The modern world enjoys little more than dividing us and few feel that pull more strongly than young people. But education can be anathema to all that, a place where children of all backgrounds, abilities and interests can come together for the highest of purposes: learning.
Step forward Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of Michaela Community School in Wembley, known as Britain’s “strictest headteacher”. True or not, this is to miss the point about what drives her. Ms Birbalsingh not only runs a hugely successful school, she seeks to ensure that the ethnically diverse students are not divided along religious or racial lines. To that end, the school instituted a ban on prayer.
However, the fate of that decision now lies in the hands of a judge after a pupil at the school began legal action in the High Court against the decision, claiming discrimination. This is now an important test case.
A ruling to overturn would be damaging to education. Schools are becoming central battlegrounds in the culture war, and headteachers should have the right to run their institutions as they see fit — in a way that unites students, parents and teachers, rather than divides them.
Get children jabbed
Vaccines work. Without them, humanity would instantly return to something of a dark age, in which otherwise preventable and treatable diseases once more curtail the lives of millions. Yet low vaccination rates are increasingly a clear and present danger to public health.
Last July, officials predicted the rates in London could lead to an outbreak of up to 160,000 measles cases. And today, tens of thousands of parents are being urged to book their children in for the MMR vaccine through pop-up clinics at school.
The uptake of the MMR vaccine among children born in 1998 onwards fell following the publication of the now discredited report by Andrew Wakefield linking the vaccine to autism. More recently the Covid-19 pandemic boosted an anti-government, anti-science attitude that appears immune to facts and debate.
Parents should check their children are fully up to date with both their MMR jab and all routine vaccinations.
A worthy adventure
Despite decades of job title inflation there remains one clear winning business card — that of the “adventurer”.
In his new BBC programme, Wilderness, Acton’s own Simon Reeve travels from the Patagonian ice sheet to the Congolian rainforest and the Kalahari desert to observe both the people and wildlife who live there.
In today’s Standard, Reeve says he wants to offer some hope to those who fear we have destroyed the natural world. A worthy endeavour for our times.
