The Head of MVA joins us for a wide-ranging interview that takes in teacher training, the state of education today and what it might be like to re-imagine the standard curriculum entirely.
Lawrence Tubb has been Headmaster at Minerva’s Virtual Academy since the online school started in 2020. In the just-over-two years since then, the school has quadrupled in size, grown its subject departments and special education needs and disabilities (SEND) provision, worked alongside aspiring young athletes, musicians and film stars — and won various awards across the UK educational and wider business sectors along the way.
MVA staff have said of Mr Tubb this year that ‘his personality, natural leadership and confidence to innovate in what many might see as a daunting landscape should give us all hope for the future.’ We felt lucky, then, to grab Lawrence for a call and speak to him about the whirlwind past year and this current one: his hopes and concerns, his aspirations, what he’s proud of and what has changed. Our discussion included Lawrence’s vision for on the future of education and how offering a quality of learning to families who might not otherwise afford it is one of the things that keeps him going.
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Lots of the major developments last year were driven by pupil number rises. Year 10 is our biggest intake — there are 140 kids in Year 10 alone, now. So we needed more and more teachers teaching the core subjects to cover this pupil rise, and we now have a team of 35 staff.
There are many benefits to this growth, for both students and staff: for example, we now have full separate departments for core subjects, so now teachers can communicate with each other and share best practice departmentally. It’s such a pleasure to see a community of staff building, in this way. There are now staff meetings and online socials: it’s wonderful.
Another big development in 2022 was the opening of our Sixth Form and A-Level provision. We’ve adapted the MVA model so that we keep the same principles of our online schooling, mentoring, enthusiasm and care, but there’s more contact time (as you’d expect with A Level) and the students have study groups where cohorts in each subject work together on a particular project without the teacher.
We also have a whole new enrichment programme for Sixth Form — the Symposium — which is a weekly course where students are challenged to think in a critical, evaluative way, in order to prepare them for University-style thinking. Last term there was a project involving Moral Philosophy, centred around the making of ‘impossible decisions’.
Finally, the development in our SEND provision was key to 2022. At the start of the year we appointed Wayne Foster to be our SEND coordinator, and that’s grown to become his full time job. We’ve even just appointed a Special Needs Intervention Lead, so from January 2023 we’ll have more targeted one-to-one support to help SEN students develop in the particular areas where they, as individuals, struggle.
On the teacher-side-of-things, we’re mainly seeing professionals coming to us from mainstream physical schools, though some others are joining us from other online schools. We’re seeing a lot of very experienced staff applying from some very good schools — ‘very good’ in terms of comparable experience — or from very high-achieving state schools, or teachers having worked with children with extra needs. There are also staff coming from some well-known independent schools. So, in all, the variety of backgrounds to our staff brings us a real wealth of experience.
There’s a lovely development too in that a few of the recent teachers to join are internationally-based — we’ve got an English teacher who lives in France, a Physics teacher in Norway and a Chemistry teacher who lives in Spain. These are teachers who are British, and British qualified, but live elsewhere — it’s lovely for them as they can teach what they know, but just from another country. Normally, if you go abroad as a teacher, you’d have to teach at an International School. We’re breaking down that boundary.
We’ve also been incorporating areas of middle - and developing - senior management this past year. Now we have two full time Deputy Heads, each with a different area of responsibility — as well as having introduced Heads of Year who focus on students in particular age brackets.
On the student-side-of-things, there are certainly some big common denominators. Many students who find us have come because, for some reason or other, the families have reached a crisis point in education. They’re coming to us through need, as much as through choice. Maybe it’s that they have special educational needs that haven’t been catered for or are exacerbated by the physical school environment. For others it's situational problems with bullying or students who suffer with their mental health or anxiety.
Then there are more and more aspiring sport-professional students, who find us through the efforts of our Elite Athlete Officers, Sol and Fabian. And there’s still a great cohort of international students, studying the wonderful British curriculum from wherever they are. It’s great to have a multicultural student body, which feeds into everything we’re trying to do with student voice.
It means having formal systems and practices for the student voice to be fully heard. We started properly on this in the second half of 2022, and, as well as putting steps in place to organise the founding members of a Student Council, we now have several Student Voice groups up and running - groups run by students, generating ideas and feedback on how MVA is progressing. Recently some of these ideas were presented to the whole school at Monday’s Assembly. We also have plans to introduce Prefects and Year Representatives who’ll facilitate a more formal communication between students and staff.
Student voice, especially in a multicultural school like ours, involves recognising what binds us together, regardless of who you are and where you happen to be in the world, whilst recognising and celebrating the differences, too.
I am extremely proud of what we were able to achieve last year. My mind’s always split between two modes: the one that says ‘there’s not long before next term, so look to the future’ and the other that’s making sure to learn the lessons gained from reflection. It’s all about getting that balance!
