OU on the BBC: School Day - Making School Day

Used with permission

I work at the BBC in Bristol with a group of filmmakers who specialise in making observational documentaries. Last year I made a film with the Open University about a day in the life of the NHS called A Picture of Health, which went out on BBC ONE in April 2003. The Head of BBC One must have liked the result because she asked us to look at Britain's schools in the same way.

So, last September, our team assembled and we started the mammoth task of trying to work out who and what to put in the programme. My Assistant Producer, Esther Stone, used to be a Deputy Head, but most of us on the team were new to working in schools. Our first task, then, was to talk to as many people as possible working in the UK's schools and colleges, and to listen to what they had to say about education.

For two months we talked to as many different people as we could - teachers, heads, pupils, unions, academics - many people kindly spared us time whilst we fired questions at them. We also sat at the back of lots of classes in primary and secondary schools, up and down the country, to try and find out what life was really like at the chalkface.

The picture that we built up was a much gentler one than is often portrayed in the media. Most of the pupils we met were lively and fun, most of the teachers put enormous amounts of energy into their work. We found many frustrations; but we also found an extraordinary commitment and a sense of idealism which often survived despite the daily challenges.

During our research, we also had to get to grips with the wide variety of issues being debated in education today - standards, inclusion, teaching methods, behaviour and funding - as well as the diversity of educational approaches in the nations that make up the United Kingdom. Even within England it came as a big surprise to me to find the huge variety of approaches of different LEAs.

We weren't making Panorama, so the issues always took a second place to building a fair portrait of our country's schools. We tried hard to weave in the bigger story where we could but it is the great advantage of having a website attached to a programme which allows a deeper understanding of the complexities to be examined.

Having worked out what we were trying to show, the next job for us was to find the people who would wish to appear in our film. We aimed to get as wide a range of participants as possible - different approaches, different parts of the UK, different specialities from across the profession. Some people run a mile at the though of having a camera pointed at them, but for others it feels the right thing to do. By the end of December a dozen people had very kindly signed up to be filmed - so then we had to decide on a day.

I chose January 15th, the date that the league tables for GCSE performance were being announced. As a filmmaker, that was very useful for me because I could use it as a way to bind together the different stories. I guessed that people up and down England would be talking about league tables - whether they loved them or hated them.

Our sort of film-making is sometimes called "fly on the wall" - but personally I think that is a bit of a daft name. Three people standing in the corner of a room with a camera and a sound boom are anything but tiny flies. The way we aim to approach our filming is through openness and trust. It's only then that people behave naturally in front of the cameras.

The best way to get that trust is to spend time with people. All our directors filmed with our contributors before the big day, getting everybody used to having a camera around. However when the filming has started we also try our best to blend into the background. We don't have lights, we don't shout action and we never call people "darling".

The actual filming day went very smoothly. I was filming David Miliband in Whitehall, and I was dreading getting an emergency call from an irate Head Teacher or a sobbing Director during the day - but all was bliss and the mobile remained silent.

The Directors returned from the length and breadth of the UK with over a hundred hours of rushes between them. Then the Editor and the Producer spent sight weeks locked away in a small dark editing room weaving it all together. Some of the stories that we filmed on the day didn't make it into the final film - I think we were rather over optimistic about how much we could squeeze into a single hour of television!

School Day in more depth: