A class act? No, Beeb must try harder (original) (raw)

This is getting personal. Last week I was writing about Dr Who playing my Dad in Andrew Davies’s The Chatterley Affair. This week I’m watching a documentary series filmed in my daughter Rose’s secondary school, shouting, ‘Look, there’s Rose! Suzanna! Georgia! Zoe!’ and numerous other friends, not to mention familiar teachers. The three-part Don’t Mess with Miss Beckles is one of two BBC Two mini-series directly addressing that greatest of all middle-aged, middle-class anxieties (after red- undancy, declining parental health and kitchen design) — their children’s secondary education. It follows an educational consultant, Yolande Beckles, as she tries to motivate a selection of bright but underperforming teenagers.

The other series is The Schools Lottery, which is really two loosely connected programmes. In the first, seven baby-boomer celebs, including Greg Dyke, Sue Lawley, Jackie Charlton and Sandie Shaw, revisit the days of the 11-plus and their various experiences in grammar schools or secondary moderns. At least this trip down memory lane keeps them away from ice-rinks and ballroom-dancing. Episode two looks at the nightmare of getting your child into a half-way decent state secondary, and what parents will do to achieve this.

This last issue is hardly a new story. I have seen dozens of television reports and articles about it and even wrote one myself a few years ago, after discovering the devious tricks that people were employing to escape the diabolical comprehensives in my old neighbourhood. (One couple even pretended to separate so that the husband could claim he had moved in with a friend in a desirable catchment area.) The new cry, repeated in this programme, is that the postcode game is unjust and socially divisive because middle-class families force up house prices near the good schools, so that the poor families can no longer get in.

Actually this completely misses the point. Many of these “good” schools achieve their good exam results only because they are full of middle-class children. If their demographic balance were to shift drastically, they would soon become what Alastair Campbell described with typical graciousness as “bog-standard comprehensives”. All aspiring families, of whatever social class, want their children to escape the influence of disruptive, anti-academic oiks — it’s just a matter of just how much oikiness they are prepared to tolerate and how much they are willing or able to pay.

I am not for a minute suggesting that children from poor homes don’t need and deserve the best possible education. But what these programmes only begin to scrape at is the central problem: the failure of state schools to solve the problem of educating poor, disaffected children with unsupportive parents who may be actively hostile to the teaching staff. The fate of any school can be determined by the proportion of these children and their influence on the peer-culture of the pupils. Pass a critical mass and effective teaching becomes containment and survival.

Some comprehensive schools have succeeded in cracking the problem (including, it appears from episode two, Sandie Shaw’s former grammar school), and when they do so the results can be spectacular. But until the Government puts its back into identifying how this is done and works out how to reproduce the trick everywhere, aspirant parents who can afford to will continue fleeing elsewhere.

None of these programmes, by the way, explores the other side of the great middle-class educational fault-line: the parents who choose to go private. As the commentary on programme one reflects ruefully, the 1947 state system was devised entirely by people whose families would never use it.

Which brings me to Don’t Mess with Miss Beckles, filmed at Fortismere School in leafy Muswell Hill, North London. The neighbourhood is split down the middle between private and state school families, but full of educational migrants, including my family, who scrambled to purchase property in the Fortismere catchment. This is shrinking into a black hole, by the way, and our house, which was well inside it when we moved in 11 years ago, is now out in the cold. Presumably the intake must be getting ever richer and more aspirant.

The programme describes it as a “typical suburban comprehensive”, which is true if “typical” means full of the children of actors, media types, academics, teachers, designers, rock musicians and any other kind of trendy ex-hippy liberals you care to mention. The programme claims that most of the girls want to be singers and the boys all form bands, which is not too wide of the mark.

This means that the disaffected lethargy of teenagers can be compounded by inherited anti-authoritarianism and an ability to argue the back leg off a donkey. This presents particular problems for the teaching staff, who have to meet the more traditional needs of the local council estate children while coping with the mouthy wiseacres. Miss Beckles has her work cut out.

The trouble is that her skills were honed by extricating bright, but disaffected, black children from schools in less affluent areas. She steams in, all no-nonsense common sense and earthy jollity, like a cross between Trisha and Rustie Lee, asserting important, if blindingly obvious, truths about making work-schedules (which the school actually tries to inculcate from Year 7 on), selfdiscipline, meeting deadlines, taking regular exercise and showing respect. Her target is as much what she sees as irresponsibly unfocused liberal parenting as the teenagers or their teachers.

The sad thing is that it doesn’t really work very well, especially as one or two of the families have deep-rooted emotional problems that intervention from Miss Beckles even seems to make worse. What may have been conceived as an educational Supernanny turns into an observational documentary about complex problems that are seemingly intractable. There is a reference to the school’s above-average exam results being heavily supported by private tutoring, but some possible shortcomings in the ethos of the school — which I happen to know have been a source of concern to the governors — are not even addressed. Nor does the series give any real sense of how excellent much of the teaching is.

Both these series raise far more questions than they answer, and will doubtless raise a bee-swarm of controversy, with educational zealots of all camps finding ammunition to reinforce their prejudices. How I wish that one day someone would have the patience to get stuck into these issues with a bit more depth and purpose.