TV documentaries filmed in classrooms are now a genre in their own right

From the Educating... series to Too Tough To Teach?: Our fascination with what goes on behind the closed school gates

In October 2004, Sunnybank Preparatory School in Burnley, Lancashire, became the first in Britain to allow parents to spy remotely on their children from their homes and offices.

Pupils were filmed in their classrooms from the morning assembly to the moment they left – their parents able to monitor their progress by logging on to a secure internet site.

“It’s working even better than we imagined,” Sunnybank’s headteacher, Barbara Cross, said at the time, beaming. The experiment didn’t last long, however, not because parents didn’t appreciate the service or teachers found it too intrusive, but because Sunnybank itself closed a year later. But Lancashire seems to be a hotbed for such innovation, because in 2011 a day nursery in Clitheroe became the first to install a similar “parental webcam” system, much to the media’s amusement.

And yet in that same year, such modest installations were dwarfed by a TV series that extended the outwardly dodgy idea of snooping on schoolchildren and turned it into mass entertainment. It plastered three different, but equally Ofsted-approved, secondary schools with 62 fixed cameras apiece – and won its makers not derision but large audiences and Baftas.

The motivation in making Channel 4’s Educating Essex, and its sequels Educating Yorkshire and now Educating the East End, may have been very different from those of the anxious parents logging on to check up on their sprogs, but the driving curiosity is surely similar. What exactly does happen after we’ve abandoned our children at the school gates? Are the horror stories about state comprehensives an actual reflection of reality? And how does the educational experience now differ from our schooldays?

Class act: English teacher Mr Bispham with Tawny, Alexandra and Ruth in Educating the East End on Channel 4 (Ryan McNamara/ Channel 4)

If the sheer number of documentaries is anything to go by, TV audiences are insatiably curious and more than a little nostalgic. Educating Essex et al have helped to kick-start a booming new genre, including Sky1’s Harrow: A Very British School, which introduced the outside world to the alma mater of Winston Churchill and Benedict Cumberbatch. And since British television is traditionally interested in only two types of school, the best and the worst, there is also a thriving sub-genre about disruptive students – shows such as Channel 4’s The Unteachables and Mr Drew’s School for Boys (in which Educating Essex’s breakout star, teacher Stephen Drew, undertook to improve “bad lads” in just four weeks) and last month’s Panorama report, Last Chance Academy, about a special unit in a Birmingham secondary school that focused on those in danger of joining the 3,900 pupils permanently excluded from school last year.

Indeed, this already crowded field is joined tonight by Channel 5’s Too Tough to Teach?, which focuses on the Ian Mikardo High School in Tower Hamlets, east London, and its attempts to get boys who have been permanently excluded from mainstream education to modify their own behaviour.

“It’s all about conflict resolution”, says the head teacher Claire Lillis. Not half, you think, as one boy puts another in a headlock, and a would-be boxer uses his peers as a punchbag.

“Education, education, education!” was how Tony Blair set out his priorities for office in 1997; in 2014, it’s a mantra more likely to be heard in the offices of television commissioning editors as they seek to tap into this public fascination. So, what’s it all about?

“No one expected Educating Essex to be so popular,” admits Andrew Mackenzie, the programme’s executive producer. “There was a truism in telly at the time that education doesn’t rate; there had been Jamie’s Dream School (in which Oliver hired celebrities to tutor failing GCSE students), which did OK but not amazingly. Educating Essex did quite well and was critically well received, but Educating Yorkshire went off the scale, becoming Channel 4’s most popular programme.”

Part of the shows’ success has been in their upbeat storytelling. “The original series was commissioned by someone who felt very passionately that teachers were like nurses and the police... linchpins of society who were doing heroic deeds that were not really appreciated,” says Mackenzie. “We make a point of picking schools that are good or outstanding, so we can’t ever claim that’s it’s typical of the whole comprehensive system.”

In fact, teachers such as Mr Drew, erstwhile deputy head of Passmores School in Harlow, which featured in Educating Essex, and Mr Burton, Year 10 English teacher at Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury, the setting for Educating Yorkshire, have become not only minor celebrities but an inspiration to others.

“I believe that applications for becoming a teacher do spike every time that we’re on air,” says Mackenzie, who also points out that applications to join the Royal Marines increased when Royal Marine Commando School, another of his series, went out over the summer. He singles out Mr Bispham, the new teacher in Educating the East End, who formerly worked in politics. “He watched Educating Essex and that inspired him to apply to the Teach First scheme. A weird irony is that, three years later, we rock up and he’s going to be in Educating the East End.”

