Teal School Hubs

The problem your project solves

Teal School are meeting several needs that are a direct cause by, or are accentuated during the crisis. We focus on the current situation for children and youths, but parents and teachers will also benefit from our solution. As well as society as a whole. The problems that our solution helps alleviate are:

• Keeping up with schoolwork: Many children have no habit of taking responsibility for their learning, and the situation around them can make it hard to focus.
• Loneliness: Children who do not usually socialize online or with few or no friends lose out, at worst, all social interaction.
• Vulnerability: Children in dysfunctional families, who in “normal” times get a break from the situation when at school, lose the opportunity with quarantine and similar situations.
• Grief, worry, stress: The corona crisis may be traumatic for a lot of children. Seeing worried parents and other adults, listening to news, maybe going through the worry of relatives being sick or even losing their lives.
• Mental health: Children and youths that were already suffering lose some of their natural contacts with supporting adults, and for some children the social interaction they get at school is their lifejacket.
• Inequality: Not all children have the same conditions at home. For example, some do not have access to a computer or tablet at home. The computer literacy of parents might not be enough to support in distance learning situations. Other parents just do not have the time to help, like e.g. health care workers that are already carrying a lot of the burden of the crisis.

The solution you bring to the table

Our very flexible and scalable Teal School Hubs provide a solution for the problems listed above. The hubs are small, local units where kids can get emotional support, social interaction, develop self-leadership skills and get guidance in their distance learning. The hubs also help maintain a sense of normalcy and provides more safe adults in children's lives.

As we are keeping the hubs small interactions with others stay low. The hub sizes are also easily adaptable to current restrictions.

Volunteers work in the hubs as learning guides. We are looking for people that have experience working with kids and youths and that share our values. The volunteers are introduced to the learning strategy, values, some basic rules and routines, and are then self-managed with support from us and other nearby hubs.

The hub network we create can grow large and we are currently in the process of developing a platform for managing and connecting the hubs and individuals.

What you have done during the weekend

We started working on this concept in the hackathon Hack the Crisis Sweden and during EUvsVirus we have continued working on the structure and functionality of the digital tool.

The solution’s impact to the crisis

From research and previous experience from crisis situations, we know that kids will experience difficulties and even trauma. The senior Director of Education at the International Rescue Committee, Sarah Smith, says that “when social disruption interrupts education, we should expect effects on brain development, especially for students who already had a risk factor or two in their biology or their family life”.

We have never before seen a crisis of this proportion, with approximately 9 out of 10 children worldwide being out of school. How will the world handle the way back to (a new) normal?

Difficulties and distress do not only occur during the event but after as well. For example: after the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, USA they found it took children two years to catch up with school work after the incident. Even though regular schools were only closed for a term and most kids were enrolled at other, better, schools. This is probably a very good example of how hard it is to learn when emotionally distressed. Since our learning strategy starts with the emotional aspect, going forward to self-leadership and then, thirdly, focuses on learning achievements, it gives immediate help in the situation and makes learning easier.

Our solution is very flexible and scalable. If implemented on a large scale, the impact on society can be huge, alleviating many of the stresses that the crisis poses on kids and young people - and on parents, teachers and schools as well. We will most certainly see the wellbeing of children, as well as their school results, increase and get better.

The necessities in order to continue the project

We are mainly in need of funding. The money will be used for equipment and resources for setting up and running the hubs, and for developing the digital platform to administer children, parents, volunteers and hubs, scheduling and more.

We also need partnerships with other organizations e.g. for getting the word out about the hubs.

Cooperation with government and/or schools depending on the laws of the country. In Sweden for example, where the government has not closed schools for ages 5-15 and where we have compulsory school attendance, there are currently many conflicts between schools and parents that keep their kids home out of anxiety. We see these parents and their kids as a target group, but our solution must be approved for us to really help alleviate this tension.

In other countries there might be other laws that need to be considered. We are not providing schools, but a part of what we provide is facilitating learning around subjects and assignments that the kids’ regular schools and their curricula specifies.

The value of your solution(s) after the crisis

The hub concept is solving many of the direct problems for kids in the Corona crisis and is at the same time a step towards reinventing the school system in western countries. With the hubs we will show what school/learning can be like in a new – more holistic, more digital, more self-directed and more “pandemic ready” – education paradigm.

Since the Teal School hubs are small self-managed units they can also be implemented quickly and flexibly in various types of crisis situations to give children access to support and progress socially, emotionally and in their learning journey. They can also be used to bring academic learning to places where there is none now, like parts of rural Africa.

Read more about findings concerning children not attending school due to crises here: