After a morning looking at tiles and borders and edgings and learning loads more than I'll ever need again about how tiling works but not enough to make all the decisions I need to make...

... I treated myself this afternoon to a really long film: three hours 37 minutes of documentary about a German schoolteacher, Mr Bachmann, and his class of twelve or so 12-14-year-olds in their final year before being selected for 'academic' or 'secondary' education. Many of them were recent arrivals and had to learn German as well as everything else. The subtitles did their best to get across the different levels of broken German but German speakers would get even more than I did from this extraordinary film.

I spent quite a bit of the first hour wondering how any of his pupils learnt anything at all (apart from music) which made me realise quite how much I have come to take the English National Curriculum for granted, despite my resistance to it when it was first introduced in 1989.

Anyone my age will remember schools before the National Curriculum when what we learnt depended on the exam board syllabus or, for pupils not preparing exams, on the inspiration or uselessness of our teachers. The National Curriculum mostly did away with the useless but also sadly, some of the inspirational. Having lost that frame of reference, it took me a while to take in quite how inspirational Mr Bachmann was. He introduced controversial topics, he showed the children how to deal with emotion and conflict, he addressed individual issues in front of the whole class that had my confidentiality principles reeling but gradually, as I got to know him and the children better, I understood the huge value as well as the high stakes of what he was doing. Above all, he cared passionately about the youngsters as people.

Very highly recommended for anyone interested in education, emotional development or adolescents.

Trailer