TO SIR, WITH LOVE: unconvincing and dated yet strangely uplifting

Even though much of the story and the acting are unconvincing it's difficult to avoid getting swept up in the liberating sense of empowerment and discovery which flows through this film.
Sidney Poitier is Mark Thackeray, a budding engineer who takes a teaching job at a rundown high school in the East End of London while he waits for something better to come along. He's assigned to a class of rambunctious undisciplined teenagers who can't wait to be finished with school and start adult life. 
The situation presents the inexperienced young teacher with the biggest challenge of his life. Can he win their respect before they break him in the same way they destroyed his predecessor?
The answer is not as hard to discern as screenwriter -director James Clavell might have hoped. This is Sidney Poitier after all. As Hollywood's first black leading man a decade earlier he'd overcome tougher challenges than taming a classroom of gobby teenagers, and established a screen persona for himself as a man of dignity and unyielding determination. 
So the question really is not if but how he's going to teach these kids to respect themselves and others. His chosen method succeeds (producing the lump in the throat of the viewer in the process) as much because the students are poorly drawn stereotypes of troubled teens, as it is because of his calmly authoritative presence.

As Denham, Thackeray's chief antagonist, Christian Roberts gives a piss-poor impression of a leather-jacketed class tough, while a chubby faced Lulu as the class tart looks about ten years too old to still be in school.- and she's not the only one. 
When the main act of rebellion by this bunch of overaged teenagers is staging lunchtime dances in the school hall, one has to wonder what the teachers are all getting so stressed about.
TO SIR, WITH LOVE has not aged well. Even if it bore some slight connection with reality on it's original release in 1967 (and it is only slight. Do we really believe that Poitier was the only non-white in the whole East End?) it now exists as a quaint snapshot of a long ago England as imagined by an outsider (Clavell). Watch it for the pleasure of Poitier's performance but don't fool yourself that you're getting a history lesson on British society.