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The role of e-learning in supporting children out of school

Merlin John

According to research by the University of Central Lancashire, 100,000 children are missing from normal schooling. Among national agencies there appears to be no major disagreement about this figure, yet despite considerable evidence that online learning can prove extremely effective in motivating and re-engaging young people out of school, existing successful online services are only scratching the surface of the problem.

So why is it that a major, clearly visible problem continues year after year without the purposeful deployment of proven, successful online services? The technology now appears to be a solution rather than the problem it represented before ease of use, robustness and broadband. It seems that the broad, relatively simple answer is that public policy is so closely focused on schools that these 100,000 young people exist in peripheral vision. Is it Every Child Matters In School, rather than Every Child Matters?

Young people miss school for a wide range of reasons, not just straightforward truancy. Illness, family problems, legal issues and bullying are just a few in a range of factors. And a number of services now exist to engage children out of school.

One of the best-known of these is notschool.net, set up by Ultralab and now run by the Inclusion Trust. Chief executive Jean Johnson says “It’s a proven, thoroughly researched solution through a virtual learning environment. After five years of Government funding it offers a well-researched solution for those who are disengaged from the current education system at less than half the cost of a Pupil Referral Unit.”

Notschool.net uses state-of-the-art Apple equipment and the most creative, engaging software and services to re-engage its students in their learning. Years of experience have brought success and case studies to underline the service’s achievements. Yet it feels it is operating well below capacity, handling around 1,000 students (3,000 so far) when it feels capable of scaling up to as high a figure as 50,000.

Notschool.net is not the only such service. On 7 May, BBC television news covered the use of the Accipio Learning online school service (motto: “Real teaching in a virtual world”) to re-engage excluded students in the London borough of Ealing. A group of excluded children attend an online class two days a week and the BBC reported satisfaction with the arrangements from the students, their parents and from the local authority which pays for access to the service (around £10 per lesson and home tuition at £30 -£40 per hour).

Eileen Field, Head of Education at Accipio, says that the service’s 28 teachers (they have 420 students currently on the books) just have to develop their teaching methods to gain success in what is a fairly traditional school with a head and department heads. Students work in online classrooms with other students and use headphones, microphones and texting with an on-screen whiteboard in a variety of combinations to communicate.

“We are passionate about teaching and give every student the best opportunity to learn,” says Eileen Field. “Every lesson is a new start for that student. Positive reinforcement and heaps of praise are an integral part of Accipio teaching and we look for success with every student.”

The main obstacle to development is seen as the lack of a budget on the part of schools, and the need to re-allocate funds from other areas to pay for virtual learning.

The Nisai Virtual Academy is known for its work with children who are too ill to go to school, like those with the Young ME Sufferers’ Trust, but the service, which is used across 33 local authorities, is also used for excluded students. It’s part of the Nisai Group which is involved in e-learning and training across the UK and Europe.

Nisai is also working on E-Lamp (the E-learning and Mobility Project), supported by the DfES, to use e-learning to support the children of travellers and fairground workers when they are out of, or between, schools. E-learning has proved to be very successful in this area over and above considerable efforts by more traditional educators.

Online vocational courses are also available now for schools. With a background in further education, Creating Careers is a service that mainly offers vocational qualifications, undertaken online, to young people in the workplace as part of the Government’s Train to Gain initiative. Young people find the course they want and then book it through their local FE college.

While that is the main thrust of Creating Careers’ activities, they also offer courses to young people out of school and they can gain qualifications relatively quickly and easily online (the need for technical support is apparently very low). Creating Careers’ Jonathan Ovenden, who says the service now has 60,000 students undertaking courses, is passionate about his clientele: “We want to bring the right kind of education to everyone who needs it.” He says the service is understood and supported in FE because it fits with current policy, but his challenge is how to extend it to schools.

Awareness of the effectiveness of online learning, particularly for disaffected young people, is not lost on teachers either. Although he has now left the classroom to create the acclaimed smartassess.com service for assessment for learning, Gwyn ap Harri still supports excluded learners in his home area in Yorkshire through his experimental Black Box Project. Although it is still a work in progress, it demonstrates how up-to-date technology can support sound learning principles. And the young people involved are engaged and committed.

The range of e-learning services, and projects, then, is becoming varied and rich, and a visit to the websites of these services will uncover case studies and evidence to support their effectiveness. So while they are all confident that they can offer meaningful engagement and success for young people outside school, why do they also feel that there is a block on helping such a clearly defined group of young people?

The consensus is that as changes in funding since 2005 have given headteachers more responsibility for social inclusion, the education focus has been on those in school, to the detriment of those outside.

The Inclusion Trust’s Jean Johnson puts it succinctly: “Those outside are neglected and disenfranchised from the education system: in short they don’t appear in statistics so nobody cares. The difficulty is further exacerbated by the meltdown in LAs as services are merged and others are in the process of disappearing.

"What we need is a system where the Government funding per capita really does follow the child. When a child is in difficulty, and with no potential to access education, we want to be in a position to work with the child immediately and to draw the requisite funding down immediately.”

Jean Johnson feels that the key is with headteachers and their management teams: “Sadly, while the current funding model has many strengths there are still many heads who will not financially support off-site provision regardless of the child’s needs.”

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Merlin John is an editor who created and ran The TES’ Online magazine. He is now freelance and works for publications including The Guardian, and runs his own web service at www.merlinjohnonline.net .

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