Ask a Principal: Your Questions Answered by the Head of the UK's Fastest Growing School

In the millenia-old history of school, online education is still a very very recent development, having only really emerged in its current form around the turn of the decade after the pandemic put the crises facing schools into sharp focus.

As a result, there can still be a lot of confusion around how online schools actually work, particularly when there are still many differences between different models.

So, to help clear up the picture, MVA Principal Suzanne Lindley has sat down with Admissions Advisor Isabelle Heptinstall to answer some of your most-asked questions about online school, MVA, and how we turn unhappy kids into thriving, successful students.

The following is a series of extracted answers from the full 45-minute session, which is also available to watch on YouTube:

Flipped Learning – How Guided is it, and How Many Hours of Self-Study?

So students will typically depending on which year group they're in will do between 45 minutes or an hour of independent work on the [Virtural Learning] Platform before they come to a live lesson.

It's very much structured and chunked down to [...] suit the needs of all types of learners. So that helps to reduce overwhelm, clear instructions, lots of variety in so in terms of the activities that they do.

Live Lessons are varied in terms of checking students understanding of the work they've done before the Live Lesson, engaging them, teaching them new content, checking their understanding and then they'll follow up with a further chunk of work on the Virtual Learning Platform all quality assured by our heads of department across MVA.

How Can Parents Track Attendance, Independent Study, and Progress?

We do that in a number of ways. And I would say that our parents at MVA get to know so much more about their child's education than a parent at a physical school would.

Our virtual learning platform is fully accessible to our parents. You can see all the resources. You can see the work that your child is submitting and then you can see the feedback and the grades that the teachers are providing for your child as often or as little as you need.

In addition to that, every young person joining MVA has their own one-to-one mentor. And that's the person that gets to know you and your child the best and therefore can provide any additional support that your child may need [...] but also in terms of their personal development and including things that they're doing outside of MVA.

And the mentor will provide you with a fortnightly report as a parent. In addition to that fortnightly report [...] we will assess students learning in a more substantial way from time to time and have more higher stakes learning and assessment opportunities and that will feed into our school reporting system and [that] will be shared back to you through our parent portal.

How is Social Interaction Facilitated?

Different students, as they do in a physical setting, will socialise in different ways. So we like to provide different types of opportunities whether that be through our enrichment program where students who are really interested in a particular activity, whether that be creative writing or baking and cooking, they can join and meet up with other students who have that shared interest through lessons.

We also offer a suite of in-person trips and visits. Some of those are open to the whole school as different opportunities, but also some of them are year group based. Some of them are curriculum based like trips to the theater, trips for music, etc. We are also this year offering our first residential. We're also the first online school to [...] run the Duke of Edinburgh award.

SEND support

All of our mentors are SEND trained. All of our teachers are SEND trained but we do have some more specialist mentors that come from a higher level of SEND background.

We have a big team [...] in our SEND department. So two SENDCos, five Assistant SENDCos a Specialist EHCP Coordinator [...] the SEND team work 1:1 either directly with the mentor to best support the mentee or directly with the families themselves. There are also additional programs like social emotional skills programs that we can offer through our SEND Support Lead. So there's a whole suite of tiered provision that we offer.

How Do Practical Subjects Work Online?

So in a number of ways. Firstly there are some science experiments that the students do in their own homes. So using [...] fairly basic simple accessible resources [like] bicarbonate of soda and vinegar [...] to create volcanoes and you're talking about the chemical reactions associated with that.

In other cases, the teacher is doing the experiment live online to students. We have a series of of demos that we do as well and we have access to data and again we use technology to give students as live or as close to a live experience as possible.

We are hoping to be able to partner with some schools and have access to labs [...] that's something we're working towards in the future as we expand our offer and our provision.

In terms of other practical subjects [...] it is absolutely possible to do arts online. It's a super super popular subject for us at GCSE [...] the students are given plenty of notice as to what equipment they need at home. Depending on what medium they want to work in, the teacher uses a visualizer to do lots of demonstrations of techniques.

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