Secondary Schools

Through collaboration, e-sgol brokers and supports secondary schools across Wales to:

• Broaden their post-16 curriculum offer for their post-16 learners.
• Ensure that learners receive the opportunity to study subjects that my not available to them in their own school.
• Increase the collaboration between schools.
• Reduce the costs and carbon emissions created through unnecessary travel between schools for post-16 learning.

e-sgol initially focused on enabling rural secondary schools to maintain the options of subjects where there were non-sustainable learner numbers in post-14 and post-16 learning. Gradually, secondary schools both in rural and urban areas across Wales now utilise the e-sgol ethos of collaboration for the benefit of their learners.

Secondary schools generally work across a cluster of schools that tend to be within travelling distance of each other. The collaborative e-sgol courses offered by schools follow a hybrid learning model, with learners accessing mainly remote synchronous and remote asynchronous learning opportunities, which are complimented by face-to-face sessions.

In an educational environment, the way in which learners receive and access lessons and courses is ever-changing. Collaboration with e-sgol allows:

• Schools and local authorities to retain learners at a post-16 level by ensuring that the courses that they want to study at Key Stage 5, if applicable, are available to them.
• Staff to continue teaching at Key Stage 5 and, importantly, a course that they are passionate about, through collaboration within a given cluster and further afield.
• Learners are given the opportunity to develop additional skills, including the skill of independent learning.
• School to be able to offer Welsh medium options for their learners, thus supporting the Welsh Government’s aim of having 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050.

Explore the interactive map below to see how the e-sgol project enables a number of secondary schools across Wales to offer virtual subject options.