Ian Allsop interviews Minerva’s Virtual Academy’s principal Suzanne Lindley, who heads up an alternative provider to the traditional school

Minerva’s Virtual Academy (MVA) is an online independent school for 11-to-18 year olds founded in November 2020 by Minerva Tutors, a homeschooling and private tuition agency.

Minerva Tutors was established by Hugh Viney, who studied classics at University College London with the intention eventually of becoming a lawyer. 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. To make ends meet he began tutoring and discovered a growing need for a bespoke professional industry offering and founded Minerva Tutors in 2014, which offers personalised one-to-one homeschooling to families in the UK and around the world.

As an ex-tutor, Viney’s founding vision for Minerva was to help professionalise the tutoring industry and to offer parents an alternative approach. By working with tutors who had the ability to raise a child’s confidence, as well as offer rigorous academic tuition, pupils would be better off in the long run, not just on exam day. Viney sees MVA as the culmination of Minerva’s desire to help as many children as possible benefit from the advantages of personalised learning, and is one step closer to the statement he wrote up on the whiteboard in the earliest days of the company: ‘Every child succeeds’.

MVA’s principal is Suzanne Lindley who joined MVA as deputy head (pastoral) before becoming principal at the start of last year. Lindley has extensive experience in schools in the UK and internationally, in both the state and private sectors, along with experience in pastoral care. She says that she joined MVA because “online schooling has so much to offer families and education professionals, and I am proud to be leading MVA into the next stage of its evolution”.

Lockdown learning

Lindley explains that the impetus for founding MVA came about during the Covid lockdown of 2020. “As lockdown hit, online schooling became the ‘new normal’. We already had the skills and the expertise to provide full schooling from Minerva Tutors, so it was just a case of building a platform that would allow MVA to do that. Most importantly, MVA was working with families who were willing to make the leap with them and recognise that a different type of education was needed for 21st century learners.”

Perfect sense

When considering what she identifies as the main advantage of the MVA model, Lindley calls
MVA “the perfect school for modern times”. She explains: “We combine smart technology and engage online independent learning resources for active learning, interactive live lessons, supported through our one-to-one mentoring programme support. Our dedicated teachers bring the British curriculum to life through flipped learning, which combines guided self-study with daily live lessons.

“We offer pupils the flexibility to learn from the comfort of their home, anywhere in the world, while ensuring they develop the social skills required to live fulfilling lives and succeed in the workplaces of the future. We believe our programme is attractive to modern employers. Our pupils’ timetables don’t look anything like the traditional school timetable, but rather resemble a work week calendar, because for significant proportions of their time our pupils are self-studying using our bespoke high-quality learning materials on our platform.

“Students have more autonomy over their learning and have more capacity to be themselves, explore their passions and engage in other activities, enabling them to live more balanced lives.”

The school highlights that its flexible structure means that pupils can learn at their own pace, with expert mentors, small group lessons, and a focus on wellbeing. Its website states: “Whether your child is anxious, burnt out, or recovering from school trauma, MVA offers a path forward with care and calm.” Neurodiverse learners are supported to thrive with expert mentors, personal pacing, and no pressure to fit a mould. And elite-level athletes can balance professional training and academic learning, wherever they are in the world. “With flexible online learning, expert mentoring, and a global community, MVA helps student-athletes stay on track, in the classroom and beyond.”

Negative energy

Lindley admits that MVA has had to counter some negative perceptions. “The biggest challenge we face is that online schools are not viewed equally to in-person schools. Successive governments have pushed the narrative that remote learning should not be viewed as an equal alternative to attendance in a physical school, but we know that there is a significant minority of pupils who benefit from being away from ‘traditional’ school and thrive in an online environment. We have provided evidence to government about the essential role online schools can play in tackling the current crisis we have in this country of long-term absence from school and we will continue to shout this message from the rooftops. We have students who have not been able to attend a physical school join MVA and attend every lesson and engage with their independent learning.”

Fee issues

So how does the fee structure work? And what about the dreaded VAT issue? “Our fees are significantly lower than traditional schools,” states Lindley. “We offer various options to cover fees. Parents can choose to pay upfront or they can also select monthly or termly payment options. Because we are still treated as a business, VAT is already included in our fees, so there are no nasty surprises there.”

Governance and regulation

MVA has a Global Education Advisory Board (GEAB), whose members play a critical role in shaping the academy’s future by providing strategic oversight, acting as a critical friend, and supporting the principal and senior leadership team. Lindley says: “Their expertise helps guide the academy’s efforts to maintain its values and ethos while achieving ambitious growth and innovation goals. Each GEAB member provides their own areas of experience and expertise across education, business, technology and safeguarding to provide expertise and strategic guidance in the following areas: safeguarding, academic outcomes, technological innovation and security, international expansion, and hybrid education partnerships.”

In terms of external regulation, MVA is accredited by the Department for Education and is also one of only a handful of online schools to have received an Ofsted report as part of the Government’s Online Education Accreditation Scheme. “Our report from Ofsted was incredibly positive and recognised us for giving pupils ‘their future back’, which really sums up everything we stand for,” Lindley says.

Learning model

So, what can traditional schools learn from MVA’s approach? Lindley argues that the education system in this country has remained largely unchanged for decades, despite the significant differences that we have seen in just one generation – in home education, technology, politics and beyond. “We need to have a proper conversation about how to best address issues such as long-term absenteeism, and examine what part alternative provisions to ‘mainstream’ schools can play.

“We believe our focus on independent learning through a well-planned and developed curriculum, and the investment in each student’s personal growth and wellbeing, prepare students for the future, not just exams, and that is something we feel all schools should be looking at.

“MVA teachers share that being at Minerva has reignited their passion for teaching, reaffirming why they joined the profession. Our teachers are thriving too, which in turn, benefits our students.”

The future

Looking ahead, Lindley wants to continue to expand. “We currently have 1,000 pupils and are looking to increase that number, to help more families and re-engage more students in their learning. That will also mean recruiting more teaching staff with a high level of expertise. When MVA launched, it was on the back of two promises that we will never break – that subject class sizes will remain the same, and that every single child in our care will have a dedicated mentor with a weekly one-to-one session.

“We have many exciting plans for the future to further broaden and expand our offer to continue to meet the needs of our diverse community, including more clubs and more in-person meet-ups. It’s a really exciting time and a vibrant place to be.”

Ian Allsop