Pupils told to use online teaching assistants to help cut school costs

THOUSANDS of pupils will be told to contact online teaching assistants if they need extra help in the classroom as schools try to avoid hiring new staff amid a budget crisis.

Forty schools have signed up to use a virtual messaging tool for children to get online help from vetted subject experts in the autumn term to help ease the pressure on teachers.

The tool, askola, was designed to help pupils studying after school, but academy trusts have asked for it to be made available during lessons as well.

Sean Gardner, founder of Gluu, the company behind the product, said that schools seeing up to sixfold increases in their core costs will consider doing away with teaching assistants.

He said: “If you don’t have reserves, the decision is, ‘do we let a teaching assistant go’?” There’s an opportunity to do things differently and not replace teachers, because we haven’t got enough, but you can amplify capacity through digital.”

Gluu expects more than 200 schools to have signed up to the scheme by the end of the autumn term, giving access to about 20,000 pupils.

Schools pay £5 per month per pupil to give them unlimited access to more than 600 online teaching assistants. An in-person tutor costs up to £30 an hour.

Pupils connect to an online teaching assistant via a live written chat and are coached using a virtual whiteboard.

Sir Mark Grundy, chief executive of Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust, which runs nine academies in the West Midlands, and has piloted the product, said: “Post pandemic, we are faced with a workload issue compounded by a national teaching shortage.”

He said that askola allows pupils to “drive their own learning” and “take that workload issue away”.

The Daily Telegraph revealed this month that school leaders are considering reducing school hours to three days a week and ramping up class sizes to pay for teachers’ pay rises and energy cost increases of up to 300 per cent.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “We expect all schools to be open morning and afternoon, five days a week.”