Videos and documentaries about education

A timeline of documentaries about education in England and Wales from 2010 to 2019.

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

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
BBC2010Unequal opportunities
Sugata Mitra2010New experiments in self-teaching
Robinson, Ken2010Changing Education Paradigms
BBC2011who gets the best jobs
C42011educating essex
Breaks, Suli2012Why I hate school but love education
C42013educating yorkshire (Mushy)
Logan Laplante2013Hackschooling makes me happy
C42014Educating the east end
C4 Unreported World2014hong kong’s tiger tutors
BBC2014Our School
C42015Educating Cardiff
BBC2015Are out kids tough enough?
BBC2015Tough young teachers
BBC2016excluded
BBC2016School Swap: Korea Style
BBC2017Will Britain ever have a black primeminister?
C42017Educating Geater Manchester
BBC, Panorama2018Academy trusts failing their schools
BBC2018School
BBC2019How to Break into the Elite
BBC, Panorama2019inside the school’s cuts crisis
C42019The 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.

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