Former first lady was inspired to take up educational initiatives after visiting school in London

Michelle Obama will return on Monday to the London girls’ school that inspired her focus on education when she was US first lady, as part of a one-day UK tour to publicise her memoir.

In 2009 Obama visited Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school (EGA) in Islington, which at the time had 900 refugee pupils in a student body where 55 languages were spoken. In her memoir, Becoming, she recalls: “Looking at the girls, I just began to talk, explaining that though I had come from far away … I was more like them than they knew.”

She added that she “knew they’d have to push back against all the stereotypes that would get put on them, all the ways they’d be defined before they’d had a chance to define themselves. They’d need to fight the invisibility that comes with being poor, female and of colour.”

On Monday Obama will join three past pupils and the school’s executive head, Jo Dibb, for a conversation on the importance of education, in front of 250 pupils from EGA and Mulberry school, in London’s Tower Hamlets.

She stayed in touch with the school following her 2009 visit. In 2011, during a state visit with then-President Barack Obama, she took a group of 37 of the school’s pupils to Oxford University, where she gave a talk at Christ Church. In 2012 she welcomed 12 EGA pupils to the White House.

Obama’s association with Mulberry school dates back to June 2015, when she visited the school in partnership with her international girls’ education initiative, Let Girls Learn. The scheme focused on encouraging government agencies, corporations, and nonprofit organisations to invest in teenage girls’ education around the globe. It was discontinued under Donald Trump’s administration.

Later the same year, Obama welcomed 20 pupils from Mulberry school to the White House.

Dibb, who has worked at EGA since 2005, said she cried after seeing what Obama had written about her 2009 visit. “I’d just come out of the gym and the news story had been Whatsapped to me by someone and I sat in my car at seven in the morning reading it,” she said.

“If we have been part of what Michelle Obama has done in the wider sphere, well, just wow. That makes me feel as if we’ve done something special.”

Obama will be discussing her memoir with the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at an event at the Southbank Centre in London in the evening. Three hundred of the 2,700 tickets, which sold out within minutes, have been given to secondary school students and local charities in London.

The rest of her book tour will take place in the US, where Obama will be joined by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Jessica Parker.