Mairi MacKay is a secondary teacher with a more comfortable working environment than most. There is no long walk down endless corridors to get to the toilets. And while jeans would be frowned upon in most Scottish schools, she is wearing a pair today because, by and large, her pupils will only ever see her from the waist up.

MacKay, who teaches from her living room in Perth using a laptop, delivers Gaelic lessons to learners in Argyll and Bute, Highland and the Western Isles with the aid of videoconferencing software. She is employed by the Western Isles e-Sgoil, which launched in 2016 and which recently inspired the Welsh government to start beaming lessons into its own schools (see box, below). To meet her pupils in person would take MacKay the best part of a working day by road and sea.

The ambition of e-Sgoil is to provide equal access to courses and subjects for pupils, irrespective of whether they are able to attend the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway, which has more than 1,000 pupils, or Castlebay Community School on the island of Barra, with its secondary roll of just 65 (see figures, page 23).

It came into being because the council was struggling to deliver on its goal that all pupils should have access to six secondary subjects through the medium of Gaelic. However, the potential of the virtual-teaching model at a time of staff shortages had long been recognised, and the Scottish government invested £550,000 in the project.

Now, e-Sgoil headteacher Angus Maclennan - who was a depute head at the Nicolson Institute before taking up his current post in 2016 - says the virtual school has a steady presence in eight of Scotland’s 32 local authorities, and has been used in 13.

The initiative has also spurred on other authorities to establish similar initiatives. Highland Council has had a virtual school for three years, but this session has appointed its first headteacher, Laura Gordon. She was previously head of Alness Academy in the Ross and Cromarty area of the Highlands, and before taking on this role served as a quality-improvement officer for the council. Gordon says she was made head after the number of pupils taking online courses grew to more than 300 in August.

Shetland Council, meanwhile, has appointed Tracy Langley, a primary principal teacher, to lead its remote teaching, and Orkney is in the process of recruiting a virtual school head.

Making a match

Maclennan likens the Western Isles e-Sgoil to a teacher “dating agency”: it has staff on its books, and when requests come in from schools, it attempts to match the two.

Last year, when a Canadian Gaelic teacher was refused a visa to teach at Bunessan Primary on the Isle of Mull - a story that made headlines - it was e-Sgoil that found a teacher willing to work remotely to keep Gaelic language learning ticking over until a more permanent appointment could be made. In August, Argyll and Bute Council filled the post and e-Sgoil withdrew.

In total, e-Sgoil is delivering about a dozen subjects, from computer science at Bannockburn High in Stirling Council to graphic communication at Bucksburn Academy in Aberdeen. Schools outside the Western Isles pay for e-Sgoil services per period, with 10 per cent of the charge going towards the time required to source staff and put the necessary IT in place.

The e-Sgoil will never be about replacing teachers, but rather “adding value” or intervening in a crisis, says Maclennan. The focus is on “real-time teaching to real pupils by real teachers” and not on the self-directed learning delivered by organisations like the Open University. The potential for prerecorded lessons is being looked into, but these would only ever be used for revision or to consolidate learning, he insists.

Gordon echoes this point: “If you have one or two live periods and online materials for pupils to access, that only supports your top-end pupils. It’s quite difficult to learn with one period of input and individual study for the other four.”

Maclennan is particularly excited about the potential of e-Sgoil when it comes to making Gaelic a living, breathing language; assisting those with additional support needs; and increasing the reach of music tuition. Last year, one Western Isles teenager, who had found it impossible to attend school due to an eating disorder, was able to join her classmates remotely (see box, page 23). Meanwhile, a pilot is being run in which piping, fiddle and brass music tutors are using e-Sgoil technology to cut down on travel and increase teaching time. One tutor has been able to reduce their travel by 560 miles per month and increase the number of pupils they work with by a third.

“The result is, using the same money, we are able to teach more pupils,” says Maclennan.

He was persuaded to take on the role at e-Sgoil after hearing about a family that was considering moving from Harris - where he was raised - to Stornoway or the mainland, so that their children could access a wider range of subjects in the senior phase.

