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.
