it keeps poor children poor." Following this, she says she became the target of racist and sexist abuse on social media. After the speech Birbalsingh was asked not to attend the school at which she taught while the governors "discuss[ed] her position". She subsequently resigned "after being asked to comply with conditions that she did not feel able to comply with", according to The Sunday Telegraph. The school, St Michael and All Angels in Camberwell, London, was closed shortly thereafter and reopened with new staff and a new name. In February 2019, Alan Johnson, a former Labour minister of education, read his history of the school from its foundation in the 1880s to its closure in 2011 on BBC Radio 4. 