Online School - it’s been emotional…

As footballer-turned-actor Vinny Jones once eloquently said, “it’s been emotional.” I am leaving a job in which parental feedback has made me weep on more than one occasion, as they’ve described the radical improvement in the development and confidence of their child after joining our online schools. The phrase “I feel like I have my child back” will live with me for the rest of my life.

As I exit Inspired Online Schools, to take over as CEO at Ding (another organisation with huge purpose, but more of that another time) I’m sharing some reflections about my time in school age education (K-12).

I have to start with a comment about Inspired Online Schools’ parent organisation, the Inspired Education group. This is a remarkable company. In ten years flat, Nadim Nsouli has built the best premium international schools group in the world. All Inspired schools share an ethos in supporting the whole child across

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Inspired schools do an outstanding job for their students.

At the same time, it is an extremely successful business – partly since as a business, it sees and embraces the need to invest in new initiatives to test the boundaries of how well we can educate our children. This isn’t just the best science labs, playing fields or school theatre. This is offering the best Virtual Reality experiences and use of Artificial Intelligence to drive learning outcomes. It’s also about leveraging the power of a group – learning from creating learning at scale and the best practices can be taken from one school’s approach into others.

It is in the context of this environment that my team has built and grown Inspired Online Schools.

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Online Schools – why and what?

I joined Inspired Education in 2020 with the idea that education could be done differently. I talked about how the existing education system that had been designed for the production of factory-ready workers and a desire to see things done differently. Since then, I have been leading a rapidly growing organisation whose purpose has been to provide education in a different way, to those for whom the established options simply do not work.

Online school existed before the pandemic but saw a huge rise in profile and popularity as a result of COVID-19. There were, and still are, communities for whom online school, when done well, is a better solution than mainstream physical school. In the last 2-3 years at King’s InterHigh and Academy 21 we have made this a better solution for an ever-growing number of children. Student needs we serve include:

The Globally Mobile: online school provides a consistent academic education and a virtual friendship group for kids uprooted every year or two, in families who frequently move for work.

The Dream Followers: young people who may be on a pathway to elite sport, may be budding actors, dancers or entrepreneurs, who need to organise their education around their other commitments. The flexibility offered by online school can work well for them.

Those Disenfranchised from Mainstream School: physical school simply doesn’t work for some young people. The highly gifted who want go faster and study out of year; the sadly growing number of young people affected by mental health and wellbeing challenges; kids with various forms of special education need and neurodiversity, including autism and ADHD. All are served well by the different approach that online school can offer.

The Aspirants to Global Universities: for students who live in places without available or affordable international schools, online schools enable access to a clearer global university pathway via globally recognised curricula qualifications like the International Baccalaureate or British GCSEs and A Levels.

The online schools that we have developed at Inspired Online Schools succeed through a blend of education pedagogy, skilled educators and targeted use of technology. We believe that:

1. Education must be human.

• Teachers matter. Much-vaunted ed tech solutions that provide only interactive content and do not involve the dialogue created via a skilled instructor are, at best, supplementary in the education of children at scale.
• Other students matter. Students can learn as much from each other’s questions as they do from the teacher, which is why live learning matters – it’s not just about the discipline of being somewhere when you are meant to be, live virtual learning is better for many (not all) types of learning intervention.

2. Education is more than academic achievement.

• We can maximise individual academic potential. Not every child is a straight A’s student but appropriately guided and supported, every child can reach their best outcomes academically. Our delivery is tailored – there’s no one size fits all.
• We can maximise the potential of the whole child. It would be easy for an online school to concentrate on academic achievement, since research repeatedly shows online learning can drive better academic outcomes. However in school age young people, personal development is of equal or perhaps greater importance, building confidence, resilience, communication skills, team and project working skills, leadership and more. The top of my wish list for my own children’s education is not their academic achievement, but for them to leave school with personal confidence and knowledge of who they are. King’s InterHigh runs a full pastoral curriculum supported by rich co-curricular opportunities, from Future Tech Club to Model United Nations and most things you could think of. Our students mostly lead these, supported by our teachers. Developing passions and related skills is a prime building block for life.

