The school-based sitcom playground is getting pretty crowded, with the bell just rung on Big School and Jack Whitehall's Bad Education still running around dropping its shorts at anyone who's interested. But for my money the pick of the Class of 2013 is Some Girls (BBC3), which scores one vital A* over the opposition: it looks as though it's set in a school that might actually exist.

On the face of it, the group of south London bffs at the heart of Some Girls is painfully PC: one sorted black girl, one ditzy white blonde, one brainy Asian and one baby Kathy Burke. So it's full credit to the spark in the writing of Bernadette Davies and a set of confident performances from the four leads that this formula adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It works.

Led from the front by Adelayo Adedayo as Viva, who was facing down the tricky issue of dumping a fit boyfriend who was too thick for her, last night's episode centred on the sudden death of a science teacher - cue the arrival of Broadchurch's Jonathan Bailey as unashamed lust object - and the fallout therein.

It was all dealt with delightfully distastefully, as voiced by the straight-talking Aussie gym teacher/resident hard-faced bitch: 'We'll provide a counsellor - if you can't talk it over with your mates like a normal person.'

The first series of sixth-form girlcom Some Girls was savaged by some on the basis that it wasn't The Inbetweeners. And fair enough: while the characters were as vacuous and clichéd as their E4 male counterparts, they were seldom as funny. But the opener to this second run suggests a mild reappraisal might be in order. The characterisation has scarcely moved on, but the performances are more confident and Bernadette Davis's writing rings a little truer.

We rejoin the girls shortly after sensible Viva (Adelayo Adedayo, the best thing in it) finds a dead teacher in a store cupboard. Enter an eminently fanciable counsellor (Jonathan Bailey), rapidly courted by bimbo Amber and aggressively on-heat Holli. It's no masterpiece, but its eagerness to please lends it a certain surreptitious charm.

Some Girls is basically a teen girls' take on The Inbetweeners, complete with profanity, banter, sex, swearing, violence and football. The setting, however, is no salubrious suburb but an inner city estate, lending a little more edge, as well as a more varied culturally mix, to proceedings.

The comedy is frequently broad and sometimes blunt, but the relationship between the quartet of friends is well observed and firmly rooted in recognisable, realistic emotions. I wasn't particularly taken by the show's use of voice-over narration, but I was extremely impressed by the narrator - Adelayo Adedayo, as Viva, is a real find. Colin Salmon, who recently waltzed off Strictly Come Dancing, plays Viva's firefighter dad.

Expect some pearl-clutching tabloid outrage about this. Bernadette Davis's comedy introduces a quartet of girls in their mid-teens who swear, have sex and regularly countermand their mothers and fathers! Yet while parents of girls approaching that age may well blanch, there's some depth to lead character Viva (Adelayo Adedayo), who's rebelling against her dad (Colin Salmon) because he's seeing her school football coach (Dolly Wells).

The script mixes deft set pieces with cheap laughs - the mute girl in a burqa made me uncomfortable - but the direction, by Adam Miller, is consistently great: plenty of swift visual gags and a very funny, lairy girls' football match filmed in slow motion.