After attending a MIPCOM masterclass panel in 2014 about TwoFour Group’s “Educating” franchise – a high school-set, fly-on-the-wall-style docuseries that had become a sensation in the U.K. – CBC’s Jennifer Dettman and her team fell in love with the format, but returned home with one overriding question.

“We wondered if we could actually do this series in Canada. Could we get the access that we would need?” said Dettman, CBC’s executive director of unscripted content, of the potential privacy issues surrounding such a series.

Feeling the concept was well worth pursuing, CBC acquired the rights to the format from Endemol Shine International, renamed it This Is High School, and enlisted Vancouver-based producer and observational doc specialists Paperny Entertainment.

Made on an overall budget of $5 million and set to premiere on CBC this Sunday, Oct. 2 at 8 p.m., the 6 x 60-minute series was in development for 18 months as Paperny and CBC sought out the perfect school at which to base the series. A fixed-rig documentary format had never been done before in a North American high school, said Paperny creative producer and showrunner Sarah Sharkey Pearce (Yukon Gold), which meant many schools were hesitant to participate out of concern for student privacy.

Combing through literally hundreds of schools from across the country, Paperny and CBC finally found a suitable school (and a willing participant) in South Kamloops Secondary School in Kamloops, B.C.

After receiving the relevant approvals from the Kamloops school board and notifying all the parents, Paperny entered the school in January 2016 to begin a seven-week casting phase, which ultimately decided which of the school’s 1000 students would be featured in the series.

Paperny installed 48 cameras throughout the premises and filmed the series over seven weeks during the spring semester, with the prodco editing down more than 1000 hours of footage into six hour-long episodes. Pearce said one of the greatest challenges in making the series was tracking the classroom swaps and movements of students as they went about their regular school days. In addition, 26 people (both student and teachers) were miked at all times during the day, which required hourly changes.

According to Pearce, the Canadian version does not deviate too far from the original series, Educating Essex, which was produced by U.K. production company TwoFour and filmed at Passmores Academy, a secondary school in Harlow, Essex.

“We were pretty faithful to the U.K. series, but occasionally in the U.K. series you feel like the teacher is the champion, not the student. We felt that the journey should be that of the students,” said Pearce.

Educating Essex has also spawned two additional homegrown series thus far – Educating Yorkshire and Educating the East End – which were filmed in different parts of the U.K. When asked if the CBC will consider greenlighting subsequent seasons of the show in different schools throughout Canada, Dettman said that while it’s still early days, it’s something the pubcaster will consider.

This Is High School is executive produced by Paperny president David Paperny, as well as the company’s EVPs Audrey Mehler and Cal Shumiatcher.