Educating Yorkshire: a 'quietly groundbreaking' documentary

It's been over a decade since "Educating Yorkshire" first "melted the nation's hearts", as we watched English teacher Mr Burton help his stammering pupil, Musharaf Asghar, to "find his voice", said Helen Brown in The Telegraph.

Channel 4 has returned to Thornhill Community Academy where Mr Burton has been promoted to headteacher. "And, despite calls for our education system to be overhauled since Covid, high-school life seems largely unchanged since the cameras last trundled down the corridors."

Mr Burton is still "jovial and dedicated, if a little wearier", and the "sturdy" format of the show remains intact. Much like the first series, the "unheard and unseen" production team behind the camera "do a great job of coaxing moving insight" from individual pupils.

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The revival is "perfectly timed", said Phil Harrison in The Guardian. Earlier this year, Netflix's "Adolescence" prompted a "national orgy of hand-wringing" about the state of education, with its portrayal of "overstretched" teachers as "little more than crowd control" for their maladjusted pupils.

It is comforting, then, that "plenty" has stayed the same at Thornhill since season one. We're introduced to Amy, a "thoroughly eccentric and entirely charming kid grappling with Tourette syndrome and the absurd (but, at 12, deadly serious) micropolitics of schoolyard friendships". And we get a snapshot of dilemmas faced by the "very clever and very disruptive" Riley, who keeps "clowning" in class.

Great care has been taken with the editing "to make these children hilarious, but never the butt of the joke; to show their vulnerability, but also their strength". Gradually a picture emerges of their "muddled impulses and motivations", and the factors that feed into their developing personalities. Many of the kids are supported with carefully tailored pastoral care. "Does it feel like a necessary blast of optimism? You bet it does."

The streamlining of footage into "simple, uplifting narratives" is part of the show's appeal, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But its inability to "scrutinise the institution it depicts" is also what leaves it "ultimately superficial as a work of documentary filmmaking".

Still, there is something "heartening" about watching kids behave in much the same way they always have. Young people are often portrayed as "inscrutable beings, half-human, half-mobile phone – and yet, here, we can see they're just children being children".

The show isn't particularly inventive, said Emily Baker in The i Paper. However, when generational divisions are so "fraught", and "new moral panics" about the world our kids are growing up in crop up constantly, "this understated, quietly groundbreaking documentary is a tonic. Its message is clear and undeniable: the kids are all right."