The status of teachers in this country is admittedly coming from a low base, culturally at least. In the late 1960s, Malcolm McDowell mowed down his teachers with a machine gun in the film If, while Alice Cooper, in Schools Out, charged that “Schools be blown to pieces” and Pink Floyd told teachers to “leave them kids alone”. But then the remote and rigid, cane-wielding beak, animated by Gerald Scarfe in the video for “Another Brick in the Wall”, now seems to belong to a pre-historic era. Indeed, today’s teachers are more likely to be down with the kids and when it was first aired in 2011, Educating Essex caused a flurry of negative headlines after one teacher told his pupils to: “Clear off, scumbags.”

“If this is an outstanding school then it doesn’t say much for the rest,” opined a spokesman for the Campaign for Real Education, tut-tutting about “extremely childish behaviour by the teachers”.

It’s this “childishness” that is lampooned by Jack Whitehall in his sitcom Bad Education (BBC3’s most-watched comedy, by the way), in which Whitehall plays a secondary school history teacher even more immature than his pupils. The David Walliams co-scripted Big School is more of an old-school sitcom in more ways than one – it’s a broad BBC1 comedy but it also seems to hark back to Walliams’ own schooldays and feels generally the more nostalgic of the two comedies.

But then a certain amount of recherche du temps perdu also lurks behind our taste for these shows – the same kind of nostalgia that drove the Nineties craze for school discos. As the opening to each week’s episode of Educating the East End puts it: “Your schooldays... love them or loathe them... you never forget them.”

“I think that there is a universality to education and there is a nostalgia,” says Mackenzie. “Most people remember their schooldays, so you can watch any scene and think, ‘Oh, I remember that, at the back of the class in double maths’ and so on. But because this is 2014, you’d look at a scene and go, ‘Oh, my God... that is so completely different’. The way that pupils live life on Facebook or BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) is so completely different from when I was their age.”

And there’s nothing like actually going back into a school building to evoke the wrong kind of nostalgia, reckons Isabel Cook, the producer-director behind Too Tough to Teach?

“I love filming in schools but going back to that environment... it smells like an institution,” she says.

Cook believes that the Educating... series have the advantage over hers in using fixed cameras, which the pupils soon forget about. “You can sometimes see the kids chatting away and then clocking the camera,” she says.

The appeal of such series is that they reveal a secret world, she says; after all, the closest that many parents get to their children’s progress is the termly written report – hardly the sort of two-way conversation we expect in the 21st century. “You don’t know what goes on... your kids go into school and come out, and if they don’t want to talk about it, that’s it. So it’s fascinating to see what does go on and what kids talk about on their own... it’s why Educating Essex and all those programmes have been such a hit because you really do get to see kids in their element.”

It’s something any parent who has accidentally eavesdropped on their children’s conversation will appreciate. There is obviously an inherent voyeuristic element to all this – and an early critic of the education-documentary genre dubbed it “middle-class porn”, as if education was only an obsession for a certain strata of society.

“I wouldn’t say that,” says Cook. “I think it’s fascinating for everyone to see how pupils and teachers work. It’s great to get to that point where you see the boy beneath the behaviour; what lovely people they can be.”

Andrew Mackintosh rejects one idea that I throw at him, that middle-class TV audiences only took to programmes such as his once they realised that they could no longer afford private education. “It’s a very London thing, that”, he says. “Most of the population, when they come to the choice of schools, have one choice and it’s the local school. In London, there is a competitiveness and a middle-class angst.”

Michael Gove might, if he still takes an interest in education, argue that Mackenzie’s programmes are simply providing PR for a broken system that really requires more parental choice. Ofsted might argue (as it did last week) that more needs to be done by headteachers to tackle the sort of low-level, persistently disruptive behaviour that is sometimes witnessed in these shows.

But Mackenzie is having none of it. “There are all sorts of Govian debates but I think that we’re proud of our education system... that you can get brilliant free schooling in Britain and that’s what we hope to reflect: great teachers who are doing an outstanding job, sometimes against the odds.”

It’s a message that the public is receptive to, it seems. Reassurance might be key here – that teachers aren’t infantile and workshy; a cross between Jack Whitehall and Russell Brand; reassurance that bad kids are all right really and nobody is having their head flushed down a toilet.

The debate rages on, as I suspect will this booming television trend.

Too Tough to Teach? starts on Channel 5 tonight at 9pm; Educating the East End continues on Channel 4 on Thursdays at 9pm