User Reviews

Unrealistic, woolly and unsatisfying. Have the writers ever worked in a school? The characters were caricatures and lacked any depth. The turning point created an unrealistic change of behaviour from the students. The action was repetitive and boring. We didn't need to see lesson after lesson ad infinitum to get the gist of what was going on. It was totally unclear as to what happened at the end. I hate this type of production, where the majority of the time is spent labouring a point, and then all sorts of information is crammed into a dialogue-less minute in a concluding thirty seconds. It's a shame that this play bucked the trend in this current series of "Moving On"; most of the others have been good to excellent.

Like another reviewer, I wondered if the writers had ever been inside a school. I worked for the first 11 of my 25 years as a teacher in state Secondary schools, very much like the one in this episode. I taught science, not english, but my first term was extremely hard work and my teacher training had not really prepared me for the realities of life in the classroom. I received little support from colleagues, like Amani, the young teacher in this episode. But that was back in the early 80s. I doubt very much whether any school today would offer as little support to a newly qualified teacher as this one. Apart from that, this episode was seriously flawed. We saw the teacher in front of just one class (Year 11s). We saw the first couple of minutes of several lessons. What happened for the rest of each lesson? What other classes did she teach (I'm guessing there would have been at least 10 other classes)? How come no one had intervened after a whole term, not even to observe her teaching (as would happen in her probationary year); Amani's father came for Christmas and she continued to have problems after that. I really don't believe those Y11s would have changed their attitude when they discovered she had cancer, well, not all of them. But worst of all, these same young people, including one who had had an exclusion, were shown sitting their English Lit. GCSE. They seem to have had only a few weeks of teaching in the entire year, but she was such an excellent teacher she got them prepared to sit the exam in minimal time? No. One final cringe came when the Head presented Amani with £800 which the staff and impoverished pupils had collected. Who would give cash to someone in that situation? It's unbelievable. As a vehicle for the plot- an honest person tells a lie when faced by extreme conditions, then is forced to reveal that they lied and face the consequences- this was one badly written episode. I would have given a lower score than 2 out of 10, but the performance of Anita Dobson as the Head was excellent. Skip this episode.