The COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools and universities to move to online teaching as standard. This has exposed serious issues in the availability of digital resources amongst underprivileged groups and the quality of education provided by some schools and universities. These have so far been the focus of reporting and the Government response. Whilst the issues that have been exposed are extremely important and must be dealt with, a shift to online delivery also offers the exciting opportunity to move towards a ‚’mixed economy‚’ approach to education. Classroom-based education is expensive to facilitate and can lead to important subjects including foreign languages and the sciences ‚’ key subjects for a global, technologically focused, Britain ‚’ being unavailable to many pupils due to shortages of suitably trained teachers. Classroom-based education can also prove challenging for pupils with special educational needs to engage with leading to lower results and so lower life chances. Rather than reverting to a solely in-person education model, schools from across the country (and indeed internationally) now have the opportunity to share teachers through online classes ‚’ and so give pupils access to subjects and educational methods they would not have otherwise been able to access. This could be fitted into the normal timetable of in-person lessons and so minimise the issues around web access for poorer students.
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