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.
