Should Class have been cancelled?

Yes.
Oh wait, sorry, did you want more? Fair enough...
For those who don't know, Class was a BBC Three original series written and created by Patrick Ness, as a young adult-targeted spin-off from Doctor Who. Set in Coal Hill School, the series saw four teenage leads and their evil alien teacher Miss Quill assigned by a certain Doctor to protect the area from cracks in space and time, from which anything could spring from. Insert monster-of-the-week formulas, teen drama and a rather clunky over-arching narrative here.
Now, that really doesn't sound like a bad idea for a series, or even a Doctor Who spin-off. Contemporary Who has definitely had a Buffy the Vampire Slayer influence, as did The Sarah Jane Adventures, and Torchwood definitely took inspiration from Angel. A teen-oriented show would be fine...if this was about ten years ago, when TV was actually trying to engage this kind of audience. Nowadays teenagers have plenty of specially-targeted shows on Netflix, and sticking some cheap Doctor Who spin-off on BBC iPlayer for them just doesn't work. Teenagers generally aren't interested in Doctor Who, so news of a spin-off would put them off, and who in that demographic actually goes onto BBC iPlayer? This isn't me assuming what's going on, this is my experience. Being a college student, I'm the perfect age for Class, and considering I'm admittedly a sad Doctor Who fan, I pretty much embody the demographic - and even I didn't like the show.
It's not without merit, of course. Class had a generally fantastic cast, and some of the characters were quite good - even if others felt like walking clichés as opposed to genuine people. Some of the stories were genuinely interesting concepts, the show actually tried to delve into realistic teenage drama, and hey - the score was good. Hence Blair Mowat was hired for some of the Doctor Who series 10 promotional material (as is no doubt waiting in the wings to replace Murray Gold for series 11...assuming Gold is leaving, of course).
The ultimate problem with Class isn't with the abominable way the BBC handled its distribution, or even the cheap production values - it's with the writing. Patrick Ness, regardless of his young adult novels, fails in almost every aspect on the show - whether it be the scripts themselves or just his general role as showrunner. Hiring a cast mostly consisting of 20ish year old actors is, frankly, a bit of an insult to your target audience, regardless of how talented they are. Do you know how many talented 16-17 year olds there are? Probably not, because you didn't look. I know lots of shows do this, but just because its the norm doesn't mean it should be. Case and point: Harry Potter. The actors were hired to play the characters at the age they were supposed to be, and even grew up with the characters over the ten years.
Patrick Ness had no interest in doing that it would seem, but he has even less interest in actually capturing a sixth form environment. Now, there's a couple of things to throw out there: is this new Coal Hill Academy building a College building, or is it a School building? The show doesn't give a definite answer and often contradicts itself. It definitely isn't the same School building as seen in Doctor Who, but the characters reference it being re-built, so theoretically it can't just be a College building. But none of the students were uniforms. In fact, there aren't any younger students, so it is a College building...? Not to mention, if you can find a school/college around London with actual desks, I'd quite like to know. I've never seen any. Oh, and they have blackboards? Seriously, what school/college has blackboards nowadays? The series also has one of the leads, Tanya, as having moved up from a lower grade to the same classes as the other leads, but...does this actually happen? I've heard of it be a rare incident in US Schools, but I've never heard of this in the UK. The long and short of it is that Patrick Ness doesn't seem to actually know the location or system he's writing about, which makes much more sense when you consider that he is actually an American writer...hence why the show makes Colleges more like US High Schools.
Then there's the characterisation. I've already covered Tanya, but the obvious one is Miss Quill. She's basically just evil Sherlock. That's literally her character, an anti-social, hyper-intelligent supervillain with a chip in her head that forces her to do Charlie's bidding...hang on a second, isn't that Spike? April is a fine character, if a little bland, although the show decides to give her almost a McGuffin instead of some kind of character development across the season; while Ram feels like the only developed character...even if a lot of his decisions make him a very unlikable character. It doesn't help that the time-frame isn't made clear, but it seems that in a matter of weeks Ram just sort of gets over his long-time girlfriend's death and moves onto April. It's an incredibly forced romance, and never feels genuine. Instead it just makes Ram seem a bit self-centered. Charlie is a weak main protagonist for the series - in part because his alien background is so confused - and his boyfriend Matteusz just shows up randomly whenever the plot demands him to be there. Their romance has no development, and you don't even see them meet, let alone get together. How are we as the audience meant to invest in that?
I think they made the new Headteacher a main character at some point but, well, I don't have anything to say (let alone remember) about the series' supporting cast. The Shadow Kin are poor villains in concept, design and execution, and the structure of this season is pretty poor overall.
And then they have an audacity to end on a cliffhanger. And then they decide to put "series one" on the DVD cover. And then Patrick Ness decides to stick the middle-finger up to Class fans everywhere by leaving the show. And then, nearly a whole bloody year after the series premiered, we finally get official word that it's been cancelled. Regardless of what you thought, the show and the people working on it don't care about a wider audience, they don't care about the detractors, and they don't even care about their own fans. There are people out there wanting a Class series 2, and why not? Why shouldn't they have Class series 2? Why shouldn't they be rewarded for supporting the series by getting to see the resolution to a cliffhanger tacked-on and just abandoned with no interest from anyone involved? X-Files got a second chance. Heroes got a second chance. Constantine got a special episode, and now has an animated series on the way. Torchwood series 5 is actually now a thing from Big Finish productions. And Doctor Who came back from loads of attempted cancellations. I didn't like Class very much, but the fans who did watch it, and especially the fans who've supported it over the past eleven months deserved more. Class killed itself, but the BBC made sure to assist in any way they could, and now that's a big hole left in the Whoniverse. What happened next? Doesn't matter. Not even the showrunner gives a damn.
And, if you ask me, that's just poor.