Read our entire coverage of the UCT Online High School:

• PART ONE: UCT Online High School is a ‘sinking ship’, say insiders and parents
• PART TWO: UCT Online High School — ‘shocking marking’ after grading outsourced
• PART THREE: UCT Online High School — fears over opaque restructuring plans and lack of academic support

After a tumultuous first year of operation, UCT Online High School is embarking on a process of restructuring, which is seeing the company significantly reduce its staff complement as it implements Product 3.0 from 2023. This comes amid some criticism that the axing of teachers and an earnestness on data won’t adequately address the calls for more teacher-student interaction and academic support. 

UCT Online High School staff, who spoke to Daily Maverick on the strict condition of anonymity, said they were deeply concerned about the lack of transparency from the school administration over its restructuring measures for 2023. The teachers we interviewed were scared to speak out and spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, they feared for their careers and because of certain provisions in their contracts.

The employees Daily Maverick interviewed were troubled by the low morale among staff, but were far more uncomfortable with the school’s lies by omission which, they say, are misleading. 

“Parents aren’t informed, and they should be,” said one teacher. “They should know exactly what they are signing up for when they join this school.”

Education ‘at scale’  

Despite claiming to have enrolled only about 5,500 learners for the 2022 academic year, Daily Maverick reported in January that UCTOHS had received more than 9,500 applications. (In response to our questions on 1 December, UCTOHS said 13,000 applications were received for its January 2022 cohort.) The online school needed to reach a critical mass of 10,000 learners, reportedly, to establish other divisions that were in the pipeline. It has been well-documented that the school’s ultimate goal is to deliver “quality education at scale.”

Additionally, UCTOHS’s partner in offering its online schooling at scale – Valenture Institute – has a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to educate 100,000 by 2028, through expanding aspirational education opportunities for high school students across the globe”. Daily Maverick understands that UCTOHS constitutes the majority of Valenture’s revenue. 

Claims made by UCTOHS insiders who spoke to Daily Maverick support that the school is pushing to scale rapidly. A common catchphrase repeated among senior management, they say, is: “If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t sail.”

“The goal is to make money,” said a UCTOHS staff member. “It’s all very profit-driven, which of course isn’t how they market anything.”

“The concern is, in this context, there’s children’s lives implicated.”

When Daily Maverick asked UCTOHS how many applications the school had received for the 2023 academic year, it didn’t give details or numbers, but claimed that it was experiencing “a steady and sustained interest in enrolments for the 2023 school year”.

“It is still too early to predict how many of these will lead to confirmed enrolments,” the school said.

Concerns flagged

In a critical op-ed about the launch of UCTOHS in July last year, Professor Jonathan Jansen first flagged concerns about the sustainability of the online school, noting that for a private school to excel, it requires a lot of cash. 

“The private sector might come on board with bursaries in the beginning, but it has a record of going lukewarm and then cold as the flash flattens in the pan. Apart from bursaries, you have to pay attractive salaries to outstanding teachers who are the key to the success of the plan. Where is all of this money going to come from year after year?” wrote Prof Jansen. 

When Daily Maverick asked UCTOHS who its funders were, the school was again scant on details, saying that it is primarily funded by the monthly tuition fees paid by its guardians and does not receive “any public sector funding or financial support”.

“In order to ensure that we can provide access to education to middle and low income families we have set our fees well below the fees charged by other private schools, and also below the additional fees charged by many state schools. To make this possible we have sought, and obtained, financial support from philanthropic organisations, private sector bursary funds and socially responsible investors.”

UCT Online High School: Reproducing elites in a sea of inequality and ignoring the rest

While the school is running a model where it’s trying to scale swiftly, Daily Maverick has learnt that it has also embarked on a process of restructuring, which is seeing it drastically reduce its staff complement in 2023. This comes, insiders say, after Paddock promised their jobs are secure. 

According to documents obtained by Daily Maverick in October, the school had “resourced up for a 2022 mid-year intake”, however, it said it “did not see the demand for mid-year intakes that [it] had anticipated, and achieved well below [its] student acquisition targets.

“[It is] therefore carrying additional costs in relation to lowered revenue. This has been further exacerbated by the current learner forecast for 2023 being below target.” 

To cushion the blow, Valenture Institute had implemented a series of cost-cutting measures, including the closure of another online school that it had launched in partnership with St Stithians. However, these measures in isolation “were not sufficient enough to ensure the financial sustainability” of the company. 

Teaching staff slashed

Importantly, the documents seen by Daily Maverick reveal that as part of the school’s restructure to implement what it calls “Product 3.0”, the company was slashing its staff complement, vastly reducing its number of teachers in 2023. According to the internal documents, its 128 teacher positions would be reduced to about 71 teacher – or “learning facilitator” – positions. Its 38 senior teacher positions would be made redundant to create 14 subject specialist positions. What’s more, 17 faculty lead positions would be reduced to eight.

Teachers who spoke to Daily Maverick explained that of the positions; learning facilitator (teacher), senior teacher, and faculty lead – only learning facilitators are learner-facing. Essentially, there would only be about 71 learning facilitators – for grades 8 to 12 in 2023. 

UCT Online High School insiders who spoke to Daily Maverick, claim that the school’s move to reduce its teacher numbers doesn’t make sense on the back of the challenges faced by guardians and learners at the school this year, and the pleas from guardians for more teacher-learner engagement and live interaction – but its reason for doing so is because of financial strain and student withdrawals.

