Praise for the BBC from this government has been a rare thing. It must therefore have created the warmest of glows in New Broadcasting House to hear the Prime Minister welcome the corporation’s education plans for the lockdown during his Downing Street news conference on Tuesday.
Amid the chaos of the government’s own policy—insisting on opening schools one day and then shutting them the next—there was at least one “fantastic” thing for Boris Johnson. The BBC’s response to the closures has been to put educational material each weekday onto two of its television channels: content for primary schools on CBBC and programming for secondary schools on BBC Two. “This will be a lifeline to parents,” added the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden. The BBC press office for its part has been in overdrive, claiming this is “the biggest education offer” in the corporation’s history.
This is, in one sense, nothing more than we should expect from the BBC. Its three great principles over the decades have been “to inform, educate and entertain”; and it would have been a poor show if the world’s most distinguished public service broadcaster couldn’t help educate our young people in a national emergency. But the truth is that “educate” has been the trickiest part of its mission to interpret in the digital age.
For people of my vintage who grew up in the 1960s, and for those older, the situation was much simpler. There was targeted radio and television for schools from the BBC, with education programmes having priority in the daytime schedules where now there are acres full of antiques and home makeover shows. My first inept attempts at exercise back then were fuelled by the Home Service’s Music and Movement, and we made weekly dates with TV shows demonstrating the wonders of science. This traditional way of reaching audiences endured. As recently as 1990, BBC Radio 5—the predecessor to 5 Live—was created to find a home for continuing education programmes, along with output from the Open University.
As broadcasting turned digital, the BBC educational output seemed to disappear for many adult audiences: partly because it was moved from the conventional schedules to be available instead on-demand, but also because “education” itself became more broadly defined. The rebranded BBC Learning department invested in a wider range of output, including sport and lifestyle, just as it was possible to find Open University credits at the end of generalist peak-time programmes. It was then the BBC’s misfortune that its major unambiguously educational initiative in the 2000s—a tie-up with the national digital curriculum called BBC Jam—fell foul of commercial competitors and was squashed in 2007 by, among others, the European Commission.
Thus by 2020, and the first of the lockdowns, the corporation was less central to the nation’s schoolchildren than it might have been. The press office still managed to claim that an initiative launched then was “the biggest push on education in its history,” and it capitalised on resources such as its acclaimed BBC Bitesize. But crucially, in April 2020, most of the effort was concentrated online, with iPlayer and BBC Sounds wheeled into action. The big difference in January 2021 is that the BBC has deployed the linear TV channels too, in the hope that they will reach children with limited access to broadband; and the learning zones have the extra impact of being part of mainstream television schedules.
Parents and teachers to whom I’ve spoken have heartily approved of the BBC offering. They observe, correctly, that many children now have little understanding of a programming schedule and see the media world as entirely on demand; so for many there will be little chance that they will tune in to BBC Two at 9am on a Tuesday morning. Teachers also wonder whether children will be attracted to entire “programmes” rather than the shorter user-friendly clips that they’re used to in their regular classes. But at a time when people in jobs like mine—I’m head of a Cambridge college—are worrying deeply about the damage to education for a generation of children, these concerns should not detract from what is unquestionably a welcome development. Anything that helps, and the scale of this is genuinely ambitious, should be welcomed.
There is no reason to doubt that the government believes this too. But Dowden’s remark that the BBC "has helped the nation through some of the toughest moments of the last century" sits strangely with the aggressive briefing against the corporation that emerged from Downing Street less than a year ago. It was going to be “whacked” and diminished, and there was much talk about how Netflix and the other streaming companies were making the traditional public service broadcasters obsolete. Some of the briefers have now themselves been whacked, and let us hope that it’s the saner heads who will continue to prevail. The BBC still needs to draw on its remarkable powers of survival, but it is making the right moves and it is heartening that they are being recognised.
