25 years since ITV Schools ended.

I suppose it depended on the school with some schools making more use of BBC and ITV schools than others. Teachers could cherry pick individual programmes according to what they were teaching.

I think LWT might beg to differ.

During the last few months of ITV Schools the opening was different. As before then the 9:25-30 period consisted of 3 minutes of a library track followed by 1 minute of The Journey, then Just a Minute. When Channel 4 started selling their own ads at the start of 1993, there was an ad break before schools programming and all you had then was 40 seconds of Just A Minute and the clock.

Also, during that time, did The Big Breakfast immediately precede schools or not? I can't remember, I know later on the BB ended at 9 and you had an episode of Bewitched or something on after it, but I can't remember if that was the case in 1992/3.

Bewitched come later.. There was a awful awful bill Cosby game show with a bird. Your money or your life???

Which ITV companies did not make any schools programmes?

Who nowadays holds the rights to ITV schools programmes produced by companies that lost such as Thames?

I'd imagine ITV Schools programmes are the same as any other programmes aren't they? The producing ITV franchise would retain ownership of the content.

Wasn't ITV Schools just a co-ordinating and scheduling operation as part of a public service licensing commitment as there was no advertising? I'd imagine that the larger ITV companies made more content than the smaller ones almost pro-rata based on their income ? Or did all ITV franchise holders contribute to a commissioning pot that was then doled out to ITV companies to fund making shows?

I don’t recall any schools series made by Border, Tyne Tees, TVS or Channel, though maybe TVS did produce a programme in the ITV Schools on 4 era. Several others, such as UTV, TSW and HTV Wales only produced programmes to be shown locally. Contributions to the network from Anglia, HTV West, STV and Grampian were very small - with the exception of Grampian, and STV’s local content, generally speaking their programmes weren’t specifically produced for schools, but were repeats of series originally shown elsewhere in the schedule.

LWT of course didn’t produce any schools content either.

ATV / Central seemed to make more schools programmes than every other ITV company put together. Yorkshire, Thames, and Grampian were also significant producers.

I think that Westward made an odd few schools programmes. TVS was rather strangely not interested in schools programmes despite being strongly committed to producing children's programmes.

That appears to be the case, although what the rationale behind the alteration was, I can't think. Thanks for pointing it out though, as well as the freeze frame difference. It's funny to learn of these things after all these years.

Not suprising seeing as they actually ran the ITV Schools service from 1968-1993.

I’d certainly recommend the TV Schools channel on YouTube if you haven’t already found it. Lots of clips are available from this era. There are also a few clips from the first year of Channel 4 Schools, and it’s quite surprising how many ITV programmes remained within the schedule. I’m guessing it took a couple of years for ITV’s output to fizzle out.

ATV and Central had so many fingers in so many pies in the ITV day as a whole across three decades. Schools, Children's ITV, ITV Sport, their own programmes that were networked (or time-shifted as the case may be), their own region (which they infamously only bid £2k for the licence in 1991) and everything else they did, some days they were practically running the network. Shame to think that entire operation was later dismantled and shifted elsewhere, leaving Gas Street to be a viewer feedback hub.

Coming back to ITV Schools...


When I was at primary school we would occasionally view ITV Schools on Channel 4 but it wasn't a regular occurrence and sometimes it was a schools programme but it was from a previous off-air recording. Secondary school sometimes used a Channel 4 schools programme (the later after 1993 look) or the odd occasion a programme would come out which had the ident of the BBC Two look launched in 1986 or on occasion the one before that. I suppose good programmes from the school's point of view never die, even if they start looking dated.