“No authority can afford now to staff a school to give the full range of subjects if they have fewer than 50 or 100 pupils - it’s incredibly difficult, that’s the reality of it,” says Maclennan. “If we can be part of the solution that allows families to stay in fragile, remote, rural communities - to me, that’s hugely satisfying.”

A wider curriculum

Secondary provision on Harris is provided by the Sir Edward Scott School in Tarbert - an all-through school with about 90 secondary pupils. Headteacher Aileen MacSween says e-Sgoil has indeed widened the curriculum the school can offer, allowing her pupils to study Highers in RMPS (religious, moral and philosophical studies), modern studies, psychology as well as Advanced Higher maths.

“My main concern was how would the technology work and how reliable would it be?” she adds. “But from the outset, the technology has worked and the young people themselves - although it is alien to them being taught in this manner - have quickly adapted.”

Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, says it is best, where possible, for pupils to learn in the same classroom as their teacher. However, it adds that e-Sgoil could be a practical solution in rural or remote areas with only one or two pupils studying a subject.

When e-Sgoil launched, the fear was that it could lead to fewer teachers being employed, but Maclennan argues that it is able to bring teachers back into the profession.

The General Teaching Council for Scotland carried out research last year exploring why more than 700 teachers, aged 21-45, had not renewed the registration they needed in order to teach. It found that the most common reasons teachers cited for allowing their registration to lapse were connected to changes in personal or family circumstances.

More recently, a report on teacher dropout rates by England’s National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) found that many secondary teachers who left teaching for another job switched from full-time to part-time work. This pointed to an unmet demand for part-time work, according to NFER lead economist Jack Worth.

The e-Sgoil employs a physics teacher in Orkney who also works part-time on his family’s commercial beef farm; one Gaelic teacher beams her lessons in from Malaga in Spain; and a teacher based in a village in North Uist, who quit the profession to look after an elderly parent, is delivering Advanced Higher modern studies to pupils in mainland Highland Council schools and on the Western Isles.

MacKay is another case in point. She left teaching in 2013 with no intention of returning. She was a Gaelic teacher and also taught history in Gaelic at Perth Academy. But as a mother of four children, one of whom was born with a rare condition - her 15-year-old son has had periods of up to six weeks when he has been unable to attend school - she was struggling to balance work and family life. Ultimately, MacKay decided to leave teaching and turn her hobby of making handicrafts into her job, but she has also started working for e-Sgoil.

“I would never have come back to conventional teaching and I still never will, because this is so much more flexible,” she says. One of the downsides of teaching in a school, adds MacKay, is that other people dictate the classes you teach, but with the e-Sgoil, she picks and chooses. And she never has to cover classes for absent colleagues.

Ready, set, Glow

When the e-Sgoil came into being, the time was right for virtual teaching, says Maclennan: the technology had become cheap enough, super-fast broadband was being rolled out and the teacher shortage was biting.

Another important piece of the puzzle is Glow, the Scottish schools’ digital network. During an e-Sgoil lesson, the teacher appears at the front of the class on a screen and the pupils each have a device to log on to Glow, where PowerPoint presentations, handouts and homework are shared, and which allows everyone in the class to communicate.

One big advantage of the set-up, finds MacKay, is that she can mark pupils’ work in real time. In a classroom, it would be off-putting for pupils to have a teacher hovering in the background, watching as they answered. But that is exactly what MacKay is able to do in the virtual world, because she can access her pupils’ work as they write it.

The result is instant feedback for pupils and minimal marking for her. Preparation is also easier - there is no photocopying to do, for instance.

One of MacKay’s major concerns when she started was behaviour management, and what would happen if a child were to “kick off”, but so far she has not experienced a single behavioural issue.

Jonathan Firth is a psychology teacher and a teaching fellow at the University of Strathclyde. Firth has been working for e-Sgoil this year, delivering Higher psychology to 17 pupils in three Western Isles schools simultaneously. Like MacKay, his biggest worry was managing the class, but in reality, it is conversing with pupils that he has found difficult.

“In an ordinary class you have that back-and-forth communication, and it’s quite difficult to do that [now],” he says. “The sound is never 100 per cent and the visuals are never perfect.” But he stresses that, without the e-Sgoil, these pupils would not be studying psychology at all.

