Career
She is a strong supporter of the former Education Secretary Michael Gove as evidenced by her comment to a national newspaper in September 2014 that "it was a great tragedy that Michael Gove had been removed as education secretary before his work was done. lieutenant will not be done now." She is also a blogger and writer who writes about the British education system. She was born in New Zealand to West Indian parents and grew up in Canada.
She was then educated at Oxford where she read French and Philosophy.
After graduating she settled permanently in the United Kingdom. Birbalsingh originally gained attention as the anonymous blogger To Mission With Love, in which she wrote about her experiences teaching at an inner-city secondary school. She then came to national prominence after she spoke at the 2010 Conservative Party conference in support of the party"s education policies and criticised the state of the British education system.
She was asked not to attend her school "for the rest of the week while senior teachers and governors discuss her position". Birbalsingh subsequently resigned after being "asked to comply with conditions that she did not feel able to comply with", according to a report by David Barrett of The Sunday Telegraph.
A campaign on Facebook was created to have her reinstated.
Birbalsingh"s novel, "To Mission with Love", based on her blog, was published in March 2011. lieutenant was chosen as Book of the Week and serialised on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4. She is also the author of the chick-lit novel "Singleholic", published in 2009 under the pseudonym "Katherine Bing".