3. Technology is a critical enabler

• The core platform has to work seamlessly. This is always a journey and we’ve come a long way over recent years, but can evolve much further. The challenge is always in what one chooses to create vs curate. There is so much great education technology out there, we have taken a pathway of picking the best of what already exists for certain subjects and topics, while developing our own solutions where we haven’t found something out there that suited out students.
• Embrace new technology and then track impact. We have been early adopters of Virtual Reality and now run 30% of our world-first, online-only International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme using Virtual Reality. Imagine experiencing Anne Frank’s life in the attic rather than just reading and talking about it. Classroom discussions have never been so elevated. Artificial Intelligence has a role to play: we’ve adapted Century Tech’s platform that personalises learning to a student’s individual progress and journey, to great effect, with a clear correlation to childrens’ improved outcomes.

What have I learned?

The move from an education designed for the production of factory-ready workers, to one more fit for modern purpose, is slower than I thought. I have concluded that this is not the altogether bad thing that it might seem, however.

Education works in long cycles. Proving the benefit of a new approach requires participation in large numbers and enough time for the approach to show an influence on outcomes for children. There are of course some "A/B test equivalent" examples in learning, but given what’s at stake for children’s futures, we shouldn’t be jumping wholesale at the next shiny new thing without effective assessment of the true impact on educational outcomes.

There is already constant innovation. Inspired Online Schools is lucky to already benefit from scale (nudging 10k students who are taking established curricula, consistently delivered). This means we have been able to get a feel for what works better, at pace. This isn’t limited to our work in VR or AI. Our learning innovation team and teachers are constantly testing new approaches. We have been the first school in the world to pilot digital-only examinations in partnership with Pearson Edexcel (student’s own computer, from home, proctored and regulated). Trying things for the first time is always hard, but where it concerns a child’s education, also potentially high risk. This is another reason why innovation within guide rails is no bad thing.

The “new thing” has to have wide applicability. Over and above a increased acceptance of a shift in the medium of delivery, a radical departure from current recognised curricula may seem superficially appealing – new topics, different learning approaches and so on. However, the world currently only values a limited set of recognised curricula as passports into post-school life, so diverging from these poses risks to a child’s journey as they exit school. Convergence around what a new model should look like moves slowly. I won’t pretend to have the answers, but there are wider differences between existing curricula than one might imagine so it isn’t currently a pure 'one size fits all'. The enquiry-first model and curriculum breadth of the International Baccalaureate is a contrast to the (marginally) more summative assessment-led British Curriculum approach.

Flexibility opens many doors. King’s InterHigh is an incredibly flexible schooling option enabling greater tailoring of subjects (where our scale enables us to offer a much wider range than physical schools) and more customisation around timetabling (a real boon for pursuing other passions, in time windows scheduled for no classes). A richer life can be had without the traditional school day if both young person and parents are willing to embrace it!

What next?

For education more broadly, the risk is that the enthusiasm for innovation in the mainstream system is crushed by economic pressures. By way of example, if the UK government does increase teacher pay at a rate closer to inflation but require it to come from existing sources of funding (as seems possible at the time of writing), the overall experience for school children will be poorer as budgets shrink. The global education landscape shows innovation everywhere with a host of different models being deployed, though sadly, too few of these revolve around structured experimentation with new curricula.

For Inspired Online Schools, I predict more success under the excellent Ashley Harrold . As Executive Head of Inspired Online Schools he has already brought fresh thinking and common sense. He has been a prime architect of the improved experience families that have with us (from 2.3 stars out of 5 when we acquired InterHigh, to 4.8 out of 5 now, as a revitalised King’s InterHigh) and the academic results of our students, that are 50% above UK state school averages without the typical independent school price tag. Inspired Online Schools will continue to do an ever-better job of serving young people who need an alternative to mainstream physical school. More parents will “feel like they have their child back”. The world will continue to be a better place for those families as a result.

For me, I’ll be operating outside education for the first time in twenty years (a COVID-crushed year at Travel Counsellors aside) as CEO of Ding.

Ding is a brilliant service that helps the migrant worker diaspora around the world send value to friends and family at home, either as mobile top-up (minutes, texts, data – keeping loved ones in communication), or as a range of other products (meals, energy and more).

As I come from helping deliver alternative education options, I can see the importance of Ding’s service as a way to keep families connected – Afghanistan and Sudan are countries where Ding currently provides a significant link from ‘the worried’ outside the country to ‘the troubled’ inside the country. There’s no education without communication, so maybe I am just stepping one stage up the chain?