‘Hope this is covered on the Robert Pesto show!’
Katherine Birbalsingh, the UK’s ‘strictest head teacher’ who is known for her uncompromising views on education, raised eyebrows again this week, claiming that children identify as pasta.
Taking to X, the head teacher of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, said:
“They also deny furries exist in the UK. Meanwhile, loads of teachers have them in their classrooms. Snow leopards and pasta too. Yes, that’s a child identifying as pasta. I haven’t made that up. Just like I didn’t make up the existence of furries. I don’t make stuff up.”
The tweet sparked disbelief and ridicule.
“Birbalsingh now insisting that “loads” of teachers have kids in classrooms identifying as pasta. Sounds like she’s blown as fusilli,” posted author Otto English.
“Hope this is covered on the Robert Pesto show,” someone replied.
“And you identify as a head teacher. Outrageous isn’t it?”
“Birbalsingh isn’t a head teacher – she’s an impasta, whose prepastarous tweets should be saved for pastaterity!” mocked Get A Grip.
Birbalsingh, who has close ties to the Conservative Party, Suella Braverman in particular, who became the Michaela School’s first chair of governors when it was established in 2014, is no stranger to controversy, criticism, and accusations of talking nonsense. She provoked a huge backlash in 2022, for saying that it is “natural” girls avoid physics A-level because “there’s a lot of hard maths.”
Birbalsingh, who was appointed chair of the Social Mobility Commission by the government in 2021, said that she did not mind that only 16 percent of A-level physics students are girls at the school where she is headteacher.
When she was asked to back up her claim that girls don’t like “hard maths,” she replied: “The research generally, people, they say that that’s just a natural thing. I mean I don’t know, I can’t say, I’m not an expert at that sort of thing, but that’s what they say.”
Political correspondent Will Hazell said that it was impossible to read that sentence and conclude anything other than that Ms Birbalsingh was “talking total nonsense.”
Birbalsingh dominated the headlines in April when her school won the right to ban Muslim prayer rituals. A pupil at her school in north-west London had claimed a ban on prayer rituals was a breach of her human rights and violated the Equality Act. But the High Court said the ban was justified and Birbalsingh should be allowed to enforce the school’s secular ethos. The ruling was seen as a victory for many on the right. ‘The triumph of Katharine Birbalsingh,” wrote the right-wing columnist Douglas Murray, in an article about the ruling in the Spectator.
Children apparently identifying as cats at school became a media frenzy last year, when a video of teenage pupils at Rye College in East Sussex debating whether a person could identify as a cat went viral on TikTok. Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch demanded that the school was urgently investigated by Osted.
The incident sparked a wider debate about gender identity and transgender rights in schools.
This week, the Tories came under fire for draft statutory sex education guidance that states sex education should be taught no earlier than year five, when pupils are aged nine, and what is described as the “contested topic of gender identity” should not be taught at all.
The education secretary Gillian Keegan said while gender reassignment should be taught in school, gender ‘ideology’ shouldn’t be presented as fact. Green MP Caroline Lucas hit out at new guidelines, saying that the Tory Party was engaging in the “worst kind of arm-chair politics.” Headteachers also challenged the guidance, with the head of a school in Rotherham, Pepe Di’Iasio, saying that pupils are being used “as a political football.”
Image credit: YouTube screen grab
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