Pupils set to educate the nation on realities of school life

Life inside a Yorkshire secondary school is to hit TV screens tonight in a new documentary. John Roberts reports on the school’s hopes for the show.
Shaunie, Amy, Max, Lauren, Hannah and Mr SteerShaunie, Amy, Max, Lauren, Hannah and Mr Steer
Shaunie, Amy, Max, Lauren, Hannah and Mr Steer

AT the start of the year Thornhill Community Academy had good reason to celebrate as the latest school league tables revealed it had the most improved GCSE results in Yorkshire.

Now at the beginning of a new term the staff and students are preparing for a very different kind of scrutiny, as their school is shown on TV tonight in the first episode of the new Educating Yorkshire series.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It is the follow up to the Channel 4 series Educating Essex which won a Bafta and saw Passmores Academy, in Harlow, praised for the way it supported some of its most difficult-to-teach students.

In January, 64 cameras were fixed up around the corridors, classrooms and offices of the Thornhill Academy, near Dewsbury. Thousands of hours of footage have been condensed down into eight one-hour long episodes.

With the first one being screened tonight the academy’s head teacher Jonny Mitchell admits to being nervous about how viewers will respond to the show.

The trailers alone have already brought the pupils into the national limelight with hundreds of people on Twitter discussing the eyebrows of 14-year-old Bailey Hill who is captured on camera proudly telling her classmates that she has “shaved them all off.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“Bailey has dealt with it really well,” says Mr Mitchell. “She has read the tweets and laughed it off. I hope the series shows our students to be the honest, raw and decent kids that we know them to be.”

Pupils who feature heavily on the show have given their consent to be involved and have also received advice from the production company TwoFour on how they use social media sites.

Staff at the school will also have to come to terms with getting recognised when they’re out and about, as at its peak Educating Essex attracted around 1.7 million viewers.

Ahead of the show being broadcast Mr Mitchell had just over 80 followers on Twitter, while Vic Goddard, the head teacher who starred on the Educating Essex series, has more than 8,000. “It has already started,” says Mr Mitchell. “People at the supermarket have started saying ‘You’re going to be on the TV aren’t you?’ I am just saying it is my twin brother for the time being.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Mr Mitchell and teachers at the school have seen the first few episodes before they are broadcast and he believes it is an accurate reflection of what happens within the school. “There is obviously an edit. So there is more happening in an hour. One episode shows pupils having a scuffle in the corridor and viewers might get the impression that this is happening at the school all the time. Of course it doesn’t, but any head teacher who says they don’t have any fighting at all in their school is basically lying.”

Other hard-hitting story lines in the opening show include allegations of racist abuse by a pupil and complaints that snowballs had been thrown at pensioners. However Mr Mitchell is confident that the series will show how well the school copes with such incidents and expects good behaviour from its pupils.

“It became quite clear that the production company wanted to work with us and were not interested in selling us or our students down the river for the sake of ratings.”

He says one of the concerns he has heard is there might be an anti-northern snobbery or bias in the way viewers respond to show. But what was far more important to him when he decided to let the TV cameras in was the reaction of local parents.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

In the opening episode Mr Mitchell tells the cameras that he hopes to make Thornhill Community Academy the school of choice for parents in the surrounding areas. He said he wanted to challenge the perception of parents who said: “I am not sending my child there because it’s Thornhill.”

He adds: “When you think of the money schools can pay for advertising to promote themselves we have had this opportunity to have this exposure and I hope people look at us and say ‘yes this is a good school.’”

As a man born and raised in Dewsbury he is also aware that Thornhill Community Academy has a chance to show the town in a positive light after years of negative publicity surrounding the Shannon Matthews case and before that the 7/7 bombers.

The school is unusual as it has an almost 50/50 split between white and Asian pupils. Staff say the way it brings children from different backgrounds together make it a “jewel” in the middle of their community.

Now they hope the nation will agree.

Related topics: