Why screen education should look beyond film
There is rightly significant investment in helping young people engage with film. Film can bring stories to life, develop cultural understanding and encourage critical thinking. It can also open up different ways of learning. It is an extraordinarily rich educational medium.
But film is only one part of our screen culture. We believe the national conversation about screen in education has become too narrowly focused on it. When policymakers and funders discuss the educational value of the moving image, the focus quickly shifts to film. Television and radio are often secondary, if they appear at all.
That feels like a missed opportunity. Britain has spent more than 70 years documenting itself through television. Our politics, workplaces, industries, communities, culture, science, social change and everyday lives are all there. Its educational value lies not only in what has been recorded. It also comes from the different ways television represents the world.
At Learning on Screen, we have spent more than 75 years championing film, television and radio in education. Through Box of Broadcasts, educators at schools, colleges and universities can access more than four million television and radio programmes from over 75 channels. Working with an archive of that scale has led us to a bigger question: are we making enough educational use of our broadcast heritage?
Television is not one medium
One of the things that makes television so useful for education is its diversity of formats. We sometimes talk about using television in the classroom as though it were a single type of content. It is not.
Documentaries and factual series give learners access to places, people and subjects they might never otherwise encounter. Natural history and science programmes reveal processes that cannot easily be observed in a classroom. Meanwhile, historical documentaries combine archive material, expert interpretation and testimony to construct arguments about the past.
News offers something different. A report does more than provide information about an event. It is also a primary source showing how that event was understood, selected and represented at a particular moment. An educator can place contemporary reporting alongside later documentary analysis. Students can then examine how interpretations change over time. Our teaching examples already use this approach to develop source evaluation and critical thinking.
Learning critically from television
Current affairs programmes bring competing arguments into the classroom. Through interviews, learners can hear directly from politicians, scientists, artists, campaigners and people with lived experience. Investigative journalism shows how evidence is gathered and claims are challenged. Arts programmes also preserve performances and conversations with practitioners.
Formats we might instinctively consider less educational can also become useful when treated critically. Reality television and observational documentaries allow learners to examine behaviour and decision-making. Comedy and satire can sit alongside factual sources to explore how institutions and public figures are represented. Drama can present a constructed version of a profession or social issue. Learners can then compare it with evidence from the real world.
The educational value does not depend on treating television as an objective window onto reality. Good teaching with television asks what has been selected, edited, dramatised or omitted and why. Educators can also put formats into conversation with one another. They might place a documentary alongside archive news or a political debate alongside satire. A dramatised courtroom could be compared with footage of the real justice system. Learners encounter the same idea through different lenses and question the differences between them.
Television can take learners where classrooms cannot
Television has a simple educational advantage: it lets us see things. Science programmes can reveal processes that are too small, large, slow, fast, dangerous or remote to observe directly. Geography content can take learners into an ecosystem thousands of miles away. When studying politics, learners can watch Parliament instead of only reading about parliamentary procedure. Creative arts programmes allow them to watch performances and hear practitioners explain their work.
Our teaching materials use broadcast content in these ways. Examples range from visualising biological processes to exploring the engineering behind everyday technology. Learners can also see how mathematics informs elections, healthcare and public policy. However, we believe television’s potential is particularly overlooked in vocational education.
Television as a window into the world of work
Work placements and employer engagement are enormously valuable. However, they inevitably provide a limited view of the situations learners might encounter during their careers. A hospitality student cannot move between a hotel reception, events venue and commercial kitchen in one lesson. A health and social care learner cannot observe dozens of different care environments. Equally, a business student cannot sit inside hundreds of organisations as managers respond to customers, conflict, recruitment or change.
Television has been entering those workplaces for decades. British broadcasters have produced factual and observational programmes set in hotels, hospitals, factories, farms, airports and schools. They have also entered construction projects, emergency services and businesses. These programmes have followed apprentices, chefs, nurses, engineers, designers, managers and tradespeople. In doing so, they document both effective practice and moments when things go wrong.
Treated systematically, this material can become a vocational teaching resource. A hospitality lecturer could show a difficult customer interaction. Learners could then consider what went wrong and what they would do differently. Business students might evaluate how an organisation handles pricing, staffing, marketing or growth. Health and social care learners could hear from patients, families and professionals across many different settings. No individual placement could provide the same range of experiences.
Watching television does not substitute for practical experience. However, it can extend the range of experiences learners examine before, during and after practical learning. It also provides a safer environment in which to encounter a difficult situation for the first time. An educator can pause a customer complaint, safeguarding issue or workplace conflict at a critical moment. They can then ask, ‘What would you do next?’ Learners can debate possible responses before seeing what happened.