When I do sit and reflect, I think about how I spent my previous career, before MVA, in some really amazing schools as Director of Music — these were all quite expensive independent boarding schools. The thing I feel most strongly about now with MVA is how we’re helping a very different type of family that I might’ve helped in those previous schools: that gives me gratification. MVA is a lot cheaper, and we have plenty of kids here funded by the council through educational healthcare plans. These families were at the end of the road with education before MVA: the children might’ve been out of school or missing education and as such their prospects were low. Those who’ve now joined us are thriving and can look ahead to the future much more positively. We’re truly helping families to see a brighter future. Everyone and everything at MVA — the teachers, the leadership, the admissions and marketing teams — it’s all in pursuit of finding those families that need us, and presenting ourselves, saying ‘if we’re the right thing, come join.’ That’s what keeps me going.
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Something that’s crucial, with all this growth, is embedding: putting down really strong roots and principles in every area and aspect of MVA, so that, even as we grow, there’s no dilution of what we stand for in every teacher, every lesson, every decision.
Traditional physical schools are slow moving things, whereas we have to be — and thankfully can be — much more agile. That means there’s a lot of change, sometimes in short spaces of time: 2022 was a year to demonstrate this. Sometimes we can excel with that agility, but sometimes we have to be careful to balance it with an embedding and maintenance in the teaching and learning space, which itself needs to be steady, careful and slow, to keep its integrity.
Now in 2023, it already feels like such a different year. Based on the success of last year we’ve had the confidence to expand in ways that are really exciting. I’m delighted, and a lot of work has gone into it, but we’ve just launched our new Middle School (Years 7 and 8) at MVA. We have a fantastic new Head of Middle School in Mark Edwards who’ll look after these years in particular. This is a great news for MVA and its newest students: up until now we’ve started at Year 9, which gives one preparatory year before going into GCSEs. By starting at Year 7, we can really push the boundaries in terms of a visionary approach to the curriculum: this is harder at Year 9, when you only have one year before the GCSE cycle starts. We’ll be able to do things in these younger years that I think will actually prepare those students even better for their GCSEs.
We’ve also just launched a new BTEC in esports, which starts in September for our Sixth Form students. It’s such a privilege to be able to work with other types of educators on this – teachers and course leaders who might not have otherwise had the chance to teach at traditional sixth forms, and likewise students who might not have had the opportunity to take the course. Esports and MVA feel very aligned in many ways - not necessarily in shared identity, but in a shared nascence - both of us breaking preconceptions of what we are, both of us undoubtedly a firm part of the future. It’s very exciting.
The things we’re trying to think about with the curriculum for Year 7 is how to embed the kind of thinking we’re doing with older students now — who are only encountering it for the first time after being at other, traditional schools. We want students who can make links: so often in schools you have children that learn silo-istically, they’re fine in individual subjects, but the idea that there’s interplay between two or more subjects seems so complicated to them. This is the kind of thinking that starts at A Level and University: so why do we take so long to introduce it? It makes learning a lot more intuitive, fun and real-world relevant.
Sometimes, when students study the same time period in different subjects, they often don’t even realise it: it’s never been presented to them in that way — the history, art, culture, geography, music of a time or place or movement. We’re able to think about doing this from the privileged position of being able to construct our timetable from scratch. In every school I’ve been in, there have been visionary staff — often in quite senior positions — who’ve wanted to make more change than is practically possible because of the structures within which those schools operate and, understandably, there's a reluctance to overhaul the system when it would affect so many set parts. We are different.
So, trying to introduce that much earlier on in the curriculum would be amazing. It might mean that we split subjects up in different ways, not separating them so rigorously into ‘English’ versus ‘History’ versus ‘Geography’, etc. I want to take a more wide-lens approach, whilst keeping in mind we can’t be so innovative that, when it comes to GCSEs, students can’t get back into those silos to take the exams! But, hopefully, the more interesting and inspiring the curriculum is, the better equipped it’ll make them to answer well in exams — rather than just the ‘what is an answer that this exam board wants for this question’ approach which currently prevails.
I’d like to add extra layers of support which weave through all year groups for things like careers and job directions so that, by the time it gets to moving on from school, our students are in a stronger position than they would be if they’d stayed at their local school. How do we manage something like work experience in an online school? These are big, exciting discussions we’re having at the moment.
Also: how can we provide more options than just A-Level at Sixth Form? We have the esports BTEC which is wonderful, but can we look at more BTECs? More options? Every school has that question of what happens to children at Year 11, after GCSEs. For us it’s particularly complicated: sometimes we’ve done our job so well so that children after GCSE level feel like a local Sixth Form which they can attend in person is a really positive move for them. So on a personal level, we’re very satisfied, but on a personal level, we’d love to attract more students at Sixth Form!
We’re also aiming for our first full in-person residential school trip in 2023. We’ve already got day trips, but we want to go away for longer, and to then branch out to international school trips. This is because students are already making amazing developments in their friendships just on the day trips: on longer trips, more students can attend them, and friendships can deepen further, and that all then transfers back into the online sphere and online learning. The purpose of the trips is to enrich friendships and lives, but it all also has a positive impact on learning, by taking those relationships and that increased confidence back into the online classroom. I’m so excited about that.
Excellent! See you there!
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