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The age-old depictions of teaching on the big screen give a false picture of the profession. It's no wonder recruitment is a problem, argues Stephen Glynn
What can cinema teach us about teaching? Hollywood has never been much help: it either shows the profession to be a breeze with plentiful downtime - as with Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher and Jack Black in School of Rock - or dangerous or demoralising but ripe for the courageous non-conformist: think Michelle Pfeiffer winning over the gang-warring kids in Dangerous Minds.
Such representations marginalise the mechanics of "real" teaching in favour of broad-stroke displays of how its inspirational practitioners remain children at heart and/or refuse the creativity-stifling system.
But what of British cinema? Does it eschew the exaggerations of Hollywood for a more realistic portrayal of teaching that acts as a champion for getting people into the job?
For my latest book, The British School Film, I researched about 100 films that include secondary education in the UK to analyse just how British cinema has projected our profession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, class, in all its meanings, is central to the British portrayal. For the first half of the 20th century, one might conclude that only fee-paying schools existed, as the privately educated film-industry elite...