Schools’ programmes
As the BBC delivers the biggest education programming in its history to help children learn from home during the pandemic, we remember schools’ TV from our childhood
As families get to grips once again with home schooling, millions are turning on the TV to access the BBC’s new offering of curriculum-based schools programming.
From words and numbers for little ones to geography, science, history and lots more for the older children, this may be the BBC’s biggest ever educational offering on TV but it’s certainly nothing new.
Whatever your age, chances are you’ll remember the educational TV that punctuated our own schooldays, when a heavy, wood-encased television on a trolley was dragged into the classroom or assembly to the accompaniment of excited chatter. It then often took more than one teacher and the school caretaker to get the thing working while the noise of fidgety children reached fever pitch! At last, the screen would crackle into life, just in time to see the television clock count down to the start of the programme.
Broadcasts for schools have actually been around since 1924 when the BBC started educational radio programmes targeted at classrooms. Following the world wars which cemented the BBC’s role as a public service, they then tried educational TV programmes, initially trialled in 1952 by transmitting broadcasts from Alexandra Palace to just six local schools using a wavelength not otherwise in use.
Five years later, the BBC Schools output was officially launched nationwide but not everyone was happy about it – the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time said it would be a, “perfect disaster” because it “drove a wedge between the teacher and the child.”
However, television as a teaching tool quickly took off. Early broadcasts introduced children to shows such