Jamie's Dream School Review

Good intentions drip from this programme like one of Jamie’s rich sauces and I have found myself so compelled by this telling insight into teachers and the taught that I am yet to miss an episode.

I wanted to wait to see how the experiment unfolded before setting down any thoughts, but find myself struggling to make sense of it, and not least the worrying allusions to the future. 

I went to six different schools, so have had a broad taste of the education spectrum through the 1990s.  The last school I went to was then ranked in the bottom five in the country.  I now teach in a prison so know what it is to have challenging students with sob stories and tough backgrounds. What concerns me most about the Dream School experiment is that it seems to take as its basis the fact that kids go to school to be entertained rather than educated.

Alarm bells should begin to sound at this premise, but Dream School goes even further, almost completely devolving the students responsibility for their own learning onto the school.  ‘We’re just not reaching them’ Jamie often exclaims and the kids lap it up.

As American Entrepreneur Alvin Hall said after his own turbulent class, these kids are ‘not bright’, but they are smart enough to see that they hold all the power.  They seem to be allowed to come and go as they please and pretty much do what they want.  The uniform policy seemed to have quietly disintegrated by day two without any hint of a challenge.

Such discipline as is imposed is either misguided like the efforts of David Starkey, toothless like those of the school’s long suffering headmaster and all ultimately undermined by the overly pally, hyper sentimental mumblings of Oliver himself. 

David Starky rightly came in for criticism after his snide approach to his first lesson but his underlying instinct to challenge the pandering, softball, kid-gloved approach to dealing with hard, worldly, system-wise young men and women was not wrong.

If initiatives like Dream School are to really offer these kids a chance, then the approach must change.  What many of the students clearly lack is not likely to be solved by a day’s sailing with Ellen MacArthur.  To my mind, what is missing from Dream School is a bottom line recognition of the value of education for its own sake – a problem not helped by multi-millionaire Oliver’s constant reminders of how ‘rubbish I was in school’.

The battles the teachers fight for basic respectful behaviour from their students would be aided by an attempt to address this problem, alongside an admission that in the real world education is not always going to be exciting all of the time.

Dream School will not help these kids get a job if they cannot apply themselves to tasks they find challenging or tasks that have not been specially designed to 'reach' them, cannot go five minutes without a fag and cannot tolerate any form of subordination without complaining that their rights are being unfairly curtailed. 

The real world will not give the constant one-to-one attention and praise that some of them crave or reward them for completing basic tasks without giving up.  The real world will not care if, as volatile student Harlem is fond of saying ‘that’s just the way I am.’  The real world is unfair and in large part uncompromising.  It will sack them and mean it.

So if not education, perhaps the value of Dream School might be in teaching application instead.  Many of the students are not, on the face of it, massively academic, but if they can be taught to stick at something even when it’s hard, there might yet be some hope.

So Dream School for all its dewy eyed sentimentality and naïve innocence is without a doubt, compelling TV.  I worry that unless the final episode pulls a rabbit out of a hat, the programme will serve as a damning indictment of this new, lost, benefit generation and of their parents and the various systems complicit in their predicament.  They are a generation that has already been sold no end of dreams via the Reality TV mentality of easy, overnight success.

So in this heralded age of austerity, I suspect that young people don’t need a dream from Jamie, they need a dose of reality.




Many thanks to C4 for images.


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