Leah and Courtney, two disaffected pupils at Willows high school in Cardiff, are late for period one science. The cameras capture them as they sidle into school and slip into class, surly and disruptive, as the teacher battles on.
Later Courtney tries to explain. “When I wake up, I have to sit there for like 10 minutes to actually wake up.” She giggles. “Well, I just don’t wake up,” says Leah. “You have to jump on her to wake her,” says Courtney, with mock gravity. The surly girls turn out to be sweet and funny; they have complicated lives and feelings, and the viewer is hooked.
We may be nearing the end of the summer holidays, but the television schedules have barely left the classroom.
A couple of weeks ago viewers watched Chinese teachers at work in a Hampshire secondary school in BBC2’s three-part series Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School.
Before that there was Channel 4’s Sex in Class, in which a Belgian sexologist reinvented sex education at a Lancashire secondary school. We’ve had School Swap, ITV’s two-part documentary in which a headteacher and three pupils from a comprehensive swap with their counterparts from a private school.
Then this week, following the success of Channel 4’s Educating Essex, Yorkshire and the East End, we had the first episode of a new eight-part series, Educating Cardiff, which is where we meet Leah and Courtney.
The appetite among television commissioners for programmes about schools appears insatiable. In addition to the flurry of documentaries, schools feature in dramas such as Waterloo Road and sitcoms such as Big School and Bad Education (now a movie too).
“They’ve become the new cooking programme,” says Vic Goddard, principal of Passmores academy in Harlow, which was the subject of Educating Essex, the first in the series. “It’s a common language, isn’t it?
“If you are a TV executive, you want to appeal to as many people as possible. Everybody’s been to school and everybody has an opinion about school. It’s an obvious thing you all have in common.”
Alex Kohler, Educating Cardiff series producer and director, agrees: “We’ve all been there before. There are so many things about these series that bring back memories – good or bad – that everyone can relate to. Everyone remembers their school days.”
It’s particularly fascinating for parents of teenagers, who may know little about what goes on in their child’s life at school. “I’ve got kids, and I’ve no idea what they get up to in school really,” says Kohler.
“You can only know so much as a parent. So it’s fascinating to see what goes on in a school, and how they are being taught.”
The arts broadcaster and writer Mark Lawson says: “TV executives are always on the lookout for subject matter that they hope will be universal. In an increasingly fragmenting society, those are hard to find but pretty much everyone in the audience has experience of schooling.
“I also think for channels such as BBC2 and Channel 4, which may sometimes be a bit queasy of reality TV, a school-based show allows a veneer of social seriousness and of being, in two senses, educative.”
Joy Ballard is the Emmerdale- and Mills & Boon-loving headteacher at Willows high, in the Tremorfa area of Cardiff, whom viewers will get to know well in the coming weeks. She too hopes there’s an educational dimension to the fly-on-the-wall documentary series – not just about schools and teaching, but the reality of life as a teenager. “I don’t see it as entertainment,” she says.
“There’s a child in every episode who is going through such difficult things. I think it’s really difficult being a teenager, or being a parent of a teenager. These things can be informative and educational as well.
“These programmes show there’s a great hope in our young people and what they can achieve against the odds. My kids are like superhumans, they show remarkable persistence and determination.”
For Kohler too, it’s the pupils that make the programme. “The kids are great. They are always themselves. Once we’ve got our cameras in they forget in a few days.”
They forget, and we see tears (Leah’s are particularly affecting as she reveals her innermost fears), and plenty of cheek (“How come we get called sheep-shaggers?” asks one innocent). Then there’s the enormous commitment of the teachers who touch these children’s lives. (Mr Hennessy calls Leah every morning to try to get her to school.)
You’d think it would drive up teacher recruitment, but Goddard says he’s seen no surge in applications and he’s still short of a maths teacher for September (like many other schools). The series had little impact on pupil applications either: the school was oversubscribed before the programme went out and numbers have remained pretty stable.
What Goddard is most pleased with is the way the series challenges some of the stereotypes that are perpetuated in the media about teenagers and provides an insight into the difficult lives many vulnerable young people lead. He has received thousands of emails from parents, many thanking him for helping them to understand and talk with their child.
The best programmes about education, he says, show the joy and the pain of schools. “Sometimes I come home and I feel like my heart’s been ripped out.” Other days it bursts with joy, he says.
For him, one of the most ill-advised education programmes was Jamie’s Dream School, when chef Jamie Oliver got together a number of celebrities to set up an experimental school to inspire a group of teenagers. Among the staff were Alastair Campbell teaching politics, David Starkey teaching history, and Rolf Harris in the art department. “It was embarrassing. That was a low point for me,” says Goddard.
At the time the Educating Essex series went out, Goddard and his school attracted some less than flattering coverage from parts of the media. But his participation in the series has resulted in opportunities for the school and its students that would never otherwise have been available to them. “Our school has a voice. It would not have done before.”
Joe Bispham, one of the teacher stars of Educating the East End, reflecting on his TV experience in the TES this week, said: “I have always bemoaned the lack of understanding of what happens in our schools and the fact that we allow certain elements of the press to hijack discussions about education.
“The chance to be in an Educating series is a chance to reset the debate and tell the truth about state education. I am sure that our colleagues at Willows high school are going to use this special opportunity to do the same.
“Nothing could be more important in the current climate. I am excited to see them and their pupils prove to the world that the British education system, although imperfect, is a wonderful and robust introduction to the world and something that we should all be proud of.”
Bispham’s moment of TV fame has come to an end; Ballard’s has just begun. Is there anything so far that she regrets about inviting a TV crew into her school for a year?
She thinks for a nano-second, then says: “I was quite shocked when I saw the size of my bottom on TV. I am never going to ask anyone again: ‘Does my bum look big in this?’”
