It’s tempting to see Educating Essex as a kind of real-life Waterloo Road, if only because they both cover similar subject matter, but while the latter is an airbrushed look at life in an English comprehensive, Educating Essex presents it as it is, warts and all.

The programme is a genuinely eye-opening glimpse into the daily struggles faced by teachers and students alike at Passmores School and Technology College in Essex, with 65 cameras installed around the school building to give insight into every nook and cranny, every conversation and furtive look.

Largely concentrating on the more difficult students at the school over each episode, the documentary-makers are clearly keen to give the limelight to the school’s problematic pupils. While this is hardly reflective of the school as a whole, it does make for guiltily entertaining viewing. So far in the series we have met such delights as Charlotte (who wouldn’t look out of place on Little Britain) and self-styled Rebel Without A Cause-type figure Sam, who appears to have formed his bullying techniques from reading back issues of The Beano.

It was in the most recent episode that it really came into its own, with the story of promising student-turned troublemaker Vinnie epitomising the teachers’ struggle to balance the need for discipline with providing a level of care and support for vulnerable young people. “Permanent exclusion is morally wrong,” the deputy head of the school Mr Drew tells us. And indeed, it is the school’s staff who lend the programme much of its positivity and energy. Their focus and determination to do well by the pupils is genuinely admirable, especially in the face of unrelenting angst and insolence.

Whether or not the cameras placed around the school truly offer a realistic, less intrusive glimpse of life in a normal comprehensive is open to debate. There are, however, certainly moments where the pupils and staff seem to have genuinely forgotten they are being filmed – and these moments of apparent unguarded realism give Educating Essex its most rewarding scenes.