As a scholarship student at Stowe School, edupreneur Hugh Viney grabbed school life by the horns. Joining the choir, playing rugby and appearing in plays, he also loved learning and felt “very lucky and grateful” to be there.
Passionate about classics (he now has a degree in the subject from UCL) he was the only student in his year studying ancient Greek and he enjoyed one-on-one lessons with an “inspirational” classics teacher, Mark Edwards.
Incredibly, Viney recently employed Edwards – who had gone on to become deputy head of The Dragon School – as the head of middle school at Minerva’s Virtual Academy (MVA), the online school Viney established during the pandemic.
It’s an indication of how the public perception of online schooling has changed since 2020 that teachers and leaders from the nation’s top schools are signing up to work in them.
“Parents were saying they didn’t want their child to go back to the school they hated.”
All the more important, perhaps, has been how parents have responded to the new school which Viney set up amid huge demand for his existing tutoring business, Minerva Tutors, during the pandemic.
“Some kids were happier in Covid doing online learning so the parents had this awakening,” says Viney, who gave up a career in the music business to work in the private tutoring world after university.
“Parents were saying: ‘I don’t want my child to go back to the school they hated. They’ve been enjoying homeschooling so much.’”
By late November 2020 the new school had four students signed up, and numbers swelled to 16 by January 2021.
Three years later, Minerva’s is thought to be the fastest growing private secondary school in the country, with 725 full-time pupils. It is expected to grow to 1000 pupils by the end of the year.
“The school appears to be riding a wave of demand for alternative education.”
The school has 95 academic staff (60 full-time equivalent) and 22 staff at headquarters in London taking care of marketing, admissions, operations and finance.
Parents pay £7,645 per year for a relatively affordable model where pupils attend online lessons in classes of up to 22 for 40 per cent of the time, with 60 per cent self-directed learning.
Learning is “flipped”, so students are expected to prepare for lessons by watching videos and reading texts, so the live lessons can be devoted to questions and discussions.
Like a host of other providers set up in recent years, MVA is benefiting from a growing consensus that online learning needn’t be second best.
“The rise of social media is almost the direct cause of the mental health crisis for teenagers.”
Much of the demand can be put down to the crisis in teenage mental health, something Viney blames squarely on social media and related activities.
“The rise of social media is almost the direct cause of the mental health crisis for teenagers, particularly anxiety,” he says.
Around half of students at Minerva’s have mental health issues, but it is by no means just for the anxious or depressed. Around 20 per cent of students are neurodivergent or have SEN, for example.
“They love our model because they don’t get distracted by loud noisy classrooms. [They can] sit and focus and accelerate their learning if they like,” says Viney.
The school also caters for 120 elite athletes who find it fits around their training and competitions and there are “lifestyle” families who have chosen to lead lives that would be incompatible with attending a school building each day.
There are even some young entrepreneurs attending the school to gain sixth form qualifications at the same time as running their businesses.
Viney is careful not to denigrate online competitors or mainstream schools who take a different pedagogical approach and concedes that the asynchronous model is not for everyone.
“The usual reason for people dropping out is there’s too much self-directed learning, and they might go to some of our competitors who literally have eight hours of Zoom lessons,” he says.
With his own happy memories of school life at Stowe, Viney is keen that his online school still incorporates the key elements of traditional schooling.
He says: “It means assembly on a Monday morning. It means pastoral care. It means one-on-one mentoring. It means clubs and societies – all this good stuff.”
There are even now twice-termly school trips to destinations such as Oxford and Bath, with the focus on both educational and social opportunities. “That’s only going to grow – we’ll do four a term next year. It’s seen by many kids and parents as a huge USP for the school,” says Viney.
The school is also blazing a trail in exams: it is one of the first schools to be accredited by Pearson to offer them online. A total of 100 Year 11s this year will be taking all their GCSEs from home as part of a pilot project.
Viney says he feels “quietly confident” about the arrangements, underlining that the school has a full-time exams officer to ensure everything runs smoothly.
In terms of the future, MVA is planning to introduce a section that runs to an Asian time zone, to capture more of the international market and offer online sixth form subjects in existing international schools.
Currently, 70 per cent of students are from the UK, although there are students studying in more than 50 countries.
A new headteacher, Suzanne Lindley, has been appointed (promoted internally from her role as deputy head pastoral) as the school grows, although founding head Lawrence Tubb has now taken an advisory role.
The school is also currently in the process of gaining Ofsted accreditation but is still officially classed as a homeschooling business.
This has not stopped a number of local authorities sending pupils their way, and some leading schools that Viney has good relationships with. Many of his teachers from Stowe are now headteachers around the UK.
He says: “We have some nice relationships with private schools, they don’t see us as a threat, they see us an awesome solution for a child who’s struggling with their system.”