I’ve just sat through the episode of Waterloo Road on IPlayer (the things I do for home education). Where do I start?
So we’ve got the broken family, where dad has just reappeared on the scene after 12 years absent (no sign of mum, presumably that was explained in a previous episode). Daughter is attending a school where there’s a gun incident, so dad pulls her out and sets up some kind of crammer lessons, with multiple pcs in his dining room for the local home educators (who all appear to be the same age as his daughter. Bizarre.)
Daughter gets sick of this, breaks out of the house and runs back into school to her friends, and gives the impression that dad is beating her, backed up when he arrives and manhandles her into (very nice) car and drives off. Despite the headmistress pointing out that there are procedures for this kind of thing it’s deputy headmaster to the rescue, because he’s Neil Morrissey, and he can. There are many doleful quotes about how home education can’t possibly match school that I couldn’t bring myself to remember.
When he gets to the house he manages to talk the father into coming for a tour around the school and to talk to the headmistress that afternoon. (I’m amazed that a deputy head can just wander off for hours like that or reschedule his time, it appears that this school is not utilising its senior staff particularly effectively). During the tour dad discovers that his daughter plays football and they witness a rowdy music lesson that he says he can beat at home, along with persuading her to excel generally rather than just being a good student.
A bit later they walk past the head of pastoral care room, just as a teenage boy bursts out shouting that he’s going to be a father. The timing is impeccable. Somehow this then morphs into a roof top protest via text message around the school (schools all around the country breathing a sigh of relief about their mobiles in classrooms ban) which disintegrates when it becomes apparent that she isn’t being beaten after all. At this point she threatens to throw herself off the roof, but don’t worry, Neil Morrisey can solve this too.
At the end father and daughter are reconciled and he agrees to step back a bit, it’s all just been an overreaction on his part trying to make up for being absent for 12 years.
Can anyone say cliche?
I honestly am not sure that it’s worth complaining about if it were not being screened at the same time as the review – I think we do risk coming over too Mary Whitehouse if we’re not careful. It all smacks of those articles in the paper about brave parents giving up their lives to home educate their darling because the nasty LA won’t give them places in their preferred school. You know the ones I mean where they all sit gazing soulfully into the camera with books scattered around a table in front of them.
Sigh.
ETA – from the BBC standards website.
Impartiality & drama
When drama realistically portrays living people or contemporary situations in a controversial way it has an obligation to be accurate and to do justice to the main facts. If the drama is accurate but is a partisan or partial portrayal of a controversial subject we should normally only proceed if we believe that its insight and excellence justify the platform offered. Even so we must ensure that its nature is clearly signposted to our audience. When a drama is likely to prove particularly controversial we must consider whether to offer an alternative view in other output on the same service.
I would guess that they don’t think of that portrayal of home education as controversial 🙁
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