Teach Secondary Issue 14.8

setting the material and helping students to access it. And being facilitators, they’re less concerned with delivering the material themselves. As Zoom is to Skype, so social media is to VLEs. With schools continuing to show reluctance inmoving from a prescriptive teacher- learner definition of education to a facilitative view, learners are opting to look for that facilitated, autonomous experience themselves – thus bringing students into the orbit of competitive, profit- orientated third party providers. Many students now regularly turn not to resources provided by their teachers, but to resources propagated by YouTubers and TikTokkers. Social media ultimately facilitates student learning muchmore efficiently than schools do – though that efficiency shouldn’t be confused with efficacy . It still remains to be seen whether education delivered through social media is qualitatively ‘better’ than the education delivered through school. The cost of schooling Note, however, that these shifts aren’t just occurring in students’ homes. Schools themselves are increasingly turning to online education providers that have built online learning structures, delivering on the original promises of the first VLEs all those years ago. Third party providers use a wide range of automation methods to track progress and provide dynamic content that can be completed at home or in the classroom, meaning that no child needs to be left behind. They offer significant opportunities for struggling departments. And yet, that leaves us with an interesting question to consider – to whom should the education of our children be given? Students turning to online influencers and high profile channels are of a generation raised to value capital and tolerate advertising. Schools are passing on their budgets into the hands of third party education providers in ways that involve sums to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds per year, per school. Taken together, there does seem to be a significant flow of capital away from educational institutions and into the hands of private companies – a hint of the privatisation of education taking place inside our state-owned infrastructure and also via social media. At what point does the cost of schooling represent a middle-man expense, between private companies and learners? And if these third parties can ultimately deliver successful forms of education, then at what point do we allow education to be facilitated by them alone, in response to the prompts of learners at home? Why not cut out the middle man of the school entirely? Operationwithout oversight Actually, we mustn’t ever allow this. As a teacher who has spent years analysing the impact of such programmes, I’m rarely convinced they fully meet those promotional promises that first encourage our initial buy-in. They operate without oversight from an external body, such as Ofsted, and their success rate is entirely self-reported. That said, I don’t doubt that there have been some successes in this space, and I still support a small-scale uptake of external providers to support teaching and learning. As we enter a new academic year with headlines regarding attendance, costs to parents and bad behaviour, perhaps we should be reinvigorating school VLEs again as a potential solution to our multiple barriers to learning. After all, countless office workers have benefited from blended work. So why have we not yet demanded that schools use the tools they already have to provide their students with robust blended learning? Maybe, if we’re to protect the future of schooling, we must. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aaron Swan is an English teacher, Language For Learning, and has been a head of department 83 teachwire.net/secondary T E C H N O LO G Y