Building Schools in the Cloud: Remapping Spaces for Learning

Ways of Seeing: London as a National Park

When I taught geography, I used to challenge my students with a simple question: Where is London?

The answers were always revealing. Some drew the familiar outline of the M25, others pinned their answer directly to Big Ben. My Australian friends? They think of ‘London’ as anywhere in England.

None of these answers were wrong—but each perspective shaped how my students understood the city.

A few years ago, geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison proposed something radical: London should be seen as a National Park City. Suddenly, what seemed like an urban, concrete sprawl was revealed as a vast living system of green spaces, waterways, and human connections—all of which had existed all along but had never been mapped in a way that made them seen.

London didn’t change. The way we saw it did.

And that’s exactly how we need to rethink education. Not by dismantling schools, but by reimagining their reach and role in a connected world.

Expanding Education Without Losing Place

For decades, we’ve built education around a centralised model:

• One school building or campus, one set of teachers, one national curriculum and set of summative exams.
• Learning happens inside fixed classrooms from 9-3 on weekdays.
• Schools operate largely in isolation from and in competition with each other.

But in a world where technology allows seamless collaboration, schools no longer need to function as standalone silos. Instead, they can become part of a wider, interconnected learning ecosystem—one that allows every school to extend its expertise and opportunities beyond its walls, while still maintaining the core human experiences that make schools invaluable.

A hot meal in a canteen, the camaraderie of team sports, the quiet focus of a library, and the personal connection of mentorship—these physical spaces matter.

But what if every school could also expand its learning beyond place while still nurturing the importance of being present?

Schools in the Cloud: Expanding Learning, Not Replacing It

I’ve worked with schools that have deep local expertise—unique courses that could benefit young people far beyond their postcode. One school I’m currently working with has an outstanding Animal Care programme because it is based on a farm. Another is renowned for its Philosophy curriculum, offering young people a depth of thought that could be accessed from anywhere in the world.

What if every school could showcase and share its specialisms globally, while also benefiting from the expertise of other schools? This is what I mean by ‘decentralising’ education—not dismantling schools, but extending their reach.

This is already happening:

• Subject experts teaching across multiple schools—allowing students in remote areas to learn from top educators.
• Virtual classrooms and learning platforms—enabling collaboration without requiring physical relocation.
• Hybrid models that blend online learning with in-person mentorship, projects, and fieldwork.
• Schools leveraging their local environment—a coastal school offering marine biology courses, a city-based school leading urban sustainability programmes.

Addressing the Teacher Workforce Crisis

Our current rigid bricks-and-mortar structure has created a teacher workforce crisis. Schools are struggling to recruit specialist subject teachers, and retention rates are plummeting as workload pressures soar.

We need to stop thinking of schools as isolated units and start designing them as interconnected, flexible learning ecosystems.

I saw this model work first-hand. In a school that had already decentralised teaching, we:

• Removed the pressure for every school to recruit its own subject experts. Instead, specialist teachers worked across multiple campuses, delivering high-quality subject instruction remotely while students had daily in-person support in their local learning hubs.
• Used vertical mentoring groups instead of traditional year-group tutor systems. This created a sense of peer learning, leadership, and support, rather than students being siloed by age.
• Focused on ‘learning to learn’ methodologies to help students take charge of their own education, rather than relying entirely on direct instruction.
• Combined remote teaching with real-world field trips for cross-campus collaboration, reinforcing that learning isn’t just digital—it’s dynamic.
• Designed mastery-based pathways through well-structured MOOCs, allowing students to move at their own pace, reducing teacher burnout caused by constantly trying to differentiate for widely varying abilities.

The result? A highly personalised, deeply connected, and scalable education model that allowed students the best of all worlds: local support, world-class expertise, real-world experiences, and digital flexibility.

The End of ‘One Teacher, One Classroom’ Thinking

Decentralising teaching doesn’t mean replacing teachers with screens. It means freeing teachers from the impossible expectation of being everything to every student, in one physical place, all the time.

Imagine a system where:

• A geography teacher doesn’t need to be recruited for every school—they can teach across multiple campuses, delivering expertise remotely while local educators facilitate hands-on learning.
• A small rural school can offer A-levels in subjects like Further Maths or Latin, without needing to fund full-time specialists.
• Every student, no matter where they live, has access to the best subject teaching available, not just whoever happens to be locally available.
• Teachers can specialise in their strengths rather than being stretched thin across multiple subjects, leading to higher job satisfaction and lower burnout.

Remapping Schools: Seeing the Spaces Between

Our current map of education is as misleading as the London Underground map—familiar, widely accepted, but a crude oversimplification of the reality on the ground.

The Underground map makes no attempt to represent the real distances between stations, the green corridors, or the waterways that cut through the city. It’s a functional diagram, but it hides as much as it reveals.

This article in the Conversation (where the picture below is from) is a great way to understand why the simplicity of this map (or rather diagram) has stood the test of time while bearing no resemblance to reality.

The same is true of how we think about schools.

When we picture ‘a school,’ we see a building. A location. A timetable. A fixed place where learning is ‘delivered’.

But what if we remapped education to show the learning pathways that already exist, but aren’t yet connected, celebrated or fully experienced?

• The subject expert teaching across campuses but invisible on traditional school staffing maps.
• The MOOC providing a world-class physics course, accessible to any student but not yet recognised as ‘part of school.’
• The learning-to-learn methodologies that empower students to drive their own education, but remain outside most national curriculums.
• The cross-campus mentoring networks where students learn as much from each other as they do from formal lessons.

These are the hidden spaces of education—the uncharted learning landscapes that exist between the rigid structures of traditional schooling.

They’re already there.

We just need to see them.

And once we do, we can stop trying to fix a rigid, outdated map not fit to direct us where we're heading and start designing a better one—one that reflects the real-world possibilities of a decentralised, networked education system.

Join the Conversation

?? LinkedIn Live: Virtual Classrooms & Labs – Remapping Learning Spaces

?? Date: Thursday 13 February

? Time: 10am UK

?? Guest: Yuekun Li, ClassIn

?? Does your school or learning community have a signature course to share? Drop your thoughts below or book a time in my diary to explore this further! ??

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