Bridgemary Community Sports College in Gosport, Hampshire, is to open its classrooms from 7am until 10pm and offer online teaching throughout the night.

Cheryl Heron, the head teacher, said that the pilot project was an example of schools changing to meet the needs of children rather than forcing them to fit in with education conventions.

She said: “Children need to be stimulated to want to come into school. The reason why most kids play truant is through boredom. If they are not responding to the classroom then perhaps they will respond to online learning and e-mentoring.”

The project will run for two years from next September. Mrs Heron said that she had the support of teaching and administrative staff at the school, who will work flexi-time.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said last night that it would closely monitor the project. “We have already seen the benefits of extended schools, including engaging children with education. We will watch this development closely.”

Mrs Heron, who has been at the school since 2001, when it was classed as a failing school and only had a 19 per cent A-C pass rate at GCSE level, said that her proposals challenged conventional thinking on how schools should run.

“Why must teaching only be conducted in a classroom? It is possible to teach a child without him or her ever regularly setting foot inside a school,” she told The Daily Telegraph.

“We are talking about schools changing to meet the needs of the children rather than requiring children to fit in with the conventional school year, which dates back to agrarian times.

“The Government is encouraging us to think ‘out of the box’ and that is what we are doing here.”

She said that technology provided an opportunity for individual learning programmes, which could be tailored to suit children who might be tempted to truant through boredom.

“This system is simply adapting to the demands of the modern world and how they live their life. The idea of a 24/7 timetable is that we look at what is best for the children and their educational needs.

“Some people simply learn better at different times than others, so why should children be forced into a situation where they have to learn between 9.30pm and 3.30pm. We know we have a problem with attendance and we do not try to hide from it.”

Since Mrs Heron took over the GCSE A-C pass rate has increased to 35 per cent, while truancy has fallen by 3 per cent in the past year. During the past year the school has already shown its willingness to adopt innovative strategies by running an ability not age-related curriculum.

Mrs Heron, who has been invited to speak at an international conference in Beijing next month, said that radical thinking was sometimes the only way to achieve results.

“I am a maverick and I make no apologies for that. How else are you supposed to get things done. Ask a university student when they do most of their work. You will probably find it is at night or even in the small hours of the morning. The same can apply to schoolchildren.”

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