Maclennan believes behaviour has not been an issue to date because e-Sgoil classes are usually relatively small and pupils are grateful for the opportunity. Also, there is always a classroom assistant or another teacher physically present in the room.

“We are adding value to what is happening in schools, and the pupils recognise that and are thankful for it,” he says.

I visit MacKay’s home in Perth one Tuesday to see her deliver lessons to a Gaelic speakers’ class for S2s at Nairn Academy in Highland (a 125-mile drive away, at least two and a half hours along the treacherous A9), and a Gaelic speakers’ class for S5s at Oban High in Argyll and Bute (nearly 100 miles away).

The Nairn Academy lesson does not go ahead. The teacher who usually sets up the videoconferencing is off and the cover teacher does not know the password. MacKay communicates with the pupils using the chat function on OneNote and sets them some work, then has no choice but to leave them to get on with it. Glitches such as this happen “once in a blue moon”, she says.

Next up is Oban High. We enter the classroom remotely just before the bell rings and the two desks that we see on MacKay’s computer screen - where laptops are set up and ready - are soon filled by Rhona MacLeod, who is studying Higher Gaelic over two years, and Martin MacKinnon, who is working towards an N5 in the language.

Not perfect, but it works

The pupils are doing a listening exercise about propaganda in the media, for which MacKay reads a paragraph in Gaelic, and they answer questions based on what they hear. The pupils approach the task with the level of enthusiasm you might expect from teenagers, but no technical hitches arise; MacKay communicates easily with the pupils and the lesson goes smoothly.

At the end, Rhona says the remote lessons can be “dead annoying”: the technology does not always work and it takes a long time to log on and get everything set up. “It’s easier to have a real teacher in the classroom,” she adds. “If there’s anything you don’t understand, you can stay behind.” But she also says that, when lessons do get underway, they “get more work done”.

Martin says the e-Sgoil is a “good idea” and that it is a positive thing to have their work marked instantly.

But the biggest advantage has to be that e-Sgoil is allowing these pupils to continue with a subject that they have studied since primary school.

As Maclennan says, be it e-Sgoil or real school, you will never have a system that works all the time. He is also very clear that, while e-Sgoil has huge potential, it is “not the cure for everything”. Amid a national teacher shortage, even a school such as his - which can in theory recruit from anywhere - is also feeling the pinch. An e-Sgoil cannot recruit teachers when they just do not exist, he says.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

Celtic connection

When the Welsh government celebrated the launch of its E-Sgol in October, it was upfront about where the idea had come from: it was based on the innovative e-Sgoil project on Scotland’s Western Isles.

For roughly a year, Angus Maclennan, headteacher of Western Isles Council’s e-Sgoil, has been liaising with the Welsh government, sharing what he and his colleagues have learned about using technology to deliver lessons to pupils who are often in remote and rural areas.

Now, as part of the Welsh government’s rural education action plan, the first E-Sgol lesson has been delivered there, with video technology used to connect classrooms.

Welsh education secretary Kirsty Williams said at the launch: “Today’s E-Sgol lesson has been great fun and has demonstrated how technology can provide solutions to some of the issues rural schools face.

“I am delighted to launch the project and am grateful to the Scottish government for their help in getting the technology to Wales.”

Eating disorder: ‘The e-Sgoil made a huge difference’

Fifteen-year-old Sarah* was diagnosed with anorexia last November. By December, she had become so weak that doctors advised she should be taken out of the island secondary she attended.

Her mother, Michelle*, recalls: “She would just collapse, she was so unwell. She was in hospital for a while, too. Every term, I kept thinking she would be back at school, but in the end it lasted for six months.”

However, thanks to the e-Sgoil, for half of that time, Sarah - then aged 14 and in S3 - was able to take part in key subjects, such as English, maths and geography, in her own home, 3 miles from the school.

“She just linked up whenever there was a class, so she was in her class but at home,” says Michelle. “It made a huge difference to her, without a doubt, because she puts a lot of pressure on herself and was worried about getting behind.”

Sarah returned to school for half-days just before the summer break, and has been back full-time since the new school year began in August.

*Names have been changed