Choosing Smart Kids over smartphones

A conversation with Michaela Headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh

Art Keller: Katharine Birbalsingh is founder and headmistress of the Michela, an inner-city charter school in the United Kingdom that has gotten a lot of attention for teaching methods that break from current orthodoxy. Why did you found Michaela and what needs does it fill that aren’t filled by other schools in the UK?

Katharine Birbalsingh: We are very different from a lot of the schools. Our teaching methods are more traditional. Teachers stand at the front of the classroom and the desks are in rows, the children looking at their teacher. At most other schools, desks are in groups where the children are looking at each other. At other schools, the teacher tends to a facilitator of learning, where they move amongst the desks and they set the children on a task and then they keep the children on task by moving from one group of desks to another group of desks.

KB: We believe in the teacher leading the learning. We might have class discussions, or do a bit of pair work, but it is the teacher leading the learning, rather than the children leading the learning. We also have very high standards of behavior. We have silent corridors. People think, ‘How can you have silent corridors?”  For a school in the inner city, if you don't have silent corridors, you often have chaos. Children can be bumped, punching each other, big fights breaking out, bashing their heads into the walls and so on. Much better to just have silence. They just move very quickly to their lessons.

An effect of that is that the children aren't scared to put their hands up. They won't feel like they're going to get bullied for being clever. In fact, they want to be as clever as possible. It's a very different kind of atmosphere than you might find in a typical inner-city school. We actively teach things like gratitude and a sense of duty and obligation towards the other people.

AK: On the Rubin Report, you said, “Smartphones are killing our kids. You have a Digital Detox plan at Michaela. When did you begin to believe that smartphones were detrimental to education and that you had to put a Digital Detox in place?

KB: Soon as we opened the school in September, 2014. Before that, I was setting up the school. So, it was really before 2010 that I was properly in the classroom with children. Before 2010, smartphones weren't that prevalent. Now everyone has one. When we started in 2014, (students) were younger, they were 11 years old, so they might only have just been given their phones. It took a few years to really embed and what I've noticed is that it really does ruin their lives and the children will tell you this themselves. They are constantly being interrupted by the beep-beep-beep from their phone. What that beep tells you is “Somebody loves me,” and somebody loving you is more important than your physics. They find it very hard to turn off. So, we have children who fall asleep in the middle of the day, because they’re up until 3:00 AM on their phones.

KB:  Even if you're quite a good parent, I've known many good parents who are just struggling. They can't take the phone away. The child goes on a hunger strike. He calls social services and make false accusations against their parent. The child refuses to come into school and locks themselves in their room until the parent in the end is so ground down, they hand the phone back over. Better to never have given them a phone in the first place. Why are they so addicted? Snapchat and Instagram are the two main culprits here. They hire “addiction teams” to make the apps more addictive. One trick they use, someone likes your photo or a comment. Instagram doesn't tell you. Then you then haven't been on the Instagram for 24 hours. Now they're going to tell you that a person likes you, to draw you back in.

KB: I was just doing some interviews with some of our “year elevens.”  They’re just finishing exams tomorrow. These are the GCSE exams that we take in the UK at 16, our national exams. They were all telling me the number one thing that has hurt their revision (i.e. studying or review) has been their smartphones. Luckily all of those children from January who I interviewed today used our Digital Detox and gave in their phones. So, from January, they have been able to work. They all claimed that their brains were able to work better now that they were no longer on their phones, so it's now been about six months that they haven't been on their phones.

KB: I've been doing this job for 20 years; it is a far greater problem now than it was 10 years ago. I believe that smartphones exacerbate the difference, the divide between rich and poor because the rich, they can hire a nanny to make sure that the child is engaged in different ways. They put a limit on the time kids spend on the phone from when they're little, so the child is used to it. The rich don't have a sense of, ‘I want to be able to give my child everything that I didn't have.’ They don't have that sentence. In fact, often the rich are very particular. “No, no, no. You're not having that new toy. It's too expensive.” They don't get it for their kids because they have a sense of propriety and order that the child shouldn't be able to demand whatever he wants. Poor families have a lot more pressure on them in that they feel like, “Well, I'm not a good dad if I'm not giving my child everything, because that means I haven't earned enough money, so I'm going to go out there and earn more money so I can give my child whatever he wants.” And then the child wants a better smartphone and an X Box to play his video games.

