It’s been 14 years since Educating Essex first aired on Channel 4, giving audiences up and down the country a peek into the lives of the students and teachers in a state secondary school. The docuseries proved a hit, and yielded four follow-ups – focusing on schools in Yorkshire, London’s East End, Cardiff, and Greater Manchester. A second series returning to the same Mancunian school was cut short when the headmaster resigned amid an unrelated scandal; a truncated four-episode season aired in late 2020.
In this light, it is probably easy to understand why producers would choose to return to Yorkshire, and the Dewsbury-based Thornhill Community Academy, for their new reboot. Back in 2013, Educating Yorkshire was an unmitigated hit, earning the show a National Television Award, with diligent teacher Matthew Burton in particular charming viewers. Twelve years later, Burton is now headteacher of the school – though the daily struggles of students and staff are mostly the same as ever.
The first episode of the new Educating Yorkshire focuses on two year 8 children – Amy, a bright but self-critical girl with Tourette’s Syndrome, and Riley, a boy who keeps acting out in class. We get a short snapshot of their lives and dilemmas, and watch as the school faculty attempts to help them. For Amy, it’s a social problem – the turbulent friendship dynamics that are so common among teenagers. Riley, on the other hand, seems at first to be a classic case of ADHD – but, after some questioning, it seems that the real problem might be dietary. It ain’t his noggin; it’s his Weetabix.
A friend of mine who works in the education system once described the Educating series as being “pure ideology” in its depiction of schools as “big, happy families”. It’s true enough that there are limits to the programme’s documentarian purview; there are hard boundaries on just how much it’s willing to scrutinise the institution it depicts. Educating Yorkshire is accessible and streamlined in its presentation of the material, organising its footage into simple, uplifting narratives. This is what made the show so popular, but it’s also what prevents it from being great, and leaves it ultimately superficial as a work of documentary filmmaking.
There is, however, an insuppressible human complexity to the social ecosystem of a school – and Educating Yorkshire has life in its margins. There is, too, something heartening about watching young adolescents behave in much the same way that young adolescents always have. Generations Z and Alpha are often framed as sort of inscrutable beings, half-human, half-mobile phone – and yet, here, we can see they’re just children being children. Contemporary school problems, such as vapes and AI, do rear their head, but Educating Yorkshire goes some way to rebuking some of the worst scare stories you read. The kids, it seems, are still alright – these ones at least.
