School Reality Tv- a real view of education?
“D’ya like my eyebrows? I shaved ‘em all off...” brags fifteen year old Bailey, a Year Ten student at Thornhill Community Academy, currently featuring on the fly-on-the-wall series Educating Yorkshire (Thursdays, 9pm, Channel 4). Bailey is a rare breed of teenager. She manages to be both a leading light in the ‘popular crowd’ as well as a staff favourite; a teacher’s pet and a rebellious teen all rolled into one.
There have been several documentaries about education in recent years. On a number of occasions the featured school has not shown up well due to skewed editing, or the effects the idea of ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ can have on an easily-influenced adolescent. This is why Educating Yorkshire, the successor of Educating Essex, has made a refreshing change. So far we have seen the effects of the groups, cliques and tribes, which have always been at the centre of school life. As well as this, we have met Year Ten GCSE student Tom, and discovered his failure to settle down has been a cause for concern.
Perhaps most memorable of all was the unlikely friendship of Hadiqa and the irrepressibly chatty Safiyyah, who punctuates every sentence with ‘innit’. As exams approach, a crisis in the girls’ friendship threatens to disrupt their academic studies: a common occurrence during teenage school years.
But does this series give a real view of education? Do teenagers often go missing from lessons? Are they sometimes unruly? Do they fall in love? Do teachers take on not only the role of educator, but also a carer, cleaner, mediator and a huge variety of other roles?
The answer is yes! Of course they do. And Educating Yorkshire represents just that. Episode five saw Head of Year, Mr. Moses, become an unlikely pacifier of teenage angst. His job as pastoral leader is to keep everyone in Year Nine on the straight and narrow. We witness his attempts to get fourteen-year-old Grant, previously a model pupil (now serving his twenty-ninth detention in a month), back on track.
As a survivor of the British education system myself, watching both Educating Yorkshire and Educating Essex has been an experience akin to what I imagine it must be like to be a WWII veteran sitting down to watch Saving Private Ryan. Every orange foundation line, every hormonal strop and every whimsical attempt at classroom ‘banter’ left me reminiscent, and almost twitching in amused horror, while watching the system in which I have lived and breathed come to life on my television.
My own Pavlovian reaction to terror aside, Educating Yorkshire is a sort of master class in how the British education system runs. It goes in without an agenda, treats its subjects with respect and leaves you with a proper insight into school life in 2013. Great stuff!
(P.S. If you’re reading this while in a lesson: “YOU’RE IN SCHOOL, DO MATHS!” or whatever lesson in which you are shamelessly procrastinating!)
By Emma Schofield
Picture © zoovroo
There have been several documentaries about education in recent years. On a number of occasions the featured school has not shown up well due to skewed editing, or the effects the idea of ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ can have on an easily-influenced adolescent. This is why Educating Yorkshire, the successor of Educating Essex, has made a refreshing change. So far we have seen the effects of the groups, cliques and tribes, which have always been at the centre of school life. As well as this, we have met Year Ten GCSE student Tom, and discovered his failure to settle down has been a cause for concern.
Perhaps most memorable of all was the unlikely friendship of Hadiqa and the irrepressibly chatty Safiyyah, who punctuates every sentence with ‘innit’. As exams approach, a crisis in the girls’ friendship threatens to disrupt their academic studies: a common occurrence during teenage school years.
But does this series give a real view of education? Do teenagers often go missing from lessons? Are they sometimes unruly? Do they fall in love? Do teachers take on not only the role of educator, but also a carer, cleaner, mediator and a huge variety of other roles?
The answer is yes! Of course they do. And Educating Yorkshire represents just that. Episode five saw Head of Year, Mr. Moses, become an unlikely pacifier of teenage angst. His job as pastoral leader is to keep everyone in Year Nine on the straight and narrow. We witness his attempts to get fourteen-year-old Grant, previously a model pupil (now serving his twenty-ninth detention in a month), back on track.
As a survivor of the British education system myself, watching both Educating Yorkshire and Educating Essex has been an experience akin to what I imagine it must be like to be a WWII veteran sitting down to watch Saving Private Ryan. Every orange foundation line, every hormonal strop and every whimsical attempt at classroom ‘banter’ left me reminiscent, and almost twitching in amused horror, while watching the system in which I have lived and breathed come to life on my television.
My own Pavlovian reaction to terror aside, Educating Yorkshire is a sort of master class in how the British education system runs. It goes in without an agenda, treats its subjects with respect and leaves you with a proper insight into school life in 2013. Great stuff!
(P.S. If you’re reading this while in a lesson: “YOU’RE IN SCHOOL, DO MATHS!” or whatever lesson in which you are shamelessly procrastinating!)
By Emma Schofield
Picture © zoovroo