The last thing children need is for teachers to be their friends

Forget national curricula, stats, funding crises and language barriers. the single biggest problem in British education is that teachers all want to be best friends with the pupils.

that has been the chief obstacle on Back In time For School, the BBC2 experiment that recreated classrooms from the thirties and Fifties. Modern-day teachers were simply bewildered by the idea of stern discipline and drilling lessons through repetition.

even the smartest students need encouragement to work hard, as we plainly saw in Growing Up Gifted (BBC2).

this documentary was revisiting three bright boys from tough backgrounds whom we first met last year.

Newcastle lad Liam, 14, who hoped to be a doctor, was slipping behind with his homework. He was getting so lazy that he couldn’t even be bothered to come up with decent excuses: ‘I forgot it,’ he shrugged.

His school had just sent him on a two-day tour of Cambridge University, where tutor sand students tried to spark his ambition. But the average undergraduate at Jesus College has scored ten A* results at gCSe. that demands ceaseless hard work.

What Liam needed was a ferocious conventional documentary continues next week, with three academically gifted girls.

A much less conventional kind of storytelling is attempted all this week in Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle (BBC4).

A series of eight 15-minute monologues follows a family through four generations from the Forties to today, beginning with snobbish nurse eunice from Jamaica and her devoted admirer, Cyrus, borrowing every penny he can to impress her.

the playlets are set in dingy sitting rooms, with the noise from neighbouring apartments drifting through the walls. Pick of the bunch so far has been Vinette robinson as Yvonne, eunice’s illegitimate daughter, whose white father abandoned them before she was even born.

More than 30 years after the Windrush docked in 1948, bringing the first post-war Caribbean immigrants, Yvonne is working in a benefits office. racial tensions are growing in eighties Britain, and she feels her black friends and colleagues mistrust her for being mixed race.

When an elderly man she’s never met sits down at her desk, Yvonne guesses she is staring at her birth father — and she goes to pieces. It’s a powerful vignette, a parable about race that doesn’t have to get up on a soapbox.

Later this week, Lenny Henry plays Cyrus as a man of 80. that should be good.