KB: I have conversations on Twitter and middle-class people say, “Just teach children how to use the phone responsibly.” Oh, you think we haven't tried that? It's so ridiculous. The child was addicted. The child tells you “Miss. I want to get off, but can you please help me, right?” That's why we set up Digital Detox, because at least we can take the phones away from them, but we can only take them away with their permission.

KB: They are literally being ruined by those phones and in 25 years' time, people will be writing reports about this. It will become common knowledge. Right now, I feel like I'm a voice in the wilderness just shouting and shouting about it and nobody's listening to me.

AK: It is coming out even now. One computer scientist we interviewed, Cal Newport, said there is a documented issue with “attention residue.” Essentially, if you break off from doing something difficult that requires serious cognitive effort and you do something distracting like check email or social media, it takes 20 minutes before you can get back to the level of concentration you had before. So, when you were talking about your “elevens” not be able to do the studying because of their phones, that's what he’s talking about. You also talk about tech exacerbating differences. Kentaro Toyama wrote a book, “Geek Heresy, Rescuing Education from the Cult of Technology.” He's on our advisory board now. He talks about trying to bring computer tech to poor kids in India. It absolutely didn't work and he found it magnified inequality. Many times, technology is injected into education and it's not doing what it was promised. My question is, why did the people selling tech have such a hard time understanding that human interaction is a key component of education and no amount of tech can replace that?

KB:  The state is a cash cow, right? The government schools are unable to do that capitalist dance that's required to get the best deal, right? When big capitalist organizations interact with the state, the state is taken for a ride. Take the big companies who used to sell interactive whiteboards. Teachers were all told they have to use it, because this was going to increase grades. Now the schools abandoned all these interactive whiteboards cause they proved to be totally useless. That's after millions spent on them. Everybody's telling you, “You must bring the children into the 21st century. In the 21st century, nothing is ever going to be the same. Children are going to be in different jobs in the future.” All this rhetoric is total nonsense, but that's what everyone believes. “Buy I-pads!  Laptops!”  I've been there, done that. Children break the laptops. Children use the laptops for the wrong reason. Children lose the laptops. The children are then unable to write (by hand) because they're used to clicking on buttons. You think they're on one website, when actually they're on a different website. Any teacher hearing this will be nodding their agreement.

KB: Sadly, we teachers have very little influence on what the public thinks because the public tend to have very little respect for teachers. Or on what politicians think.

KB: I just read a testimonial one of our year elevens wrote. She said she remembers when she was in year seven, grade seven, me giving an assembly. “I remember, you told us several things to try and test yourself. See if you can go without your phone for one night. Could you do that? See if you can do it for two nights. See if you can stay away from the video games and Netflix for two nights, and so on.” And when she heard me say that at the time, she thought, “Well that's easy. I can do that. That's fine.” She didn't have a phone at the time. So, she's now in grade 11. Her mother got her a computer, Netflix, a phone, and the girl is so addicted. She found it impossible to revise for her GCSE exams. And she was saying how sad it was.  Now she's just as addicted as the rest of them. And the peer pressure is so much to have a phone.

KB: So, I'm not knocking technology, but when it comes to bringing up your children, you need to be very, very wary of it.

AK: I would agree 100%. There is a book by Nancy Jo Sales, “American Girls,” about the impact of smartphones and how they encourage terrible behavior. All of the girls interviewed in the book use the exact same language that you use, “I know this is bad for me. I know it's addictive. I can't put it down.” And they get engaged in things like posting inappropriately revealing photos online.

