Imagine a school where all the teachers work from home and never see the students they teach, there are no physical classrooms and children attend from across the country yet never meet one another - and most only stay for a few weeks before leaving.

This is the reality at Academy21, an entirely online alternative provision (AP) school that was one of the first three schools to receive accreditation from Ofsted under the new Online Education Accreditation Scheme (OEAS) that launched last year.

The inspection report, published in March, said the school had “a culture of high ambition and high expectations” that was “driven [by a] focus on providing the best online provision possible for the pupils they serve…including the quality of teaching and safeguarding”.

For Margaret Mulholland, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), the fact that the OEAS is now live and schools like Academy21 are being accredited should help to give more schools confidence to use online AP settings to meet students’ needs.

Online alternative provision: how it works

“We’ve always been very cautious about [online AP] because we would always say to schools, ‘Make sure to check an AP provider is registered,’ but an online school can’t be registered,” she explains.

“But now they can be accredited against a set of standards by Ofsted, that can reassure school leaders that there is a quality standard in the alternative provision they’re choosing.”

For schools yet to use an online AP, however, many questions likely still remain around how such provision works, what the benefits are and whether it really can help to address the needs of students.

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• Ofsted: Alternative provision in “desperate need of reform”
• Behaviour: How our MAT improved behaviour with on-site AP

At Academy21, although as many as 3,300 students may be enrolled at any one time, it is important to note that most are only there for a short period of time, says Ashley Harrold, CEO of Inspired Online Schools, the division of Inspired Education Group that runs the school.

“We operate in a partnership model, so every student that comes to our provision already has another education establishment they’re engaged with,” he says.

“[But] they may be struggling to attend school, perhaps for physical health reasons or perhaps mental health reasons, such as anxiety, or it may be something around pupils being excluded or suspended and wider behaviour challenges.”

The school is commissioned by a local authority, multi-academy trust or individual school to work with pupils and, most of the time, it sets them back on a path back to mainstream education.

“We’re part of the journey of a student remaining in education,” Harrold says, noting that around 85 per cent of those that the Academy21 works with fall into this category.

To date, some 900 schools across 140 local authorities have used Academy21, and Harrold says the hope is that the OEAS will give more schools the confidence to use the service, rather than worrying that children sent to an online AP will “get lost in the system” and never return to a mainstream setting.

The school does have “full-time” students, although this is a low number: the Ofsted report put the figure at 106, with most of these students on education, health and care plans (EHCPs).

Live lessons

Lessons at Academy21 are conducted entirely online, with a maximum of 15 learners per class. Live attendance is expected, although students can catch up on lessons.

Laptops are provided to students by the school that has commissioned their place, and learners log on to the bespoke platform used by teachers to run lessons via webcam.

For safeguarding purposes, pupils are not visible to either the teacher or one another, although they can interact. “There’s a public chat channel where students can talk to each other or they can message the teacher privately if they don’t want to ask a question publicly,” says Harrold.

There are also numerous tools designed to tackle behaviour and lesson disruption, such as by blocking students from “spamming” the chat channel.

However, Harrold says that while these tools are required on occasion, for most pupils the chance to re-engage with school in a new way is a positive that means disruption is rare. Ofsted reported pupils saying that they “very rarely experience bullying”, often “wished their lessons were longer” and “really value their class teachers”.

Teaching remotely

Speaking of teachers, all staff are trained key stage 3 or key stage 4 subject specialists and work entirely from home. Given that many educators struggled with teaching from home during the Covid pandemic, it might be viewed as surprising that enough staff are willing to work like this.

Harrold says, however, that being remote is the appeal for staff. “There are teachers that had a good experience in the pandemic and they’ve got lifestyle aspects that fit this well,” he says.

“We’re quite positive about part-time working as well, and flexing working, so there are ways in which it’s a very accessible career move.”

As a result, Harrold claims that staff retention is strong and recruitment is not challenging: Academy21 hired 15 new teachers in January to boost capacity, something made easier by the fact that “we can recruit from anywhere in the country”.

Afiya Romain-Baines, deputy head of science at the school, says she enjoys being able to “impact so many more students” through working online, and being able to “integrate much more edtech”.

To help teachers in working with students who arrive and leave at short notice, the school uses adaptive quizzing to build up a picture of an individual’s learning level, while all lessons are centrally planned so teachers can focus chiefly on interactions with learners and helping them to readjust back to education.

“We take a very gentle approach - it’s very forgiving - because a teacher might have a student who’s in their first lesson for six months perhaps, and we celebrate everything a student achieves with us along the way,” adds Harrold.

Staff are not left entirely alone, though - there are regular online meetings and occasionally real-life meetings, such as one in July bringing together around 400 staff from Academy21 and the group’s other online school, Kings Interhigh.

A model to be rolled out?

Given the fact that teachers are willing to work like this and the OEAS will allow more online school providers to be accredited, Harrold believes there is “plenty of mileage” in online AP provision.

“I think there is huge potential in this model as you can turn around provision for a young person at the moment of crisis…and fix things before they are completely broken,” he says.

Mulholland agrees that for “stretched schools” the flexibility of online provision for AP could work really well.

“You could have young people who are in school but aren’t coping. But you don’t have to look for something external to the school - they could even attend the online provision from the school,” she says.

In fact, Harrold says he often speaks to MATs exploring whether they could create their own online provision to tap into these benefits: “When we speak to [MATs], they are asking, ‘Is this something that we could do?’ And we walk them through how we do it and the set-up.”

However, he says that many realise it is not just a case of using Teams or Zoom to host online lessons and, with 28 developers maintaining the Academy21 offering, it requires significant investment.

“They usually identify that there are things which are going to be too big a challenge to surmount,” Harrold says.

The financial reality

Of course, for a private provider of AP the idea of MATs (or local authorities, for that matter) creating their own provision would represent a risk to its commercial model - schools, LAs and MATs are paying customers, after all.

On this point, Harrold acknowledges that in “an ideal world” private providers of AP provision would not be necessary as capacity would exist within the state system.

However, he says that, from his experience as a state school head in Brighton, there is “not enough access to alternative provision”, which is why Academy21 is seeing such demand. “Schools are paying for alternative provision because the capacity isn’t in the system and demands are rising,” he explains.

He says, too, that Academy21 sets its charges close to school funding levels and offers a mix of contract types: “There’s a pay-as-you-go model so schools are not locked into something they don’t need, all the way up to an annual contract.”

Given that a government-commissioned report in 2018 found that costs for AP rose to as high as £50,000 for a year’s placement, and averaged at around £20,000, the ability for online providers to potentially offer a lower-cost approach could help schools with stretched budgets.

For Mulholland, the fact that schools are turning to private providers is an indication that there needs to be “better investment in state education to ensure there is high-quality alternative provision right across the country”.

However, she adds that “many schools are clearly benefiting from using private AP providers” and that the need to ensure that students receive the right provision means “no options should be off the table”.

As such, her hope is that, with the OEAS up and running, other online schools can receive accreditation so more schools can meet their students’ needs with confidence: “We should be building on what we learned in the pandemic and I think [OEAS] gives us an opportunity to do it with rigour.”

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