An intriguing primer for a looming career crisis
‘Harrop Fold School is now under new leadership.” The real story behind Educating Greater Manchester (Channel 4) came at the end of its opening episode. Returning for retakes might have suggested a lack of imagination, but this second visit to the Salford secondary reaped unexpected rewards in late 2018 when it was put into special measures and its head, Drew Povey, was suspended for allegedly falsifying attendance records. Povey subsequently resigned, claiming to have been the victim of a “personal vendetta”. All this lies in the future; in the meantime, I couldn’t help scrutinising footage for evidence of a school on the precipice.
Largely to no avail, it has to be said. This was business as usual for a series which has long juggled gritty reality with heart-wrenching personal stories and knockabout playground silliness, somehow tying it all up into a neatly inspirational package by the end of the hour. We saw the challenging behaviour of Jacob from Year 7 – munching sweets in class, swearing in Spanish – put in the context of his dyslexia, and his attitude transformed by a Povey pep talk where the latter revealed he, too, was dyslexic. “[I feel] better, knowing someone with dyslexia has gone all the way to the top,” Jacob remarked, adding with killer timing, “Well, sort of.”
Katelyn, familiar from the previous series, was still struggling to focus on her studies with newly diagnosed ADHD, but Povey stepped in (again) to inspire her to pursue studying to be a midwife by taking responsibility for her actions. A knife scare was traced to one of the school’s leading lights who had brought in a trick knife and (on Povey’s recommendation) redeemed himself by posting a cautionary Youtube video. The only Povey-free zone was the crackdown on sales of sweets, where kids raking in £25 a day could have taught The Wire’s corner king Bodie a thing or two; the staff, meanwhile, drew tactics straight from the Jimmy Mcnulty school of intel gathering. It was great fun.
On this evidence, Povey’s pastoral methods were hard to fault, some excruciating banter about Hitler and diarrhoea aside. So what went wrong? Did something get lost in the edit? His journey from here to “influential leadership authority with a unique multi-sector viewpoint on creating innovative and sustainable change” (according to the profile on his website for his current role as a coach and mentor) will be an intriguing one.
The disgrace of Aung San Suu Kyi seems baffling. How can a Nobel Peace Prize winner and champion for non-violent resistance, democracy and tolerance be delivering tone-deaf pronouncements at The Hague, defending the military junta which imprisoned her?
Aung San Suu Kyi: Fall of an Icon (BBC Two) was an impeccably researched, thoughtful effort to resolve the conundrum. Wrangling friends and sceptics, it detailed with great care and fairness her decades under house arrest and rise to de facto head of state of Myanmar, as well as her navigation of a parliamentary system stacked in favour of the military. Suu Kyi’s tragedy was that, in using that keenly pragmatic political mind to effect glacial change on the regime from within, she became its tool.
From Bono to Obama, many queued up for the benediction of this magnetic figure. The generals basked in reflected glory, securing an easing of sanctions from western powers in part responsible for her “fall” for idealising an image she could never live up to. “We put the bumper stickers on the back of the car,” said Derek Mitchell, former US Ambassador to Myanmar, “but we may not have entirely understood what her agenda was.”
Nor do we still. But if Suu Kyi’s inner life remained opaque, her attitude to the Rohingya is transparently indefensible. The army has subjected Myanmar’s minority Muslim population to what, by any reasonable estimate, is genocide, yet Sung Kyi initially avoided “taking sides” before abdicating moral leadership entirely, crying “fake news” about credible evidence of atrocities. “You will accept there is a perception that global Muslim power is very great,” she remarked in one interview. It was quite Trumpian.
With the junta in control of the military, police and judiciary, Suu Kyi’s room for manoeuvre has always been limited, yet has she ever truly exploited her popularity, especially regarding the Rohingya? Fall of an Icon left as many questions as answers, but at least began to make sense of an apparently inexplicable situation.
Educating Greater Manchester ★★★ Aung San Suu Kyi: Fall of an Icon ★★★★