KB: Absolutely. That is a big thing

AK: And it that leads to bullying and “slut-shaming” and awful behavior. One of the girl’s solution to being bullied after posting explicit pics was not to get off the phone, but move to a different town and stay on the platform where she was bullied. Parents don't understand, because they're from a different generation. We grew up without this tech that has been engineered to be addictive. No one sits parents down and says, “You are putting something that is the equivalent of a drug into your kid's hand and kids don't have self-control yet. That’s a circuit in a brain, impulse control, that doesn’t fully develop until we are about 25. You’re putting an electronic drug into the hands of someone who doesn't have the impulse control to handle it.” It's horrific. And I don’t think it'll be 25 years before the reports about how bad this is. I think there'll be out in the next five years.

KB: Oh, that's a great thing. I'm so pleased to hear that, because I need all the help I can get. I feel like I'm fighting a war. And the number one thing I'm fighting is smartphones. I mean, here we are in the inner city, serious poverty, problems with drugs, alcohol, absent fathers. Any number of things, right?  Gangs, kids carrying knives, and I tell you the number one problem we’ve got is those smartphones, right? And that's really interesting, isn't it? We have kids who show up with knives on bicycles with a mask on, waiting for our boys so that they can have a rumble. Why is this boy showing up in the first place? Because somebody “dissed” somebody else on the smartphone, right?  On one of these platforms. It is so maddening and nobody's taking any notice. We're fighting a multibillion-dollar industry. And it's not just one thing. It's Instagram. It's Apple. It' the iPhone, It's all those Android phones. They are all in collusion. These guys need someone to pay for their jet planes. My families are paying for the jet planes. But it makes me really, really angry because my families don't have any money.

KB: I'm doing my best and we are removing some of the phones and some of the kids giving them up. So, I'm now talking to them before the kids get to us. I've got a session booked with sixth grade kids. They come to us at grade seven. And the reason I'm meeting with them is because normally what families do is once they start grade seven and secondary school, they get given a phone. So, I'm going to try and stop these families by talking to them next week and saying, “Whatever you do, do not buy your child a smartphone. Instead buy them a brick phone.” Part of our Digital Detox program, we have brick phones, phones that you can ring up on, and you can text on, but there's no internet. We know families like the convenience of being able to get in touch with their child, fine, get a brick phone, it costs 9.99 pounds in the office here. We sell them here at a discount, because they're actually 14 pounds. But we make a loss on it deliberately, in order to encourage families to get the child to brick phone instead.

KB: And it's always those getting good grades who’ve got a brick phone. A boy I interviewed this afternoon who is grade 11, just taking these exams, was very confident, saying exams went really well. I said, “So, what about your habits with your phone? How has that changed?” He said, “Well, you remember that first meeting we had at the beginning of year 10? Two years ago? My mother listened to you talk about the evil phone and the evil video games. She went home and took away my phone and X Box.” And he was looking at me like, “This is your fault.” “And so,” he goes on, “For the last two years, I haven't been on Snapchat and Instagram, so all I've been able to do is revise, and I've been working really hard.” And now he's gone in there and done really well. That mom listened to me, but not every mom does. Some of the moms come to me and they say, “I'm too weak. I can't do it. I can't deal with the fight. I've got three other children. I've got two jobs. I just don't have it in me to fight with them.” And nobody ever warns them. Somebody needed to tell them when their kids were in primary school. So, I'm trying to tell them now before they get the secondary school. Some of those kids will already have a phone, but I'm hoping to catch some of them in a way that I wouldn't have caught them before.

AK: That seems like a good idea. Warn them while they're young. You have teachers from around the world visiting Micaela. Is there much interest in the Digital Detox plan?  Have you gotten any feedback from those who have tried to implement it at their schools?

KB. No, I haven't had any feedback actually, but lots of people do come and ask about it because I tweet about it on Twitter and so a lot of people know how much of a problem it is. I don't know how much success they’re having in their schools. The thing about our school is because we are very good on the discipline side of things and because there are such high expectations of the kids, we're able to get some kids to put down the phone. We're not that successful either, but we might get the phone away from them for one night a week or we might persuade them to put a screen time lock on their phones, especially when they're coming towards the GCSE exams.

Then the screen time lock will allow them on the phone for an hour night. That's the good thing about the iPhone is you can actually put a lock on it. That way, kids’ brains aren’t so broken. They stay away from the phone and their brain is able to develop again, you know?

KB: I genuinely think the government should be putting out information for people, but they do the opposite. The information they give is, “Technology is the most important thing we need to be giving kids tech in the classroom” The number of people who say to me, “You need to use phones in the classroom because otherwise they won't know how to use them. Like, what planet are you living on? Because if you knew any children, you would know that you don't need to teach them how to use the phone.”

AK: Would it surprise you if I told you that Silicon Valley now donates more to Washington DC than either Big Oil or Wall Street? That may be why you're not hearing more about why technology is bad for kids. That may be why this tech is completely unregulated and unconstrained and no one is warning about this, because the people who would put those rules in place have a very definite motive not to put those rules in place. It's why every time there have been proposals to regulate Facebook, you go to those hearings, state hearings in California, and who do you see showing up? Lobbyists for Facebook, and somehow those rules always get killed. So, it's not a coincidence. It's not, “Oh, we don't know about it” from lawmakers.  It's active opposition from the companies.  People like you and I saying “This is a real problem” are being shouted down by the money. But the news is slowly spreading. There's finally talk about regulating the big tech companies in a serious way that simply wasn't there until recently.

AK:  I have a question and it's not strictly about tech, more about the importance of human factors in education, specifically, expectations. I went to a private primary school and the teachers were decent. Most were not special. But I was given a lot of homework. and I was expected to do it by myself.

I have a really good friend who was an excellent teacher, very innovative and supportive. She built a whole mountain-bike track by herself at her school so that kids could learn how to mountain bike. She stopped teaching. At least partly because she was sick of the students' parents demanding special treatment, demanding that their kids not live up to standards. Now, when there is any dispute with the teacher, the parents always assume that their kids are in the right and that the teacher is wrong. And we've developed terms that are linked to this behavior.  “Helicopter parenting,” where parents are constantly hovering to make sure that their precious child is okay or, “Bulldozer parents,” who bulldoze obstacles out of their child's life. How important do you think expectations are to a child's success, and how do you get kids to internalize the idea that you're going to hold them to high standards? And here's the important part: that they can probably meet them, even if they face obstacles?”

KB: Well you just do it. like in any school, not so much here because we are consistent across all our classrooms, but in most schools, you will find a kid who always does his homework for Mr. X, always turns up on time for Mr. X, is always sensibly behaved in Mr. X's classroom. But when he goes to Ms. Y’s classroom, he suddenly badly behaves and he never does his homework and it's the same child. And you will find this everywhere. The children will rise to the expectations that you set for them and Ms. Y’s expectations are, “You don't really have to do your homework because I feel sorry for you, darling. I know it’s just your mom at home, and it's difficult for you, isn't it? And you don't have any way to do your homework at home because you don't have your own desk. So, I'm going to allow you to get away with it.”

KB: So, he doesn't do his homework for her. But Mr. X says, “I don't care what your situation is it home. You bloody well do it for me.” And he says that because he's not gonna let standards drop for this kid just because this kid might be poor, or lives on the state, or has a single mom, or is black, or whatever it is, right? So, children pick and choose, and they will rise to the standards that you set.  If the standards you set are those of helicopter parents, “Oh my poor little darling shouldn't be made to work so hard. I want him to have fun.” I often hear this from parents. Not so much inner-city parents, but more rich parents at private schools who, who say things like, “I just want my child to be happy.”

KB: So, what is happiness? Let's break that down. because if your child struggles in reading, then he's not going to be very happy in life, you know? And if you struggle child's struggles to do math in class and feels like an idiot, he's not going to be happy. But if on the other hand, when he's young, between the ages of zero to five, you as mom and dad have spent time reading daily, say an hour a day, but when they're tiny toddlers, right? You are spending time reading with them. If he understands mummy and daddy love reading, this is bonding time. He comes to love it himself and then he will read on his own and he will come to love novels and get lost in them. 

