The project uses an online community to re-engage teenagers who have been out of education. Its key finding is that being an active member of a learning society has the potential to turn the situation around for such teenagers.

Ninety-one 14 to 16-year-olds from Essex, Suffolk and Glasgow took part, each receiving a home computer, printer, scanner, digital camera, graphic tablet, software and high-speed internet connection. The pilot group included those who were school-phobic, pupils who were ill or pregnant and excluded pupils. More than 70 per cent said they had been bullied at school so the need for Notschool to dissociate itself from traditional terminology was clear. “Early on, some teenagers would not communicate with tutors although they were talking online with peers,” says Jean Johnson, project director at Ultralab.

The technology unit at Anglia Polytechnic University, which manages Notschool, therefore adopted its own terminology: students are researchers, tutors are mentors, buddies and experts, depending on their role.

Disaffection with traditional learning at school was one of many hurdles. Getting access to books was another.

“The first hurdle in running an online book club was how to get books to kids,” says Ms Johnson. Libraries were ruled out since some researchers felt unwelcome in their branch. An inhospitable local community was another hurdle for researchers taking exams.

Ms Johnson believes that accreditation designed for traditional schooling falls short. “Our teenagers may rule out qualifications simply because they are not able to go back to school, where they are known, to sit an oral component.

“We need to develop accreditation suited to students studying at their own pace and who may have very good but narrow ability,” she says. Notschool is working with New Concepts for Education, an awarding body, to give its online learners “hard, transferable currency”. Notschool’s work with museums, which produced some materials, ran into problems. The museum’s charitable status did not include its work for Notschool, so resources had to be paid for.

Notschool hopes to add more “researchers” to its virtual community and solve the problem facing all local authorities of providing a full-time education for excluded pupils from September 2002. The research phase has been constructed so that it can be scaled up to an economically viable model. For Notschool, this means a change in intake, away from those who want to learn but have been hindered and toward pupils whose desire to learn has been extinguished.

Children’s homes and dysfunctional families with disinterested teenagers generally did not find the project a success. Thus the hope that technology will reverse the collective failure of society to care for its vulnerable may be wishful thinking.

Debbie Davies Notschool: www.notschool.net or tel: 01245 345532Oracle Corporation hosts Notschool as part of Think.com, a secure learning environment. For a demo visit: http:demo.think.com