The first episode of this excellent documentary series dragged us into the depressing reality of an academy classroom – where the kids are not all right, and neither are the grownups
‘My heart is racing. I feel sick.” Meet Chloe, a 16-year-old student about to sit her mock GCSEs. She has anxiety, which appears to be at epidemic levels across final-year classrooms and staff rooms at the Castle school in south Gloucestershire (although it is conspicuously absent from the trust’s boardroom). She has had three panic attacks this week. She walks out of class, then flees the exam hall, before being coaxed into sitting the test in a room on her own. As the camera pans away from the “Shhhh … exams in progress” sign tacked to the door (which is enough to make this school leaver’s belly curdle with terror), we hear Chloe softly wailing her signature refrain behind the door: “I’m going to fail.” Which, judging by the first episode of School (BBC Two), may as well be the motto of our education system.
This excellent if grim six-part documentary comes from the team behind Hospital. There is only one way to watch these forensic examinations of our privatised-by-stealth education and health systems: head in hands, guts churning with stress. Emitting the occasional bout of foul invective under your breath. Not unlike the average teacher’s day, then. School follows the fortunes, or rather deficits, of three secondary schools run by a multi-academy trust over an academic year. The Castle school seems pretty generic. Gulls wheeling over a menacing concrete playground. An atmosphere laden with tension, and difficult hormones. Penis graffiti. Fire-alarm antics. Frazzled teachers saying things such as: “No, your eye hasn’t been poked out,” over and over again in a maddeningly calm voice. Plus ça change and all that. Except, of course, that everything has changed. Four years ago, the Castle became an academy. Since then, as Andy Grant, one of the quietly heroic teachers now routinely missing performance targets and taking pay cuts, puts it: “There is a general feeling that this school is falling apart.”
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