KB: And then when it comes to school, the teachers have to have high expectations of everyone instead of making excuses. This is “no excuses behavior policy.” You don't allow excuses from some children just because you think they’re too poor to behave. You'd expect the same of all children. All children can do their homework if you expect it of them. If you don't, then they won't do it for you. It's very simple. And so, the person who thinks that they are being compassionate by allowing the child off for not doing their homework is not being compassionate. They are resigning that child to a life of possible illiteracy. To a life of underachievement, where they never really know what it is to meet a deadline, to turn up on time, to sit up straight to, to please someone and to have someone else feel proud of them. All of these things, which are wonderful things to be able to have in your life, that child is never going to know. And why? Because you constantly make excuses for them and you make excuses for them not for the child's sake, but for your sake. Because ultimately what really is at the bottom of all this is that you want to feel better about yourself. You feel guilty about your own privilege as a teacher. You think, “Oh, but I had such a nice life and I had a mother who loved me and I went to nice school and I feel guilty about that and this poor child doesn't have the advantages that I had, so I'm going to let him off because I feel bad.”

AK: Their reading of basic psychology seems wrong. They don't get that a kid that has chaos at home, if you can give them an ordered environment at school, that's the best thing you can do for you.

KB: Exactly. Yeah. They'll love it.

AK: And that's the way they're going to get away from the chaos. They're going to see other behavior modeled in front of them and they're going to see which one brings success and which one's bringing failure. The chaos is bringing failure and the discipline is bringing success. I want to call it “toxic compassion” for the making of excuses. There's so much to be said for establishing standards and expecting people to meet them and finding that they're amazed when they learn that they can meet them.

AK: A newspaper tweeted out an article with a headline that said, “Young people are battling an epidemic of depression and anxiety and losing. Its time parents discuss their fears rather than dismissing them.” You responded, “Well, it's their smartphones. Why is this not obvious to everyone? They’re in a solipsistic world, addicted to the constant dopamine hits, unable to form meaningful relationships, and under such pressure to have perfect social lives and bodies and lipstick.”  That last bit, it sounded more like it's about the girls. Do you think teen girls are uniquely vulnerable to the way smartphones hack our brains?

KB: No. The brain hacking happens to all of the kids. The boys tend to get involved in gangs and knife carrying and fights. Because they have to seem “hard.” So, to be a “man” on social media, you have to throw insults. And then somebody says something that “disses” you, you're going to “diss” them back. And the next thing you know, somebody turns up with the knife outside of school, right? That's the world of the boys. The world of the girls, which I was referring to in that tweet at the end, the girls can only see themselves as some kind of puppet that looks pretty in a tiny little picture. And, they pout and they held the chin in a certain way, and they push their bottoms out, and they put lipstick on, and they say, “Look at me.” And so, these are 12-year-old girls who are now looking like 16-year-olds, or 18-year-old women. Trying to make themselves look older and sexier. Their whole understanding of what it is to be a woman is to be something that is there to be pawed at. The idea of being intelligent and powerful and believing in something and doing something with your life. All of that is gone. They're just there to please the boys. And then the boys are all trying to be as bad as possible.

KB: I’ll tell you about the parents say when they take the phone away from their child, every single one of them says this phrase independently. “I finally got my boy back. I finally got my girl back. My child had gone from me. They had a different personality. And now that they're no longer on the phone, I've got my child back.”  To parents who are listening, the best thing you can do, it's hard, but take the phone away, and just dig deep and for weeks they will hate you, they will scream at you, and they will threaten with hunger strikes and they will go crazy. But you just hang on in there, right? You've got to remember that you love your child and that when you were wiping their bottoms when they were two, you were doing it so they could become a success in life. Take the phone away!

AK: I think there may be a misunderstanding and I don't know if it's parenting philosophy has changed, but there does seem to be a failure to understand it's not your job to be friends with your child. It's your job to parent them.

KB: Exactly.

AK: So, you are going to be making decisions that they're not going to be caring for, not least because they're not fully developed, so they don't understand them. And you've got to do anyways.

KB: Exactly. Exactly.

AK: Well this is such an interesting conversation. Is there any other topic about the intersection of tech and education that we haven't talked about that you'd like to talk about?

