If I may bore you with a little philosophy, and hypothesise why Birbalsingh has gone in for this kind of nonsense too: The narrative at play here is one which radically reduces the amount of agency that the individuals have: If you are angry, it's *because* you've been neglected by the elites If you express that anger, it's *because* you've been taken for granted If you show violence against ethnic minorities, it's *because* metropolitan technocrats have allowed those minorities and immigrants to take your job Etc etc. When it comes to apportioning blame, you move it a step away, and say "well, what did you expect to happen?" The main issue I have with this is that it ignores the fact that most of us believe in free will, and that people make choices. You don't *have* to lob a brick at a police officer or a mosque, you *choose* to. You don't *have* to get on a bus and travel hundreds of miles to go burn some bins, you *choose* to. Swinging back to education: one of the biggest debates between "trads" and "progs" was about student agency. On one side, people argued that if you planned your lesson well and it was engaging and relevant, students would behave. If you had good relationships and unconditional positive regard, your students would behave. If they didn't behave, it's because you didn't do that work, so teachers were quite literally blamed for students' poor behaviour. On the other side, people argued that this was A) empirically not true and B) philosophically problematic, because it downplays student agency. It treats students as if they have no choice in the matter: if my lesson is good they behave, if not, not. Others believe that I can plan the most boring lesson in the world and still expect children to behave, because it's a choice, and they should choose to behave because it's the right thing to do. It's always been a bit of a tightrope though, because the grain of truth is that there are plenty of things we can do to increase or decrease the chances of students making the right choice. E.g. putting in a system of clear and consistent consequences results in students making better choices. But we don't want to go so far that we take away their choice completely, we have to believe that students are like any other human, and we have to start from a position where we give them the dignity of choice. Any time we put in a rule or a restriction, we have to do it with care, and with the knowledge that it has to be worth it. Against that backdrop, Birbalsingh has a rather extreme position. Her belief appears to be that if we put *any* slack into the system, chaos will descend. If we don't have completely silent corridors, or we allow students to congregate in groups of 5, or we put in a prayer room, everything will fall apart. This is a pretty hardline position on student agency - it says "if I don't do all of these crazy restrictive things, students will inevitably become feral." Is this so different from saying "if the government doesn't close the borders and listen to the legitimate concerns of the left behind white working class then they will inevitably become feral"? To me, only the surface is different. The deep structure represents a common view of humanity and agency. So there's a type of consistency here, rooted in a belief that people have no agency, and are mere leaves on whatever wind happens to be blowing. It's not a vision of humanity that I share. Anyway, that's my theory. Maybe I'm overthinking 🤷‍♂️