2 days ago
13
The trailer for the new series of Educating Yorkshire is a work of art. Shot in one take and clocking in at more than three minutes, it was written and performed by the children of Thornhill community academy in Dewsbury – in collaboration with Dougal Wilson, the director of Paddington in Peru – and takes in a school band, percussionist dinner ladies and a child seemingly being fired out of a cannon from the roof. It’s sweet and funny, but it’s pointed, too, in style and content.
This hasn’t been a great year for the public profile of British secondary schools. The national orgy of hand-wringing prompted by Netflix’s superb Adolescence has led to something approaching despair at the state of education, entrenching the perception that overstretched and under-resourced teachers act as little more than crowd control, leaving children neurotic and dysfunctional, making them sitting ducks for malignant influencers such as Andrew Tate.
This revival then, is perfectly timed. In the trailer, the one-take style showcases humour, variety and invention. The show itself suggests that while many things have changed since we last spent time at this school, in 2014, plenty more has stayed the same. Mr Burton – last seen movingly coaxing fluent speech out of a stammering pupil, Musharaf – is now Thornhill’s headteacher. Britain has had six prime ministers since 2014. Sometimes a slow but steady uphill trajectory is the most worthwhile path for a public servant to take.
So who are our new Musharafs? The very clever and very disruptive Riley is certainly an early candidate. Might he have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Or dyslexia? Or is his clowning, as Mrs Delaney-Hudson puts it euphemistically, “a behaviour choice”? He faces significant sanctions if his erratic modus operandi can’t be clinically explained. A neurodiversity screening doesn’t help. His mum is nonplussed. Maybe a food diary will offer some answers? The gentleness with which Riley is guided towards better habits is striking. As Mrs D-H puts it: “He absolutely thrives off the positivity.” Who doesn’t?
Then there is Amy. “I’m just a mixture of random stuff, put together incorrectly,” she says. She is underselling herself considerably, of course. Amy is a thoroughly eccentric and entirely charming kid, grappling with Tourette syndrome and the absurd (but, at 12, deadly serious) micropolitics of schoolyard friendships.
In a pastoral care session, she struggles to find a single good thing to say about herself. It can be stated with confidence that viewers will feel very differently. Amy is obsessed with the school’s hash browns and says quirky, funny things (“Why are your tights so holey? They’re like the Bible”). She is a star; as you watch, you can feel the country’s collective heart begin to melt.
Amy’s trajectory illustrates the genius at the heart of this series. What an incredibly careful and delicately performed editing job is routinely done here: to make these children hilarious, but never the butt of the joke; to show their vulnerability, but also their strength; to render their triumphs and tragedies serious, but never overwhelming. It shows us the nuance and the nuts and bolts of their developing personalities, their muddled impulses and motivations, the gently irresistible force of their forming identities.
The care of the film-makers echoes that of the teaching staff. When Amy has a mild falling out with her friend Millie, the student manager for year 8, Mr Wilson – who isn’t a teacher and is more like a benign big brother – simply brings them together in his office, puts his headphones on and lets them get on with setting their incredibly minor difference. “I don’t think I opened up to people when I was at school,” he reflects later. “But then I don’t know if there was anyone I could have opened up to.” This will chime with many viewers of a certain age who may wish things had been different in their day.
There is something gently polemical going on here. Sadly, there will be people who observe this school, with its wellness hub and its positive reinforcement and its atmosphere of listening, rather than shouting, and decry it as “woke”. What happened to the stiff upper lip? To discipline? To “spare the rod and spoil the child”? Educating Yorkshire reinforces something quite different. Things have changed. These children are given tailored, individual pastoral care. They will be better adults for it.
For viewers in search of confirmation for their biases, clouds will certainly gather in later episodes. Smartphones will be discussed; social media, too. But initially, at least, solutions are hard-earned, but relatively simple. Is Educating Yorkshire rose-tinted? Probably. Is it filmed and edited to show everyone involved in as positive a light as possible? Almost certainly. Does it feel like a necessary blast of optimism? You bet it does.
