<i>Adolescence</i> – lessons for pastoral educators … and parents?

Every few years a television drama is broadcast that touches a common nerve or captures the Zeitgeist of an entire nation.Previous examples within the UK have included ITV's Mr Bates vs The Post Office, that portrays the human toll of a piece of faulty Post Office software on scores of wrongly accused subpostmasters, Channel 4's It's a Sin that tells the story of a group of gay men and their friends during the 1980s HIV/AIDS crisis in London, and even Channel 4's Derry Girls that presents the comedic adventures of a group of teenage friends against the bloodstained landscape of Northern Ireland's Troubles.This year the only contender is the new, highly acclaimed Netflix four-part series Adolescence, first broadcast on 13 March 2025 and written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham.Technically, the series is remarkable -each of the four episodes is filmed in one single, continuous, intense take -but it's the quality of the acting and the script that really make the series stand out from the rest, and ensures that this is compelling viewing from start to finish.A summary of the plot cannot do it justice, but with that caveat acknowledged at the outset, the storyline focuses on the arrest of a 13-year-old schoolboy, Jamie Miller (played brilliantly by novice actor Owen Cooper) for the murder of one of his classmates, Katie Leonard, stabbed seven times in a car park.Each one-take episode charts a key element of the story, starting with the police raiding Jamie's house, his arrest and questioning; then the investigation at Jamie's school where police officers speak to Jamie's classmates; followed by an interview with Jamie conducted by a forensic psychologist at a youth detention facility in order to collate evidence to inform the writing of a pre-trial report on Jamie's mental capacity; and finally, 13 months after the murder, an insight into the impact of the case on Jamie's family: his dad Eddie, his mum Manda and sister Lisa, whom we watch struggling to deal with the aftermath of a spraypaint attack on Eddie's van on his 50th birthday.The focus of the drama is different from many other television series, for this is no 'whodunnit'.We know from the first episode that Jamie committed the murder, captured on CCTV and replayed to him and his dad in the police station.Nor is our gaze fixed on the murder victim, Katie, except in so far as we learn more about her through the words of Jamie and his friends.Instead, for me, the uniqueness of the drama is due to its concentration on the motive behind the murder.Through the first three episodes we learn that