In February 2020 I was invited to Wey Education’s Quality in Teaching & Learning Awards Dinner. The purpose of the occasion was to honour five teachers who had achieved a recently-developed online teaching award. Interhigh, the school arm of Wey Education, helped to develop the qualification. They clearly take online education seriously; it is, after all, different in many respects from face-to-face teaching. In some ways it is easier (less traipsing around from room to room, less noisy, and perhaps fewer discipline issues. On the other hand, I think it’s more difficult to gauge people’s reactions and interactions, and if the technology fails you don’t necessarily have a Plan B that can be implemented immediately.

Interhigh runs its timetable like a normal school timetable, and it obviously has the technology in place, as you can see from the school’s tour video. In other words, their offering has been thought through systematically and not done as a reaction to sudden events. Nevertheless, I thought they might have some useful tips for mainstream pupils about learning online, so I looked and came across this: Ten online learning tips. I don’t think there is anything earth-shattering there, but it does serve as a useful — and ready-made — guide to which to point your own students.

(I think, having heard stories of kids not doing schoolwork and having very unstructured days that online timetabled lessons are a good idea for mainstream schools too if the school and parents have the requisite technology in place.)

I’m not sure that for all kids, or even most, online education is “the answer” on a permanent basis. The social aspects of school are addressed by Wey, but for some pupils school provides an escape from a chaotic home environment. I realise that most kids from an unhealthy home environment won’t be likely to attend Interhigh or schools like it, because of the fees, but the school does award scholarships. Would a teacher in an online teaching environment be able to spot pupil red flags? What about sport or exercise? (It appears to be a voluntary option at Interhigh.)

I also notice, from a small random selection of pupil stories, that an online school appears to be attractive to youngsters who have had a rough time (bullying, for instance) at a physical school. Perhaps an online school is also an attractive proposition for parents who wish to home-school their child but don’t have the required subject knowledge in all areas, who can afford the fees, and are able to ensure that their child attends. Clearly, such conditions won’t be satisfied in the lives of the majority of parents.

I don’t know enough about online schools in general, or Interhigh in particular, to be able to answer the questions I’ve raised, but it does seem to deliver the goods for some pupils and their parents. I was going to say it’s a good proof of concept, but the concept was proved back in 1998 when Professor Stephen Heppell set up his Not School.

The technology is even better: more reliable, more accessible by a multitude of devices, more ubiquitous, cheaper now than it was then. If I were running a school I should do my best to invest the time and money to ensure that a switch to online education is relatively easy to achieve in the event of a crisis.