Two different things get called "registering an online school" in England, and confusing them is common enough to be worth ten minutes.
- Independent school registration is a legal requirement that applies to some providers. Running an unregistered independent school when you should be registered is a criminal offence, carrying a fine, imprisonment, or both.
- The Online Education Accreditation Scheme (OEAS) is a voluntary, non-statutory Department for Education scheme. Nobody is committing an offence by not being accredited.
Most of the anxiety we hear from people setting up online provision is about the second, when the question that actually matters is the first.
This is a plain-English summary of published guidance, not legal advice. The consequences of getting registration wrong are criminal, so confirm your own position with the DfE or an education solicitor before relying on any of it.
The test that decides whether you must register
A provider must register as an independent school in England if it provides full-time education to:
- five or more pupils of compulsory school age, or
- one such pupil who is looked-after or has an Education, Health and Care plan.
Two phrases carry all the weight here.
"Compulsory school age" excludes a great deal of provision immediately. A school teaching only sixth-formers, only adults, or only under-fives does not meet this limb of the test.
"Full-time" is the one that decides most cases, and it is the one with no clean numerical definition in statute. The DfE's guidance approaches it as a question of whether the provision represents the child's main or only source of education, taking into account the hours, the breadth of the curriculum and whether the child is receiving education elsewhere.
Which is why most supplementary schools are not caught
If you run a weekend school, an after-school programme, a Saturday language academy or a faith school that teaches alongside the children's mainstream schooling, you are almost certainly not providing full-time education. The pupils have a main school; you are additional to it. That provision does not require independent school registration.
This is a very large share of online schools, and it is worth stating plainly because the fear of accidentally committing an offence pushes some perfectly legitimate supplementary schools into paralysis. Teaching twenty children Arabic on a Saturday morning over Zoom is not an unregistered independent school.
The judgement gets harder if you are the child's only education — for example, if you teach children who are otherwise home-educated, for most of the week, across a full curriculum. That is the case to take advice on rather than decide for yourself, because it is exactly the case the registration requirement exists for.
What accreditation is, and who can apply
The Online Education Accreditation Scheme is the DfE's answer to a real problem: online providers had no route to demonstrate quality and safeguarding to parents, and parents had no way to tell a serious school from a website.
To be eligible, a provider must:
- teach online only, on a permanent basis
- provide a full curriculum, or represent a child's main or only source of education
- have at least one full-time pupil of compulsory school age based in England
- have a physical presence in England
- be registered with Companies House or the Charity Commission
The process runs DfE first, Ofsted second: you send the application form to the DfE, which checks eligibility and passes eligible applications to Ofsted. Ofsted carries out suitability checks and an accreditation visit against its inspection handbook, reports back, and the DfE makes the final decision. Accredited providers are listed on Get Information About Schools.
Note what the eligibility criteria imply. The scheme is aimed at providers offering something close to a full education. A supplementary school is not merely uninterested in accreditation — it is not eligible for it.
Is accreditation worth pursuing?
If you are eligible, the argument is commercial rather than legal. A parent choosing a full-time online school for their child is making a large, frightening decision with very little to go on. An Ofsted-visited accreditation and a GIAS listing is one of the few pieces of external evidence available, and it is difficult for a competitor to replicate quickly.
The costs are the ones you would expect from any Ofsted-facing process: your safeguarding, curriculum, staffing and governance documentation has to be genuinely in order, not merely written down. Most providers find preparing for the visit is the real work, and that the preparation is worth doing whether or not they apply.
The other registrations people forget
Registration with the DfE is not the only one that applies, and the others catch supplementary schools too:
- The ICO. If you process personal data — and a school processes a great deal of children's personal data — you are likely required to pay the data protection fee and register as a data controller. This is cheap, quick, and frequently missed.
- Companies House or the Charity Commission, depending on your legal structure. Also a prerequisite for OEAS eligibility.
- Employer obligations once you pay teachers, including whether they are genuinely self-employed. Many online schools engage teachers as contractors on arrangements that would not survive scrutiny.
- DBS checks for anyone working with children, which is not a registration but is the first thing any parent, inspector or insurer will ask about.
The practical order
- Work out whether your provision is full-time for children of compulsory school age. If it might be, get advice before you enrol anyone — this is the one with criminal consequences.
- Register with the ICO and get your data protection basics in order.
- Sort DBS checks and your safeguarding policy before the first lesson, not after.
- Consider OEAS only if you are eligible, and only once the underlying practice is genuinely inspection-ready.
For what happens after the paperwork — the enrolment, fees, attendance and reporting that occupy every week thereafter — see the operations guide to running an online school.
