The first UK-wide hybrid school, teaching children up to sixth-form age both from home and in person, will open in September 2024.
Duke’s Education schools will expect students to come in for at least one day a week for practical subjects, and to take part in sporting and social activities. For the rest of the week, it will offer four live lessons and two independent study sessions a day.
Designed for school refusers, those with anxiety or those whose parents feel there are no suitable local schools, and students who want to fit their education around sporting or other extracurricular commitments, the school has ambitions to open its doors to children across Europe.
“Unlike other online schools, we are not a temporary phase, we are a proper school,” said Ambreen Baig, who is modelling the Duke’s schools on the more limited model she set up at London’s Portland Place independent school in September 2020.
Duke’s Education runs more than 25 schools and colleges in the UK and Europe. Now Baig aims to offer the hybrid model across them all. “Our research shows that families are prepared to travel quite large distances to get to one of our schools if they’re just doing it once or twice a week,” she said.
Duke’s schools are private but Baig aims to work with local education authorities (LEAs) to introduce scholarships and bursaries. In the meantime, she said, the hybrid model is about a third of the full-time cost of independent schooling. “At most, we’ll charge £4,000 a term but I want to work with LEAs (local education authorities) to see their school refuser list and whether they are willing to fund this for those children to join us,” she said.
Baig said her model could be used more widely to tackle the growing issue of absenteeism in education: government statistics have found that 24.2% of pupils were persistently absent over the autumn term of 2022 to 2023, meaning they missed at least 10% of lessons. Pre-pandemic levels of absence were only around half of this.
Over the same period, the number of children who missed 50% or more possible education sessions – 110,000 or 1.7% of students – was almost double pre-pandemic levels
Sonny Brendon, now 15, found it impossible to settle into his secondary school three years ago. Without the hybrid model of Baig’s previous school in Portland Place, which only goes up to year 11, his mother, Sasha, said that Sonny would be “lost to education by now”.
Sonny said he felt his new secondary school was too big. “There was a distinct feeling that most of us did not matter to the school,” he said.
Now on track to get all 8s and 9s in his GCSEs, Sonny said that “hybrid learning is really appealing for students who don’t have the mental capability to go in five days a week, every week, but also don’t want to learn exclusively online for fear of missing out socially”.
“It gives you the best of both worlds because it gives you the time to socialise with friends but, simultaneously, gives you the ability to stay at home for other parts of the week. It should definitely be available for every child,” he said.
A few other schools, including Harrow private school and online schools Kings InterHigh and Academy 21, have tried remote learning but none has adopted the fully hybrid model going up to sixth form.
Baig’s previous school, Portland Place hybrid school, recently received a glowing report from the Good Schools Guide (GSG) and GCSE results better than the day school, with 31% gaining grades between 9 and 7.
Explaining why the school’s hybrid students perform better academically than the other students, the GSG said: “The school attributes this to them making a positive choice to opt for the mix of online and in-person learning – they really want to do well but realise traditional schooling is not right for them. By nature, online students also tend to be focused, independent learners and, as a result, they progress quickly.”
Baig said that if hybrid learning was available across the UK, it would transform education. “There are so many children for whom mainstream education just doesn’t work,” she said. “I’ve had children who hadn’t been to school in years: children who are wounded and damaged, bullied and bereaved. Their parents didn’t know what to do – mainstream education didn’t know what to do – but we watched them blossom.”
Baig said that she does not think Covid is the only reason why there is an increasing interest in hybrid learning. “It’s also due to the changing nature of parenting – we’re much more aware of mental health wellbeing and don’t think it’s OK to just force kids into a school environment if they struggle with it,” she said.