KB: No. I mean phones are my big thing. I don't want to “down” tech completely. Tech has its uses. My teachers at school, we all communicate by WhatsApp in the school. We communicate via email and it's a wonderful tool. I might use a PowerPoint at the assembly to show them pictures of something. Technology is a wonderful thing, so I don't want to just bad mouth it, but when using it with children, we need to be very, very careful. You keep saying quite rightly that children are not yet fully formed, and that their impulse control was not yet fully developed. Unless we put certain restrictions on technology with our children, they will never be successful adults.

Note, the above story ran in the Technoskeptic’s hardcopy magazine in 2019. This is the first time it has appeared online. We spoke with her again in July of 2023 to get an update on the progress at Michaela.

AK: We spoke about four years ago. And at the time you said Snapchat and Instagram are the two main culprits sucking up kids’ attention, and I'm guessing probably since then, maybe TikTok has been added to that.

KB: Definitely TikTok is number one on the list.

AK: I want an update on Digital Detox. How has it been going with parents and kids? Have the kids continued to push back? Have the parents gotten more supportive? Where do things stand?

KB: Quite a number of the families, at least half the families when joining the school now will not give their children a smartphone at all.

AK: Great.

KB: Before we started, I'd say everybody had a smartphone when joining. Now I talk to the families twice before they join, I'd say half of them listen to me and don't give a smartphone. Then over time because they join in grade seven and then over time, they start giving them phones. At least 10, 15% make it through to grade eleven. When they have their national exams, they make it through to them without a phone. So, some families still hang on. And then I'd say between grade seven and grade eleven, at some point various families start falling. In year eight you still have about 40% of them. Now the kids who have phones use our Digital detox system to put the phones in the safe, you know, maybe from Monday to Friday or for a couple of days during the week so that they can give their brains a break.

KB: So kids do make use of the system somewhat, but, you know, small numbers, I mean, I say small numbers maybe in each year group five to ten every week might make use of it. I also hope that even if they're not putting the devices in there, those who have a device, because we're regularly giving assemblies about how they destroy your brain, I'm hoping some of them use their devices less. By the time they get to grade eleven, when they have their exams at the end of that year, most of grade eleven will be putting their devices in the safe for the whole week and then get it back on the weekend. Some of them will give it to us for six weeks at a time and then they get it back perhaps during the holidays.

AK: Four years ago, you said in 25 years people are going be writing that smartphones are a disaster. And I predicted it would take less than five. And thankfully that prediction was right. Jon Haidt, he is now talking about this.

AK: Back then, you were a voice crying in the wilderness, but I know a lot of people visit Michaela. Has there been any broader interest in Digital Detox from other educators or from anywhere in the world or other schools in the UK?

KB: People always ask about it, whether or not they do it! You know, I mean, a few do it and tell me, I don't know. I mean, obviously I don't hear from everybody, but everybody's always very interested to hear about it. Definitely.

AK: The reason I'm asking specifically is you said they were kind of interested, but it didn't sound like people were digging into the details of how you were executing it in a way that suggested they really want to do this at their school as well.

KB: So, they ask generally. They're not asking specifically for details. I suppose if they had those specific details, then they would be more likely to succeed at doing it in their own schools. I don't think it's bad faith on anyone. I think that there are so many other bigger fights to fight in their schools that Digital Detox seems like a detail. Like they're trying to stop kids fighting in the corridors and nobody's doing their homework. And kids are insulting each other and you know, there's so many other issues in schools that whether or not they have a phone at home is not their biggest concern.

AK: That sounds dead on. And this is just my guess because I've been following this and see if you think you agree with this, they think ‘I've got all these other things to deal with, the fighting’ and what people aren't realizing is every other problem, smartphones and social media are fertilizer that makes the evil in them grow worse.

KB: Yes, that's right.

AK: So, it's like people don't realize fragmented attention that makes kids more impulsive.

KB: That's right.

AK: It's not that if smartphones disappeared, every problem would go away, but would it reduce all the others by 10%, by 20%? I don't know, but that's kind of my intuition. What do you think about that?

