AN education is on offer at Southampton University’s The Phoenix on Wednesday after a vote by audiences.

Nick Hornby’s adaptation of wellknown journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir of teenage seduction shows his trademark understated wit, but it’s the nuanced touch of director, Lone Scherfig, that turns this film into something rather special.

The getting of a sentimental education, as opposed to an academic one, has long obsessed film-makers, but it’s been largely a boy’s-eye-view. So Lone Scherfig’s crisply confident and charmingly comic coming-of-age drama shows the delight of a teenage girl kicking against the pricks for a change – a girl who’s hungry for adult life, too, rather than love or peer approval – those banal staples of the schoolset movie since the 1980s.

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