In England we used to have a weekly soap set in a school called Waterloo Road. This had everything you would hope not to find in a school: inappropriate behaviour, theft, even attempted murder – and that was just the staff. The kids were pretty OK by comparison: teenaged pregnancy, illegal drug-taking and gangs. Strangely enough, there didn’t seem to be more than 30 kids on roll, judging by the number of people who attended whole-school assemblies. But my main interest is this: what (good) use of technology was shown in this programme?

The answer is, precious little. Occasionally, you would see an interactive whiteboard with something displayed on it. However, that something was invariably a page full of text, which is the least you can do with such a device (and should never do anyway) and which was never referred to or used in any way by the teacher.

In one episode the head boy and girl were allowed time off lessons or studying to make a promotional video about the school, and were permitted, unsupervised, to upload it to the school website. There was an implicit assumption that being studious also meant being trusted to ensure you could take responsibility for ensuring that something uploaded to the school website was appropriate. It’s a dangerous assumption to make: even using an out-of-date logo could be construed as inappropriate (I was once asked to change the logo I’d used on a Local Authority training pack for ICT because, unbeknownst to me, the corporate logo had recently been changed.)

Needless to say, someone intervened and uploaded the outtakes, which were pretty embarrassing (the two people concerned were “an item”).

The only good use of technology, in fact, was displayed by the kids, when they used their phones to text each other with messages like “Skip last lesson? Meet you outside the gate at 2”.

There was one episode in which a teacher felt sorry for a child and decided to put him up in his, the teacher’s, own home. In another, someone somehow pretending to be a teacher managed to persuade a teenage girl to run off to a hotel with him. What?

So, the school was not a good example of a functional school in general, and neither was it a beacon of excellence in terms of the use of technology. It was the sort of school that no sane person would want to work in. There seemed to be no child protection measures in place, no common sense, not even a sense of self-preservation.

I suppose it all made for good drama, and to be fair I recall a police officer telling me that police procedures are nothing like what you see on the TV. But even so, surely there has to be some nod to reality?

Mind you, I used to enjoy a series called Teachers. The teachers alluded to in the title were completely inept and bonkers. I found it to be hilarious, but my line manager felt it conveyed a really bad impression of teachers. He was concerned that some people would believe that schools really were like that.

I seemed to have gone full circle or something and ended up contradicting myself. Well, as Walt Whitman said: