For most adults, however happy their experience of education, the words “first day at school” still raise a certain frisson: an electric memory-shock of the sheer strangeness of being taken from the comfort of home to a place where everything — smells, sounds, people, even the furniture — was unfamiliar. And then, having survived the first day, the outrage of finding that this wasn’t just an aberration, but was going to continue the next day, and the next, and the one after that.
For parents, the experience gains an additional layer of emotional complexity when it comes to one’s own children’s first day at school. The tears, the alienation and the unbearable sense of abandonment — and that’s just the grown-ups at the drop-off. Of course, what you really want to know, once you have got over how shockingly empty the house feels without the children, is what they are getting up to all day out there in the secret world of the classroom, where you are not allowed to follow them.
“Activities,” says Grace’s mum, in Fran Landesman’s film for Channel 4, Secret Life of the Classroom. “That’s all she says if you ask what she did at school. ‘We did activities’. ” Landesman’s hour-long film decodes the enigmatic term “activities”, offering a fascinatingly detailed view of what really went on during a term in the reception class at Moorlands Infant School in Bath.
The striking thing about the film is that its perspective is, literally, that of a child. Landesman and her crew filmed with a hand-held camera on their hands and knees, at child’s eye-level, so the Gulliver-in-Lilliput view of children to which one grows accustomed as an adult, looming over a world of little creatures, carrying on their shrill transactions at knee-level, is subtly readjusted. And although the children were fascinated by the cameras at first, they very soon seemed to forget all about them.
“The interesting thing,” says Jane Southwell, the reception class teacher, “was that they didn’t see the film-makers as witnessing adults.” The resulting footage of children’s interaction, unconstrained by the perceived presence of adults, has the enchanting and sometimes comic spontaneity of some film of rare wildlife, going about its busy life in unselfconscious ignorance of the watchful lens.
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Landesman’s film explores three strands of the experience of a child starting school: adjustment to life in an institution, as distinct from home; conflict and negotiation; and the complicated business of making friendships. Each section is illuminated by the emotional journey of a particular child: Isaac, whose difficult early life made the transition from home to school a particular challenge; the boisterous Dylan (“Energetic?” he says to a teacher who has just used the word to describe his behaviour. “What does energetic mean?”); and Grace, who found it difficult to make friends. “Making friends is a skill that needs to be learned,” says Mrs Southwell, “like tying your shoelaces. If we can help children learn to make friends at this age, we can save them a lot of pain later on.”
Like Être et Avoir, Nicolas Philibert’s award-winning film about life in the classroom of a village school in the Auvergne, Secret Life of the Classroom eschews sentimentality in favour of fine observation. The difference, says Landesman, is that the French film presented the classroom from the teacher’s perspective, while hers is child-centred. Mrs Southwell is a self-effacing presence on film: “When the children are older,” she says, “they won’t remember me and that is as it should be. But I hope they will remember some of the social and emotional lessons they learned here.” But, as the term passes, her influence — kind, firm, endlessly patient — begins to be reflected by the children in her charge: Isaac gains confidence; Dylan calms down; and Grace makes some new friends.
And then, too soon, the film is over — its only flaw is that it is too short. Être et Avoir ran for almost two hours. At half that length, Secret Life has to ignore entire areas of classroom activity — there is only the briefest sketch, for example, of the children’s academic work. Still, for anyone who ever wondered what happens after the school gates close on their child, Secret Life of the Classroom provides a tender vignette that would be magically reassuring — if only one could be certain that all infant schools were like Moorlands, and all reception teachers as inspiring as the remarkable Mrs Southwell.