KB: Yeah, definitely. So that's why we spend our time on it. The thing about Michaela is because we deal with many of the bigger issues, you can then hone in on the smaller, more subtle issues and really look at those in detail and see whether or not they do have impact on kids like phones or phones at home or their route to work or to school. Like tiny details we can look at now.

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AK: Have you asked parents, and this may be too big of a thing, or they may not have the attention themselves to do it, to say, “When you give your kids their smartphones, I would like you to observe their behavior and see how it changes?”

KB: It’s only anecdotally, but kids without smartphones tend to rise in terms of the sets of their four sets in a year. Top set, second set, third set, fourth sets. And I've watched kids move from fourth set to top set. And whenever they do that, they never have a phone. It's always kids without a phone and kids with phones, I've watched them drop from first set, maybe not down to fourth set, but they might go to second set, maybe to the third set over time, this is over years. I've watched how their academic ability is affected by either having the phone or not having the phone.

KB: It's never the case that some kid makes some meteoric rise through the sets and he's also got a phone.  Never happens. Or it's never the case that a kid starts tumbling down and they don't have a phone. That never happens. It always matches. You know, the thing I'm fighting is that the smartphone and the iPad, they make great babysitters!

KB: Parents use them because they're busy. The cooking dinner, they've got a friend they want to talk to. They've got work to get on with. They've got a million things. They've got five kids, you know. And so it's much easier when you give them a smartphone. The kid is just quiet and just gets on with stuff, you know? Yeah. Much harder to say, “Pick up the violin. You need to do some practice. Come on, let's play a game of chess or Monopoly. Oh, let's sing a song together. Let's do Wordle together.” It's very hard, especially if you have more than one child. But you know the trick is to get kids, brothers and sisters, doing those sorts of things together. You've got to have an atmosphere in the house where, you know, screen time is simply unacceptable.

AK: Yes.

KB: It's just their kid keeps badgering them, “I don't want to miss out. My friends are all online. I want a smartphone for Christmas.” And the family feels bad. And mom then gives them the smartphone. Problem is once you give them the smartphone, very difficult to take it off them. But you've got to hold the line. Otherwise, well the kids are going to walk all over you. And you end up with a kid who has exam results that aren't as good as they could've been otherwise. You end up with a kid who could have mental health problems, anxiety, depression, meeting all kinds of horrible people online, gang members, pedophiles, everybody out there knows where your kid lives.

AK: I would like to do a whole separate interview on just the horror stories. Because in some ways those drive the point home in a way of just generally saying you don't have any idea how dangerous these things are. Because when you hear concrete examples, people learn through stories.

KB: Kids have no idea what they're doing. You find out that your daughter is selling nude photographs of herself for one pound each to the boys in her class, or just random boys online!

KB: Or you've got boys who are involved with gang members. And of course, they then get so involved that they then make videos that are insulting gang members from across the line, you know, down South London. And then the South London gang come up to North London to try and knife your boy, you know, and kill him because he said something insulting and you think, “How has this all happened? I didn't even know he knew any gang members.” You would be very surprised at the number of things that middle-class kids can get involved in!

AK: At the time we last spoke, you had finally had a full batch of students go all the way from beginning to end at Michaela, and they were just taking their GCSEs.

KB: Yes.

AK: I'd followed you on Twitter. I think it was to the dismay of your critics your students did great. So, I just want to get on record for the readers. Tell me about Michaela's results on those national tests in the UK measuring student achievement.

KB:  The way they judged schools in this country is the amount of progress they've made. From year seven, grade seven through to grade eleven, which is when they take those national exams, which are called GCSEs. These are national exams in all subjects. It's not just English and maths, but it's also history and geography and science and a language and so on. They measure the progress that the kid has made in those five years to then make a judgment on the school. And they look at the average of the cohort and they give you what's called a Progress Eight score. And last year we got the highest Progress Eight score in the country. It gives you some sense. We're obviously doing pretty well.

AK: I would say.

KB: Yeah. This is an inner-city intake with a typical inner-city group of kids and we're doing really well with them. And the results that we get are nothing in comparison to the kinds of people that they become. You know, they're, they're decent, kind, hardworking kids and that's what they become at the school. I'm more proud of that than I am of the results. That's why we get 800 visitors a year. And your audience is welcome to come. All you need to do is sign up on the website and come over to London and you come and you'll have lunch with the kids. You'll be able to have a tour with the kids and you'll see what it is people are talking about. It is a really special school. One of the things that makes it special is the fact that the kids certainly don't have phones when they're in the school, but lots of them don't have phones outside of the school. And there is an understanding even with the ones who have phones, that it is a damaging item and that they should keep it to a minimum

AK: If you've done nothing else, just in conveying that to them, that they need to treat smartphones essentially like a loaded gun.

KB: Yes. Yes.

AK: I've followed you on Twitter and see you're regularly attacked by people who hate that you are holding kids to standards and expecting them to perform and then they perform! And then of course, Digital Detox plays a part. You have the numbers behind you. You would think, “You can't argue with success,” but clearly they can. What is your sense of why they're attacking you? I mean, perhaps envy, but it can't all be envy?

KB: It's not so much envy it's that we show them up. They want the narrative to be “Poor kids, black kids, disadvantaged kids cannot achieve.” So, when we prove that they can achieve, if only you change some of your approaches, then it undermines their point, which is that these kids can't achieve and they certainly can't achieve unless we pump a whole load more money into the system.

KB: Now we're doing it with less money than many schools and in a terrible building, without any trees, without any fields, without any sports, you know, we do it in a very reduced situation. Our building is really quite dreadful. We're right next to the trains. We're on seven floors instead of on two floors that you would normally have in a school building. The corridors are really narrow. It wasn't meant to be a school. So, the fact that we are succeeding is very annoying for them because it disproves many of their claims.

AK: Now it makes a little bit more sense; it's about the economics. If they’re saying “More money, more money,” but you prove it can be done with less, then you invalidate the claims that money is the problem.

AK: Atmosphere and expectations. They don't really cost any money.  But that clicks with something I heard several years ago. Catholic schools, like I attended, are similar to Michaela in that they have high expectations. Homework is issued and you are expected to do it, and they will be talking to your parents if you don't do it.  I want to say I’d heard in New York City, someone was looking at the New York City public school system versus the Catholic school system. And head office of the public school system had 1500 people administering it, and the head office of the Catholic school system had three. Obviously, you need a lot more money to support 1500 salaries!

KB: Yes, exactly.

AK: You are essentially undermining their bloated model and naturally they're attacking you because your results are proving it doesn't have to be that way. And no one likes to think that they're investing a lot of money, time, and effort into something that doesn't work. So now it all makes sense to me.

KB: I don't think it's conscious. I don't think they sit there and go, “She's disproving us. We have to discredit her.” No, but they don't like it. It makes them angry. I mean, they don't really know why and they get very annoyed about it. That's human nature, you know?

AK: You're a hundred percent right. I'm a psychology nerd. Unconscious motivations, the way it usually works is we feel a way and then our brain does the work of creating a reason to justify why we feel something!

KB: Yes.

AK:  What I've also seen online is you are ‘too conservative’ as if being a little bit conservative is a character flaw.

KB:  They hate that because I go on about “small c” conservative values. And I say, that's why the school succeeds. So, then they're saying, “What, how dare you say that conservatism is needed for children to succeed?” And I think it's obvious that you need values like personal responsibility, a sense of duty towards others, an idea of self-sacrifice, putting others before yourself working hard, taking responsibility for the things that go wrong.

AK: Personal agency.

KB: The idea of agency, the idea of praise and punishment. These are “small c” conservative values. The idea that children are not born good, but we'll have to work to become good. We need to teach all of us. You know, it's easier to eat chocolate than it is to eat broccoli, you know, easier to sit on the sofa than it's to go to the gym. But honestly, people don't want to accept those very basic truths. I would say that if you don't get that stuff, it's very hard to succeed with children.