Ofsted sounded the alarm last week over ‘flexi-schooling’. But what is it, how many schools do it, and should we be worried? Schools Week investigates…
What is flexi-schooling?
The only official advice on ‘flexi-schooling’ is in government guidance on home education. This says flexi-schooling can help “provide education [for home-schooled children] in specific subjects more easily than is possible at home”.
But, in practice, it seems schools are using flexi-schooling as a tool to help children with special needs, school refusers, or those at risk of emotionally based school non-attendance (EBSNA) from dropping out of the classroom.
It’s for parents to ask schools for such arrangements, and heads have discretion on whether to agree.
Data on its use is sparse. When learning from home, flexi-schooled children should be marked as authorised absent on registers.
Chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver last week said this makes him “very concerned” as Ofsted “don’t have a proper handle on it”, adding: “We’re not able to track how many children are having some time home educated – so that worries us.”
Families group has 25k members
Facebook group Flexischooling Families UK, launched in 2012, has almost 25,000 members, and its numbers have almost doubled in the past year and a half.
The spike in interest comes as schools are struggling with large absence rates. Last year, one in five pupils missed the equivalent of an afternoon a week.
The Facebook group’s administrator, Juliette Beveridge, says they know of at least 568 schools with flexi-schooling in some form (around 3 per cent). But just 45 of them actively have a policy in place, and most agreed to it “on a case-by-case basis”.
Just 27 of those 568 schools are secondaries. Yet in a Teacher Tapp poll of more than 7,200 teachers, commissioned by Schools Week, 18 per cent of secondary teachers said they had at least one flexi-schooled pupil. At primaries, this was just seven per cent.
Different from part-time timetables
Two in five of the secondary teachers who had flexi-schooled pupils also said they had more than five across the school.
However, they might not have appreciated that flexi-schooling differs from a part-time or reduced timetable, which should only be used in “very limited circumstances”, according to government guidance.
Former teacher and flexi-schooling campaigner Sarah Sudea explains that part-time or reduced timetables are “a reactive and remedial measure” and typically short-term.
Flexi-schooling arrangements are “co-created between families and schools”, she added.
Teacher Tapp data also shows that the most common reasons for flexi-schooling are mental health needs, social anxiety and then physical health.
A Flexischooling Families UK poll of 139 parents in June found that 42 per cent were allowed to flexi-school because their child had special education needs.
Who are the flexi-schools?
Hollinsclough Church of England Academy, in Staffordshire, started offering flexi-schooling in 2008, when it had just five pupils on roll and was facing closure. The primary now has 35 pupils – it has capacity for just 60 – and all are registered as ‘flexi’.
Pupils must attend school from Tuesday to Thursday, but may be home-educated on Mondays and Fridays.
“When flexi is done as a proper partnership between home and families, children can do as well, if not better, academically, than children in full time,” said headteacher Lynda O’Sullivan.
“A parent who is switched on and wanting to help educate their child can do more in 40 minutes of one-to-one than can be achieved in a classroom in longer than that.”
The school now helps others develop their own policies.
Milburn Primary School, in Cumbria, introduced flexi-schooling in 2019, also as a bid to boost pupil numbers, which had dropped to just six. It now has 15 (it has a capacity of 28).
Head of school Hayley Dixon said flexi-schooling had been “a real success”. All but one of the pupils eventually attended the school for four or five days a week and are now in full-time secondary education.
Mondays and Fridays at home
Huxley Church of England School, in Cheshire, offers flexi-pupils the chance to learn from home on Mondays and Fridays.
When the scheme was introduced in 2020 the school had just four pupils. Today it is at full capacity, with 84 per cent flexi-schooled. Parents travel as far as 30 miles to access it, and it has a waiting list of 26 children wanting flexi provision.
Headteacher Rachel Gourley said the scheme only worked when there was a “strong partnership between the schools and families” who held a “joint educator role”.
While flexi-schooling was “not for everyone”, there was “an absolute need” to provide it for pupils who would otherwise not be in formal education, she said, adding: “I strongly believe that there should be more flexi school places widely available.”
But headteachers said it would be harder for larger schools to manage timetables for such flexi arrangements.
Families say flexi-schooling has helped children in a range of ways – from improving health, sleep, and social skills, to academic learning.
‘A more rounded education’
Parents Sebrina Blackstock-Miller and Steve Miller, himself a headteacher in Birmingham, said it had allowed their two children to “go at a faster learning pace than their class allows, to develop skills in areas they are struggling in, [and] pursue passions that are important to them that can’t always be catered for in a classroom”.
Lorna Mitchell said flexi-schooling one day a week had given her daughter “a more rounded education”, allowing her to go on trips, take music lessons, and learn Gaelic.
Another parent, who wished to remain anonymous, said their primary-aged daughter, who is autistic, had never managed to attend school full-time but is “finally thriving” under flexi-schooling.
Mother-of-three and former teacher Sarah Sudea set up the social enterprise Finding the Flex (FTF) after seeing the benefits that flexi-schooling at Stroud Green Primary in North London offered her daughter, who had EBSNA.
FTF has developed a blueprint to help schools develop their own flexi-schooling policies.
