At the end of a week in which The Times has dedicated itself to children’s TV, it seems fitting, correct – and like I know what’s going on in the rest of the paper – to review the BBC’s new kids’ drama, Summerhill.

Children’s drama gets a short straw. Of all the areas of the arts, it registers the longest delay between broadcast, and the programme-makers finding out if the audience liked it. With children’s TV, there are no congratulatory e-mails from your mates the next day. You have to wait until your viewers have stopped wetting themselves, left school, discovered marijuana, and spent long evenings passionately, but slightly ironically, discussing all the programmes of their childhood to find out if, after all, Biker Mice From Mars hit the spot.

Anyone who has a fondness for children’s TV will already have been sent reeling by last week’s announcement, on the future of Grange Hill. It is, apparently, to be reimagined to “fit in” with the new BBC charter. All the awkward teenagers – with their edgy, socially relevant problems like drugs, horniness and flick-knives – are to go. In their place, a host of 7 to 11-year-olds will be installed, and shows will revolve around such plots as “an escaped puppy causing chaos”.

One would hope, then – Grange Hill clearly having had its knackers cut off and thrown in a ditch – to see the BBC’s children’s drama department being able to show its balls on other projects. Although obviously not literally, as I should imagine there have been some pretty strict memos around the BBC in recent months about such things.

And Summerhill does promise some sinew. After all, this four-part series focuses on the legendary school where children make the rules, and its 2000 court case – when David “No hippy teachers in Hush Puppies on mywatch” Blunkett tried to close it down, but failed. In a world where we worry about simultaneously mollycoddling and over-pressurising our children, a drama about kids who spend all day running around with their arses hanging out, screaming, and falling out of trees, but at a boarding school, borders on the subversive.

Alas – as you would kind of expect from a show almost singlehandedly representing the BBC’s children’s drama department – Summerhill buckles under the weight of its many tasks. Despite having four half-hour episodes to tell its story, Summerhillcan’t fit in everything it wants to. It has painstakingly to spell out the educational ethos of Summerhill, in a serious of earnest speeches – “Freedom is a big thing to deal with. Sometimes, you have to learn it.” It has to cover an educational tribunal that set a legal precedent in British teaching standards. And – as all TV must these days; even the weather reports and Nasdaq updates – it has some “emotional journeys”. These concern the two new arrivals to the school – Maddy and Ryan.

Maddy (Holly Bodimeade) is a hyper-anxious overachiever. She seriously needs to get a small muddy smudge on her nose, take her shoes off, and dance to some crazy rhythms being knocked out on some steel drums in the school’s courtyard.

Ryan (Eliot Otis Browne Walters), on the other hand, is a one-stop-shop ASBO rat-boy. His path to responsible adulthood will clearly have to involve nurturing a small, abandoned baby rabbit back to health.

Having watched all four episodes of Summerhill,however, I must report it’s a bit of a curate’s egg. A bit of a Lowby David Bowie (no one ever listens to side 2). For while there are lots of pleasingly lysergic shots of English woodland in summer, and a hot turn from Jessie Cave as teen hippy sex-pot Stella, the second half of the series focuses on Summerhill’s pivotal educational tribunal.

Desperate to razz the whole thing up, Summerhill descends into “imagineering”, culminating in the boggle-some scene in which the renowned human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson, QC, dresses up as Peter Pan, and attacks Blunkett’s lawyer with a cutlass. Watching it borders on the mortifying, and makes you wish they had just stuck with emotional journeys, educational proselytising, and Jessie Cave smiling sexily in the sun.

In 20 years’ time, however, when Summerhill’s viewers are stoned thirtysomethings, it will seem semi-legendary – like the episode of Camberwick Green when Windy Miller goes whacky on cider.

Summerhill begins Mon, CBBC Channel, 6pm, continuing Tues; episode one repeated on BBC One, Wed, 4.30pm. A full version is also due to be shown on BBC Four

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