What Ontario can learn from Britain’s strictest school

Michaela Community School’s rules are tough, its teaching is traditional, and its results are undeniable

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Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the United Kingdom. During that trip, he toured Michaela Community School and met with headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh. What he saw there offers clear lessons for Ontario on discipline, curriculum, and school choice.

Michaela is often called “the strictest school in Britain.” Students are held to strict behavioural standards and school rules are consistently enforced. Not only are students required to wear a uniform, but they are also expected to remain quiet in the hallways. Obviously, there’s zero tolerance for disrespectful behaviour toward teachers or other students as well.

The educational programming at Michaela is also very traditional. Students are seated in rows, assignments are done individually rather than in groups, teachers provide plenty of whole-class instruction, and there is a great emphasis on knowledge acquisition. Contrary to the old chestnut that a teacher should be “a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage,” teachers at Michaela take centre stage in their classrooms. In fact, the teachers do the teaching, and the students do the learning.

Significantly, Michaela students have achieved impressive academic results. On standardized exams such as the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), Michaela students consistently score well above average. In fact, Michaela was recently ranked as the highest performing school in the United Kingdom on the Progress 8 scores, which are a standardized assessment that evaluates the year-over-year academic growth of students.

With results like this, it’s natural to wonder whether Michaela is a public school or a private school. The answer is that it doesn’t fit neatly into either category. That’s because Michaela is a “free school,” which is the approximate equivalent of a charter school in North America. Unfortunately, Alberta is the only Canadian province that has charter schools.

A charter school is an autonomous public school that operates outside the authority of a school board. These schools must hire certified teachers, follow the provincial curriculum, be non-sectarian, and, most importantly, they cannot charge tuition fees. Ontario does not currently allow charter schools, and publicly funded education is almost entirely delivered through government-run school boards.

No doubt there are important things that Minister Calandra learned from touring Michaela. Here are some key takeaways.

First, it’s essential for the government to provide curriculum guides that are content-rich and present material in a logical and sequential manner. Research shows a strong correlation between reading comprehension and background knowledge. Simply put, the more that students know about the topic covered in an article or book, the more likely it is that they will be able to understand what they read.

These results mean that the Ontario government needs to beef up the content requirements in its curriculum guides. This means prescribing standard algorithms and the memorization of basic math facts in math curriculum guides, reorganizing social studies curriculum guides so that students learn Canadian history in chronological order, and ensuring that English language arts curriculum guides mandate phonics instruction for teaching reading in the early grades. These types of changes would go a long way to putting Ontario schools on the right track. Other provincial governments should implement this lesson too.

Second, the provincial government must send a strong message that all students will be held to firm behavioural standards. This doesn’t mean that Ontario schools should be as strict as Michaela’s but it’s not unreasonable to expect all students to show respect to teachers and other students, and to follow school-wide rules. Importantly, administrators need to send a clear message that students who persistently defy the rules will be suspended from school or, in the most extreme cases, they will be expelled.

Finally, Minister Calandra should enact legislation that would allow Ontario parents to establish schools like Michaela by passing charter schools legislation similar to what has been in place in Alberta since 1994.

Currently, Alberta has 32 charter school authorities which run 52 charter schools. Some of these schools, such as Foundations for the Future Charter Academy in Calgary, use an educational model that is similar to Michaela’s. Others, such as Boyle Street Education Centre in Edmonton, offer alternative programming geared to at-risk students. The key is that charter schools are flexible and can make needed changes more rapidly than schools managed by large school boards.

In the end, there is much that the minister can learn from his visit to Michaela. If he is serious about improving Ontario’s education system, it’s time to look at successful schools like this one.

Michael Zwaagstra is a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.