Last Updated on September 28, 2023 by Karl Thompson
There are several useful documentaries available for teaching and learning the education module as part of A-level sociology and this post simply provides a few links to some of them. The easiest way to access the links to them is to go via my Google Spread Sheet – which contains a lot more than just video resources btw…
Education Documentaries 2010- 2019
Where possible the links take you through to the actual videos, but in some cases they aren’t available anymore, mainly thanks to the BBC being an anachronism which can’t seem to store documentaries even though we have no real choice but to pay our licence fee, in which case the link goes to the programme homepage, or Wiki in the case of the ‘Educating series.
| Channel/ author/ presenter | year …. | Title/ link |
| BBC | 2010 | Unequal opportunities |
| Sugata Mitra | 2010 | New experiments in self-teaching |
| Robinson, Ken | 2010 | Changing Education Paradigms |
| BBC | 2011 | who gets the best jobs |
| C4 | 2011 | educating essex |
| Breaks, Suli | 2012 | Why I hate school but love education |
| C4 | 2013 | educating yorkshire (Mushy) |
| Logan Laplante | 2013 | Hackschooling makes me happy |
| C4 | 2014 | Educating the east end |
| C4 Unreported World | 2014 | hong kong’s tiger tutors |
| BBC | 2014 | Our School |
| C4 | 2015 | Educating Cardiff |
| BBC | 2015 | Are out kids tough enough? |
| BBC | 2015 | Tough young teachers |
| BBC | 2016 | excluded |
| BBC | 2016 | School Swap: Korea Style |
| BBC | 2017 | Will Britain ever have a black primeminister? |
| C4 | 2017 | Educating Geater Manchester |
| BBC, Panorama | 2018 | Academy trusts failing their schools |
| BBC | 2018 | School |
| BBC | 2019 | How to Break into the Elite |
| BBC, Panorama | 2019 | inside the school’s cuts crisis |
| C4 | 2019 | The great British school swap |
How useful are education documentaries for teaching A-level sociology?
Well, it depends on the documentary! Personally I’ve used most of the above docs in my teaching over the last few years. I tend to find ‘single issue’ documentaries more useful, such as ‘How to Break into the Elite’, whereas the ‘fly on the wall documentaries’ are maybe less useful as valid texts but more useful for getting students to think about research methods.
A timeline of education documentaries
NB I know it probably looks hideous if you’re viewing this on a tablet or a phone, but if you actually click through to the Tableau site, it looks a lot better. Just an experiment, not sure it worked TBH!
Changing Education Paradigms
An excellent video criticising modernist perspectives on education.
Signposting and related posts
This material is mainly relevant to the sociology of education module, part of the A-level sociology specification.