Additionally, documents seen by Daily Maverick show that UCTOHS tried to enforce a code of silence among employees with regard to its restructuring measures, instructing staff to maintain confidentiality around the process. “There is no reason to raise the restructure with learners or guardians,” the documents read. If asked directly about the proposed restructuring, staff were provided with another canned response to give to guardians. 

On the other hand, communication UCTOHS sent to its guardians on 14 October 2022 provided a very sanitised account of the school’s restructuring plans and failed to mention that 190 positions would be affected by the retrenchment process. 

“It is common practice in any restructuring process to require confidentiality from affected individuals so that the process can be carried out fairly. Nevertheless, we have communicated the full range of changes that we intend to make to our guardians and learners,” claimed UCTOHS in response to our questions.

The school claimed to have fully briefed guardians and learners in a series of emails. But all of the guardians Daily Maverick interviewed disputed that claim. 

In interviews with Daily Maverick, several parents were aware that a series of “enhancements” would be implemented from 2023, but none of them knew about the reduction of teacher numbers. Based on the communication that they had received from the school, these parents weren’t convinced that the changes would make a difference.

In response to questions from Daily Maverick on its alleged reasons for restructuring and the retrenchment of staff, UCTOHS said: 

“Based on our comprehensive data set, and related insights, from our first year of operation, we are introducing a range of enhancements to our learning and teaching model that will be fully implemented for the start of the new school year in January. This has necessitated a realignment of staffing roles… We have scaled back our targets for enrollment in 2023 because of the deteriorating economic environment, already evidenced by the number of learners who have had to withdraw because of tuition-fee debt… 

“As a consequence of these factors we are completing a restructuring process, following the requirements of labour legislation, which will result in some of our current staff leaving us… Earlier this year we built up our staff capacity to welcome an additional 2,500 learners in June… but only welcomed 400 in June. This has meant that we’ve been over capacitated for the majority of 2022, which is being corrected through our restructuring exercise.”

Because the school couldn’t provide us with its application and enrollment figures for the 2023 academic year; it is not yet known what the exact student-to-teachers ratio will be. However, several teachers are concerned that if the student numbers are on par with 2022 – which saw many teachers of core subjects with class sizes of over 400 learners – the reduction of teachers could create an environment where there could be roughly one teacher per 1,600 learners. From the documents seen by Daily Maverick, it is understood that there will only be one learning facilitator per subject per grade. 

“There just aren’t going to be enough staff to support that many children,” said one teacher. 

“If the model has already negatively affected students this year by not offering them enough support and structure, I cannot see how these new changes would be more beneficial, although the company said it would be,” another teacher said.

The teachers Daily Maverick spoke to said that this year they were already over-capacitated and unable to offer academic support to each and every one of their students. UCT Online High School’s model places the onus on the child to reach out if they are struggling; and the teacher has little agency in trying to ensure sustained contact. 

“I can’t tell you I know my children, because truly I don’t. I know a handful of them because they reach out to me, but don’t have the capacity to connect with all of them, on a one-on-one basis all the time,” said one teacher. 

In response to Daily Maverick, the school claimed that “comparisons with learner/teacher ratios in conventional schools are inappropriate and misleading”, because it does not divide each grade cohort into conventional classes and because a teacher’s conventional role is unbundled into a series of specialist roles in its model.

“Some of these roles are performed by technology and pre-created content, and others are supported by a suite of human roles including learning facilitators, support coaches, technical support officers, learning designers, project managers, data analysts, administrators and so on.”

“Our specialist learning facilitators use each learner’s unique digital footprint, along with learning analytics and real-time data reports, to provide targeted academic support,” added UCTOHS. 

Data-driven

Daily Maverick understands that the restructuring of the company is based on a product which is inherently focused on data, which it says it has generated in its first year of operation. However, in interviews with Daily Maverick, several teachers have warned against the school’s assumption that a centrality on data will automatically improve its educational offerings and student support structure. 

While data-driven interventions can be a useful tool to help indicate where learners require support (if the data is reliable), teaching is as much about qualitative experiences as it is about quantitative experiences, they say. 

“You can’t reduce a student’s performance down to data, because there are a lot of things to take into consideration when working with students,” said one teacher. 

Speaking to Daily Maverick, several staff members also raised concerns about the reliability of the data gathered during the 2022 academic year; considering the issues with marking. 

UCT Online High School claims that the changes it is implementing are based on feedback received from guardians and learners. In interviews with Daily Maverick, the overwhelming concern from guardians has been not enough sustained teacher-student interaction needed for learners to ask questions and receive academic support. The teachers who spoke to Daily Maverick, concurred that among the complaints they had received from guardians, the request for more engagement with learners was heard most often. 

“How is getting rid of teachers addressing this problem?” asked one teacher. DM

Read our entire coverage of the UCT Online High School:

• PART ONE: UCT Online High School is a ‘sinking ship’, say insiders and parents
• PART TWO: UCT Online High School — ‘shocking marking’ after grading outsourced
• PART THREE: UCT Online High School — fears over opaque restructuring plans and lack of academic support

In response to Daily Maverick’s questions, UCT Online High School requested that we include all of the information it provided. We have included it as a PDF below because we feel it is important for the public to be informed about all of the allegations Daily Maverick put to the institution, and its respective responses. Additionally, UCT Online High School denied some of Daily Maverick’s findings. We stand by our reporting.