This turns television from something learners passively watch into material for observation, analysis, judgement and reflection.
Broadening what young people imagine is possible
Young people’s understanding of work is shaped by what they encounter around them. Family, friends, education, employers and local communities influence which careers feel visible and achievable. Some young people grow up surrounded by adults working across many professions and industries. Others do not have access to those networks.
Television cannot remove those inequalities, but it can open windows. A learner can see inside an occupation they had never considered or discover jobs they did not know existed. They might also see someone with a similar background doing work they had never imagined for themselves. The breadth of broadcast television means careers education need not be limited to programmes explicitly labelled as careers content.
This is one reason we see particular potential for television in further education. FE serves a diverse population and has a strong vocational mission. Yet national discussions about screen education still tend to focus on film literacy, filmmaking and the creative industries. These areas matter. However, screen and sound can contribute to vocational education across every industry. Their value extends beyond preparing young people to work in the screen industries.
A record of how Britain changes
Broadcast television and radio provide an extraordinary record of our social history. A programme made in 1985 does not only tell us about its stated subject. Its language, assumptions, speakers, absences and workplaces all become historical evidence. The same is true of its attitudes towards gender, race, disability, sexuality and class.
Broadcast archives are therefore particularly useful when change over time matters. Learners can compare how mental health was discussed across different decades or examine changing representations of disability. They can trace arguments about immigration or climate change. They can also study how the language of political debate has evolved.
News and current affairs are especially important when young people are navigating misinformation, synthetic media and fragmented information sources. Our work on political and media literacy encourages learners to compare sources and examine how narratives develop. It also helps them evaluate the information presented to them instead of simply receiving another set of facts to remember.
The distinctive value of radio
Radio offers another educational form. It strips away the visual and asks learners to listen closely to language, argument, testimony, tone and perspective. Decades of interviews, documentaries, debates, lectures, drama, news and arts broadcasting provide access to different voices. These voices can bring subjects to life in new ways.
Radio can also afford to be niche. Television is expensive to make, and programmes often need large audiences to justify their place in a schedule. Radio can devote more time to specialist subjects. As a result, it has created an archive of detailed discussions relevant to particular courses and professions.
In vocational education, that might include a discussion about why women remain under-represented in construction. Other programmes could explore recruitment challenges in social care, automation in manufacturing or working conditions in hospitality. They help learners move beyond how to do a job and understand the wider industry. This includes its debates, inequalities and workforce challenges.
Radio also creates space for depth. Long-form interviews allow practitioners and people with lived experience to explore complexity and disagreement. Learners hear what somebody thinks, but they also hear how that person constructs an argument. They can observe how the speaker responds to challenges and makes sense of an issue.
Its value becomes particularly clear when combined with television. A construction learner could watch a factual programme filmed on a major building site. Afterwards, they might listen to a radio discussion about the industry’s workforce and culture. One medium provides access to the workplace, while the other supports deeper analysis and debate.
Listening itself is also valuable. Without images directing their attention, learners can concentrate on language, evidence and tone. Audio can become material for close analysis in much the same way as a written source. It also offers another route into learning for people who find predominantly text-based material less accessible or engaging.
A broader definition of screen education
The argument is not that radio, television or film is inherently better than another medium. Each does something different. Television can show environments, people and processes. Radio can take learners deeper into ideas, experiences and specialist conversations. Film can offer sustained storytelling and interpretation.
Education becomes richer when educators can choose the medium that best serves the learner, subject and teaching objective. In many cases, a combination of media may be the most effective choice.
Nor is this an argument for investing less in film. Film deserves its place in education, and organisations expanding young people’s access to it are doing important work. But the UK has something larger than a film heritage. We have a screen and sound heritage documenting decades of our working lives, politics, culture, science, communities and social change.
At Learning on Screen, our question is not simply how we preserve that heritage. We also want to understand how we can unlock its educational potential. How can educators find the right two minutes within millions of hours of broadcasting? How can we curate material around particular subjects, professions and educational challenges? And how can broadcast content prompt discussion, comparison, problem solving and critical thinking?
Screen education does not have to mean studying film or learning how to make one. The most valuable screen in a classroom might contain a documentary or yesterday’s news. It could show a political interview from 30 years ago, an engineer explaining a problem or a chef managing a kitchen. The screen might even be switched off while learners listen closely to a radio interview.
We have spent decades broadcasting the world around us. Those archives contain an extraordinary educational resource. The challenge now is to make much better use of it.