Sudea said flexi-schooling helped boost mainstream inclusion by better meeting the needs of some SEND pupils.
She said it could also form a “proactive and preventative early intervention”, giving another option to families who would otherwise “reluctantly deregister” children from school entirely.
“The reason it is gaining in popularity now is because we’ve got more desperate families with children desperately unhappy in school, and they need a different option.”
What are the main concerns?
But many do not agree. Ofsted said flexi-schooling was just one element behind the “significant number of children” being “opted out of more orthodox patterns of education”.
Dr Jeffery Quaye, national director of education at Aspirations Academies Trust, said remote learning is a hangover from the pandemic, and leaves children “disadvantaged” academically.
“We need to return to the normal, which is pupils being in school in front of an expert to deliver the curriculum,” he said. “It’s not just the curriculum – but social skills and wider development that you can’t get at home.”
Stroud Green, which actively advertises its flexi-school policy on its website, says it does not expect parents “to be teachers and deliver the curriculum” on home-learning days.
It instead suggests children will benefit from being “out in the real world”, doing activities such as visiting museums, baking, playing, doing art, or going for walks.
‘Treating symptoms not causes’
However, Ben Newmark, a teacher and school leader, said allowing children in crisis to be flexi-schooled was a “treatment of symptoms not causes”.
“If we create systems and structures to facilitate more children not being in school,” he said, “I worry under-pressure schools and parents will, with best of intentions, end up going ‘oh flexi will be better for them’. And we end up with more low-quality education.”
He also said the practice might be used by quite advantaged parents, but showed a “misunderstanding that education is a collective endeavour and something we all do together”, adding: “While their individual child may benefit, it will be the most disadvantaged kids who will be the ones who pay the price.”
The first mention of flexi-schooling in an Ofsted report was in 2016. The term appeared in just six more since then – less than one a year, SchoolDash analysis shows.
A March 2022 inspection at Huxley found full-time pupils were “disadvantaged” by the fact other pupils were being flexi-schooled. They were left to “tread water” on the two days a week when most other pupils were at home, so their learning “lacked structure”.
The school was rated ‘inadequate’.
The report also highlighted the low attendance of flexi-pupils, saying they on average “only attend for two out of their three core days”. Pupils’ academic achievement was “poor… irrespective of whether they attend school on a full- or flexi-time basis.”
Gourley said the inspection came just seven months into the flexi-schooling programme, adding: “Despite the Ofsted report, numbers continued to grow and we are now at full capacity.”
A monitoring report in July last year found the school had improved.
Flexi-schooling was mentioned in a positive light at St Weonards Academy in Herefordshire, rated ‘outstanding’ in June.
Inspectors praised how the maths curriculum “is organised so that pupils who are flexi-schooled do not miss out on core teaching”.
Ofsted described the school, which has a high proportion of SEND pupils, as “welcoming and inclusive” and said “many families travel from outside of the area” to benefit from flexi-schooling.
Calls for government guidelines and new attendance codes
Quaye said that inclusive school systems “need to meet the needs of a wide range of learners”, adding that flexi-schooling “must be used like exclusions and suspensions – as a last resort”.
He said: “Every child should be in school…full-time, unless there are exceptional circumstances.”
Dr Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT union, added that there needed to be “a national mission to tackle the causes and impacts of all forms of school absence and to make regular attendance the norm, not the exception”.
But Jon Paxman, author of a flexi-schooling report in 2022 for the social justice research charity Relationships Foundation, said “numbers are on the rise”.
“Rather than just describing what flexi-schooling is, government should start to present some best practices around it,” he said.
He said the report concluded that not all schools should do it, but should be open to considering flexi-schooling as a “special needs support mechanism and not necessarily dismiss requests because of a blanket ban”.
He said some councils had outlawed the practice.
The report also called for national guidelines and a new attendance code for flexi-schooling.
Sarah Hannafin, head of policy at school leaders’ union NAHT, said the lack of a specific flex-schooling code “harms school attendance statistics – for which they are held to account in a punitive and high stakes accountability system”.
What does the government say?
Oliver also said there needed to be “greater safeguarding” around flexi-schooling. But Dixon at Milburn Primary argued that getting children to attend school on a flexi basis meant they were “on the radar”.
She said that if children just ended up quitting school entirely, they were “not seen – people don’t know they exist”.
Ofsted said it planned to “discuss with ministers … the rules and the controls around flexi-schooling”. It “needs to be properly held accountable … to make sure their child’s getting a great package of education altogether”.
The Department for Education refused to comment on the discussions. But its 2019 home education guidance said it was “not appropriate” for a specific attendance code to “approve off-site activity”.
This was because the school “has no supervisory role in the child’s education at such times and also has no responsibility for the welfare of the child while he or she is at home”.
It said it “is not the case” that such absence may have a detrimental effect for Ofsted inspections.
“Flexi-schooling has great potential to solve a number of the urgent problems that that we’re facing across the educational landscape.
“It’s really counterintuitive, because it’s condoning less time in school. And there’s always this fear of opening the floodgates, which just makes me laugh.
“I think head teachers who worry about that underestimate the appeal of school as free childcare. People want their children in school.”
