Technology has changed a lot across the world in the last few years, and nowhere has seen more in terms of advancement than the way people work. Over the last five years, companies have adopted new strategies time and again that allow people to work from home, without ever having to come into the office. 

While this has been a success in business, however, a trial carried out in the US appears to show that remote working in an education sense cannot replace the traditional school system and the benefit of being taught by a teacher in a classroom. 

The report, from researchers at the University of Washington, Stanford University and the Mathematica policy research group, looked at online schools, which are still very small in number, and analysed the results. It found that those taught in online settings performed far below their classroom-educated counterparts. 

In fact, in some tricky subjects such as maths, the researchers found that the difference was the equivalent to online learners having missed an entire year of school. 

While it is not something that has crept in in the UK, and appears not likely to given the results of this study, the volume of pupils learning virtually in the US has climbed in recent years, from 65,000 in 2013/2013 to 200,000 this year.

The study showed that the main problem pupils face when attending an online school is that they have far less contact with their teacher. On average, classroom-based pupils are getting as much contact with their teacher as an online pupil would get in a week. 

Pupils at online schools are instead relied upon to drive their own learning, which can lead to many advancing at their own slower pace. 

"Challenges in maintaining student engagement are inherent in online instruction," said report co-author Brian Gill. 

"And they are exacerbated by high student-teacher ratios and minimal student-teacher contact time, which the data reveal are typical of online charter schools nationwide."