The legal process, the schedule, the curriculum, the cohort, the fees. No hedging, no marketing softness — the same answers we give parents at consultation.
No. Under Section 7 of the Education Act 1996, parents have the legal right to educate their child at home in England. There is no application or permission process — and no Local Authority approval to wait for.
If your child is currently registered at a state or independent school, the only formal step is a written de-registration letter to the headteacher. The school must then remove your child from the register and notify the Local Authority.
Send a short, dated, signed letter — addressed to the headteacher — stating that you are removing your child from the school roll because you intend to educate them at home under Section 7 of the Education Act 1996.
That is all the law requires. No template is mandated and no formal application form exists. The school must process the de-registration and notify the Local Authority.
We share an example wording during your specialist consultation, so you have something tested in front of you before you send anything.
No. A child being electively home-educated is not required by law to sit the end-of-key-stage National Curriculum tests. SATs are designed to measure school performance — not individual child potential.
We use the SATs standards as our internal baseline so your child is genuinely Year 7 ready, but we redirect the 100+ hours typically lost to test prep into deeper mastery.
Because the cohort is 1:10, the lead teacher knows exactly where every child is, every day. We don't need a high-pressure May exam to prove progress.
No — and many UK secondaries (especially high-performing ones) already treat SATs results with scepticism, because they can be inflated by teaching to the test.
Most secondary schools run their own CAT4 cognitive ability tests or internal baseline assessments in the first few weeks of Year 7. They do this because:
Our students arrive having mastered the underlying logic — which is exactly what those internal assessments are designed to measure. The result is a child entering Year 7 with a genuine love for learning, not test fatigue.
Three hours of live, high-intensity instruction per day, four days per week, across a 36-week academic year.
That is more high-quality teaching time than most private schools manage to deliver in a 9-to-4 day, with none of the administrative drag, transitions, queuing or low-density activity that fills a traditional timetable.
It is more than enough — because every minute is teaching.
Audit a typical school day honestly: registration, transitions between rooms, behaviour management, low-density group work, queuing, assemblies, breaks. A USTBAS hour is a USTBAS hour: concentrated, high-impact instruction in a 1:10 cohort.
Five terms, 36 teaching weeks, with two-week breaks between terms — including dedicated breaks aligned to Eid ul-Fitr and Eid Al-Adha.
Yes — that is part of the design. Lessons are live and online, so your child can join from anywhere with a reliable connection.
No holiday tax baked into the timetable. No penalties for off-peak travel. Visit family abroad, perform Umrah, or simply reclaim a long weekend without negotiating with an attendance officer.
Absolute maximum of 10 students per year group. That is not a soft cap — it is the structural feature the entire academy is built around.
Standard private schools run 15–25 children per class. High-end tutoring centres often group 6–8. At 1:10, every child is called on multiple times every lesson — strengths spotted and stretched in real time, struggles caught and corrected before they become gaps.
Tutoring is supplementary — it patches what school missed. USTBAS is the school.
Other online academies tend to scale by stacking large virtual classrooms; we deliberately cap at ten per year group and lead every lesson with a single specialist teacher. You are not buying access to a platform with rotating instructors — you are securing daily access for your child to a deeply experienced lead teacher with 15 years of Key Stage 2 leadership.
Ust. Bas leads the academy and teaches every cohort. The credentials behind that:
A full primary curriculum aligned to the UK National Curriculum: Maths, English, Science, History, Geography, Religious Education and Computing.
You receive a digital pupil progress report three times per year — clear, specific and actionable.
Because the cohort is just ten, the teacher is in continuous direct contact with every child. Informal feedback is a normal part of the parent relationship, not something rationed out at one parents' evening per year. Mastery teaching means we surface gaps before they become problems.
Two payment options:
Total annual investment of around £7,000 versus £15,000–£20,000 at a traditional private school — for a 1:10 specialist-led cohort instead of a 15–22 generalist classroom.
Often, no. The realistic annual hidden cost of a "free" state school place tends to land between £3,400 and £6,850 per family:
Intake is strictly capped — 20 seats academy-wide for September 2026 — to maintain the 1:10 ratio. We close cohorts the moment they fill, and the next intake won't open until the following academic year.
Don't see your question? Email hello@ustbas.uk or raise it during your specialist consultation — we answer everything before any deposit is taken.
Each cohort caps at ten students. Once filled, it closes — and the next intake won't open until the following academic year.
Reserve your child's place