What university students taught us about flexischooling

Emma Quartey
May 12
5 min read

What might flexischooling actually look like in a city like Bristol...and who gets to access it?

That’s the question at the heart of a recent collaboration between Finding the Flex and second-year students from the Centre for Innovation at the University of Bristol.

Finding the Flex acted as a client on this project, working with students to explore one key challenge: How might we design an educational flexihub to ensure equity of access to flexischooling for anyone who needs it?

Sarah Sudea, founder of Finding the Flex, has a vision for “flexihubs”: places where children on flexischooling arrangements could access a range of educational opportunities. This would mean that while they remain under the responsibility of their parent or carer on flexi days, families wouldn’t have to directly deliver the learning themselves, helping to widen equity of access to flexischooling.

Together, we focused on what a flexihub for Bristol could look like; something rooted in the real world of schools, councils and communities, but ambitious in its thinking about access, equity and opportunity.

In this blog, we’re sharing reflections from that work: what the students brought, what surprised us, and why it’s changed how we think about flexischooling.

Why does this matter?

More 15-year-olds in the UK report low life satisfaction than anywhere else in Europe, and many point to the rigidity of the school system as a key factor. Alongside this, schools are under increasing pressure from attendance figures, wellbeing needs, and a SEND system that is stretched and costly.

Flexischooling offers an option in the toolkit for schools to tackle these issues.

Flexischooling is a formal agreement between a school and a parent or carer, whereby a child is registered at a school but receives part of their education outside of the school setting, typically at home. When it is safely and effectively implemented, it can help keep young people connected to mainstream education when full-time school isn’t working.

At Finding the Flex, our mission is to embed flexischooling into the UK system, so it becomes a widely understood, properly supported option for educational wellbeing, not a misunderstood exception.

How we set the challenge

At the start of the project, we set a clear direction but also clear constraints.

We asked students to think about education in a grounded way: not just what could exist, but what would actually work within the current system.

That meant understanding:

the diversity of learning opportunities across Bristol
the role of places and spaces in education (including the Temple Quarter (TQ) campus at the University of Bristol)
and the realities of local authorities, safeguarding responsibilities, and school accountability systems

We were also very clear on one point: flexible education must not become the preserve of the privileged few. If it is going to work equitably, it must work for families who do not have the time, confidence or capacity to piece it together themselves.

And crucially, any model had to be realistic enough to sit inside existing systems: lawful, financially viable, and compelling to decision-makers in local government and schools.

What the students did (and what surprised us)

Walking into a room of high-achieving university students, we weren’t convinced the idea of flexible education would immediately resonate. And we definitely weren’t sure they’d quickly grasp the complexity of the education system, let alone the pressures schools operate under every day.

We were wrong.

Not only did the students understand the mission, but many of them also connected with it personally. Several reflected that a more flexible model would have made a real difference to their own school journeys. Very quickly, they saw flexischooling not as a “soft option,” but as a way of keeping more young people meaningfully engaged in mainstream education.

And then they went further than we expected.

They:

built full digital prototypes (apps, dashboards, websites)
designed user journeys and cartoons to explain how flexi-learning could work
created user personas grounded in real education scenarios
produced branding and communication tools for a flexihub
mapped community organisations and even contacted partners directly to explore involvement
designed information hubs to increase awareness and legitimacy of flexischooling

What stood out wasn’t just creativity, it was systems thinking. They didn’t get stuck in ideas; they methodically worked through barriers, constraints, and the practical realities.

The quality of thinking, and the clarity with which they approached a complex education system, was genuinely impressive. A lot of that is credit to the teaching and support within the Centre for Innovation at the University of Bristol.

What we learned from them

We went in thinking we would be explaining flexischooling. Instead, we found ourselves learning from how the students approached it.

A few things stood out:

1. They saw the value immediately.

Not just for children currently out of school, but for keeping more young people engaged in mainstream education in the first place.

2. They were comfortable with systems thinking.

They didn’t shy away from complexity, they leaned into it, especially when mapping how schools, councils, universities and community organisations could connect.

3. They brought technology into the conversation naturally.

Apps, dashboards, digital hubs - these weren’t add-ons, they were central to how they imagined access and coordination working.

4. They understood equity quickly.

The question of who gets access to flexischooling came up again and again in their work, not as an afterthought but as a design principle.

What role can universities play here?

One of the most interesting shifts for us was realising just how central universities could be in a flexischooling ecosystem.

We hadn’t fully considered universities as part of community asset mapping but this project made that feel obvious.

Universities already:

have physical spaces and hybrid learning models
sit at the intersection of education, research and community engagement
and are already experimenting with flexible and blended forms of learning

In a moment where questions are being asked about the value and future of higher education, how might universities both contribute to - and learn from - a more flexible education system that spans all ages?

And more specifically: how might their expertise and infrastructure support young people who find traditional school the hardest?

Where does this leave us?

A flexihub for a city like Bristol isn’t a design concept, it’s a systems challenge.

It sits right across education, local government, community provision and public value. That means it has to do two things at once: feel ambitious enough to change the conversation about flexischooling, and practical enough to work inside the realities of schools, councils and funding pressures.

What this project made clear is that there is real potential in that space between imagination and delivery. When you bring together different perspectives (especially students who are both close enough to education to recognise its strengths, and far enough from it to question its limits) you get ideas that are not only creative, but pragmatic too.

For us, the next step is making sure that thinking doesn’t stay on the page. The challenge is turning it into something that local authorities can work with, schools can trust, and families can actually access. Because flexischooling isn’t just an interesting idea, it is already a legal and available option. Flexihubs could help make it genuinely accessible to all, ultimately supporting more children to stay on roll at their mainstream schools, at the heart of their communities.

Emma Quartey, Senior Associate at Finding the Flex

May 2026