Educating Yorkshire’s Mr Burton talks show’s return and modern teaching: “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers”

Broadcast on Channel 4 in 2013, Educating Yorkshire was based at Thornhill Community Academy, a large secondary school on the edge of Dewsbury, not far from the M1, and it was the interactions – both good and bad – between staff and pupils rather than the scenery that caught the public imagination.

The most memorable of those interactions took place when English teacher Matthew Burton helped Musharaf Asghar. The Year 11 student had suffered from a profound stammer since he was five and was obliged, as part of his English GCSE exam, to make a speech.

Burton, the sort of resourceful and committed teacher that every child deserves, borrowed a trick from the film The King’s Speech, telling “Mushy” to listen to music as he tried to talk. It worked. Viewers gasped, and perhaps stifled a sob, as Asghar’s first faltering words came out.

There were dramatic outcomes for Asghar, who went on to university where he studied journalism and is now a motivational speaker, but also for Burton. His wife Laura had suffered a miscarriage at the start of the year, just when the series was being filmed. “It was a difficult period,” he says.

Nine months later, when the episode was screened, she was pregnant again with their first child, Liv. “We watched the last episode, when Musharaf was on, in the school hall after a parents’ evening. Laura was standing next to me feeling Liv kick in her tummy. Not long after Liv was born, I became a different kind of teacher, a different leader. It was an unbelievable end to what started as a difficult year. 2013 changed my life.”

Now Educating Yorkshire is back, and so is Mr Burton. He’s talking to me today from the poolside on a family holiday, a well-deserved break from the pressures of being Thornhill’s headteacher, a role he has filled for the last six years. In the new series, we see him leading from the front, out among his pupils supporting his “phenomenal” staff while employing the constant mantra, Be Nice, Work Hard.

“It is the most incredible professional privilege to be a headteacher,” Burton says, only slightly fuller in the face over a decade on, still brimming with the positivity that lit up the first series. “There are tough days, there are days where you are frustrated, but there are amazing days as well, days where you celebrate.”

For the documentary, 900 pupils and approximately 100 staff at the school were filmed between November 2024 and August 2025. But lessons were undisturbed by film crews. Instead, 64 fixed-rig cameras were placed around the school, capturing over 1,000 hours of footage. The resulting eight episodes will cover familiar issues in education but also a dizzying set of new problems.

“Life in school in 2025 is a microcosm of society in general,” says Burton. Since 2013, British state education has had to accommodate challenges like knife crime, growing diagnoses of ADHD and gender dysphoria, plus the long shadow cast by lockdown and the unstoppable rise of mobile phone culture.

“Not everybody had a mobile back then,” says Burton. “And they certainly weren’t as powerful as the ones you can get for a few quid now.” Mobiles are banned on school property; nonetheless one girl tells Burton she’s onscreen for 14 hours a day.

In another scene, a teacher asks Burton for more training so she can better interact with a girl who claims to be a “furry”, someone who identifies with an animal displaying human characteristics, in this case a fox.

“Society has changed markedly,” notes Burton. “AI [artificial intelligence] is another example; we have to get ahead of it.” When, in one episode, a pupil is suspected of using AI to write an essay that has, teachers believe, uncharacteristic wording, she passionately denies it. So, will AI destabilise teaching? “It will make us think,” says Burton. “Because you can’t necessarily set traditional homework of, ‘Right, go home and do this essay.’

Though we could look at AI as a huge positive for teachers as well, something to help them with resources and to support them with some of the workload.” Burton remains convinced of the transformative power of good, real-world teaching. “Some of the aspects of teaching are about emotional understanding, about that kindness and relationship you build,” he says. “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers.”

At heart, the school’s main issue is the same one encapsulated so neatly by Burton and Asghar 12 years ago: how do we help kids when they need it? And there is already a candidate for another Musharaf moment.

Year seven pupil Tremaine has the reading age of a five-year-old; embarrassed during English lessons, he can become distraught and walk out of class. The staff are determined to help. “You’ll see him working on his reading comprehension and there are huge, seismic shifts for him being able to link the phonics together and read. It’s life-changing stuff and a symbol of what happens in schools across the country.”

For a while in 2013, Thornhill was the most famous school in England and Burton found himself doing drama lessons with local star actor Jodie Whittaker, who volunteered to help the pupils. “It was a brilliant, surreal day,” he recalls. “Jodie was lovely and so generous with her time with our students. That was hugely inspiring; loads of wonderful opportunities like that came up for the school.”

But will the new series come with dangers as well as opportunities? What if the pupil’s local accents or personal quirks become memes online or attract social media attacks? “We haven’t rushed into things; this isn’t about wanting the school to be famous. The decision was taken with lots of people involved, and lots of checks and balances,” Burton says.

“Safeguarding and education trumps absolutely everything. Channel 4 and [production company] Twofour have got independent psychologists who work with families and students to say whether they can give informed consent to be able to take part. The vulnerabilities around that are considerable, but all students have been told about how to deal with potential online issues.”

Yorkshire’s children are in good hands; 12 years after we first met him, Burton remains his pupils’ relentlessly upbeat champion. “Teenagers are great,” he says. “They’re so kind, so reflective, so intelligent, and really inspiring. A lot of headlines about school and teenagers aren’t necessarily positive, but we want to show that schools are still brilliant places to be.”

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Educating Yorkshire 2025 begins on Channel 4 on Sunday 31st August at 8pm.

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