Sophia High School is based in the UK, with our Executive Leadership and Development team offices in Chelsea London.  We are registered with Companies House in the United Kingdom Company Number 12765193.   Our Online School is also a UK Registered Learning Provider UKRLP 10087150. 

At our Virtual School, we offer the full UK National Curriculum for England across Key Stages 1 to 3.  This ensures we meet the UK Department for Education Online Accreditation standards for Online Education and Online School Providers.   We are curriculum partners with both the globally recognised International Primary Curriculum (IPC)  and International Middle Years Curriculum (IMYC) programmes which ensures that our thematic curriculum is globally minded, enquiry based and actively promotes the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.    In doing so, Sophia High becomes the first British Online School to concurrently offer both programmes at our online virtual school.

All of our teachers are experts in supporting families with online homeschooling.   As fully qualified teachers, they each hold a Bachelor of Education or Post Graduate Certificate in Education and have at least five years (some have 30+ years) of teaching experience in leading British Schools and international schools around the world.   Our team is passionate about working with young people in an online homeschool environment as they bring their subject specialisms and wider interests to each and every lesson that we deliver in our virtual school.    Our teaching team have been handpicked and recruited to the highest standards of safer recruitment in education by our Senior Leadership Team who share over 60 years of Headship experience in leading British Schools. 

All students looking to join our online homeschool take part in an online baseline admissions assessment (reading and mathematics) and trial an online live session with one of our team of teachers.  These sessions are designed to provide parents and students with a taster of our online lessons and while non-selective, are designed to inform our team of the individual starting points for each student.   These results are discussed with families and teachers so that all of our students get the personalised focus they require to make excellent progress at our online school.  Children are also assessed throughout the year to ensure progress in learning is being made.

Our homeschool students generally take part in three live online interactive lessons each day with their teachers who are fully vetted and highly qualified. These live lessons are scheduled from about 8.50 am – 12:50 U.K. time Monday to Friday. After lunch, students work independently on their homework and on their projects as part of our blended learning program at our virtual school. 

At Sophia High School we cover English and Maths lessons (we follow the British national curriculum). At Key stage 1-2, we also follow the International Primary Curriculum.  this is theme based – and covers many of the other subjects such as science, history, geography, ICT, art, music, technology etc).  French is also taught once a week. At Key stage 3, we also follow the International Middle Years Curriculum.  this is theme based – and covers many of the other subjects such as science, history, geography, ICT, art, music, technology etc). On top of this we have two extra science lessons a week. French is also taught once a week.

Sophia High School uses Google Classroom to deliver all its live online lessons.  This has been developed by Google and its aims are to simplify creating, distributing, and grading assignments. The primary purpose of Google Classroom is to streamline the process of sharing files between teachers and students. It is estimated between 40 to 100 million users use Google Classroom.

Google Classroom integrates Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, and Calendar into a cohesive platform to manage student and teacher communication. Students are invited to join a class through a private code. Teachers create, distribute and mark assignments all within the Google ecosystem. Each class creates a separate folder in the respective user’s Drive, where the student can submit work to be graded by a teacher. Assignments and due dates are added to Google calendar, each assignment can belong to a category (or topic). Teachers monitor the progress for each student by reviewing revision history of a document, and after being graded, teachers can return work along with comments.

Independent learning is something we develop and support, and we believe that education should be a result of the successful collaboration between our school and the parents. Sophia High School offers blended learning, which means that children follow their classes online in the morning and are free in the afternoon to complete homework and projects.

However, the younger children are, the more help they might need from their parents or caretakers. This includes help to get set up and ready for online lessons, especially during the first days and then in the afternoons to ensure children are on task and completing work to the best of their ability.

Sophia High School is proud to be a member school with the Council of International Schools (www.cois.org)  This follows our three day evaluation and inspection visit in November 2021, where we were deemed to be exceeding expectations in seven of eight areas.  Sophia High School is now the second of only three online schools globally which have been invited by CIS to join their esteemed organisation.

Currently, no British online school is accredited by the U.K. Department for Education or British Government.   However, in June 2020 the Government published their consultation response to the ‘Online Education Accredited Scheme’.

This recognised the growing market of online education services for children in England, many of whom offer a full curriculum and may represent a child’s main or only source of formal education.

As this type of provision is currently unregulated, the Department for Education is preparing an accreditation scheme to reassure children, parents and local authorities of the quality of education and safeguarding arrangements in using such services.  Sophia High School has been chosen as one of the schools that the government is looking to accredit, when they launch the scheme in the near future.  While Online Schooling is currently outside the remit of the Department for Education’s approved inspectorate for independent schools, The Independent Schools Inspectorate, (ISI), Sophia High School complies with ISI guidelines.