Three CambriLearn students entered South Africa’s largest school science competition in August. All three came back with medals, from judging panels the school played no part in appointing.

Mapula spent much of this year building a below-knee prosthesis. It is adjustable and modular, made from materials she could source locally, and costed so that a household without medical aid might realistically buy one. She entered it in the Eskom Expo for Young Scientists and it took gold at the regional round in August. She has since moved on to a knee joint for above-knee amputees, which is a considerably harder piece of engineering.

Two other CambriLearn students entered the same round. Joni developed a biodegradable sanitary pad, having read that some commercial pads contain chemicals linked to health problems, and she intends to set up a charity to get hers into rural communities. Ruth compared PFAS-based firefighting foam with fluorine-free alternatives on both safety and performance, after a visit to a fire station taught her that the chemicals in the foam and in firefighters’ own protective gear have both been linked to long-term illness. Joni took gold as well, and Ruth silver.

Three entries and three medals is ordinarily the sort of claim a school gets picked apart for. In this case CambriLearn had nothing to do with the marking.

Why a medal counts for more than a school’s own numbers

Every school publishes its own figures and CambriLearn publishes plenty of them. It reports a 98% university acceptance rate among graduates who apply, more than US$25-million in scholarships won by its students, and a 4.8-star rating across more than 330 reviews. All of that comes from the school itself, as it does everywhere else.

The Eskom Expo figures do not. It is the largest school science competition in the country and the scale is substantial: 18 481 learners took part this year, presenting 13 882 projects at 287 district expos, of which roughly 6 300 progressed to the 38 regional fairs. Judging is spread across 13 scientific categories, on panels of engineers, clinicians, researchers and academics appointed by the Expo. Nobody at CambriLearn had any say in who assessed Mapula’s leg.

That distinction is worth carrying into any conversation with an online school, and it will tell a parent more than most of what gets covered at an open day. Ask which competitions the students enter, who appoints the judges, and how the students did. Those answers are a matter of record. CambriLearn’s for this year run to prosthetics, materials science and fire safety chemistry.

How three students working from home ran real research

Once cost and socialising have been argued out, the worry parents are usually left with is that a child studying at home ends up doing all of it alone. CambriLearn does not run that way, and the detail of how it does run is the part worth reading.

Lessons are live and timetabled and taught by specialist subject teachers, which gives a student a fixed weekly structure to fit a long project around rather than an open-ended pile of content to work through. Anyone doing independent research at CambriLearn is given a mentor in addition to their subject teacher, and Mapula’s was involved from the first sketch. All three of these projects ran across months of a normal school year, on top of a full academic load.

CambriLearn has spent two decades arriving at that arrangement. It teaches students aged 4 to 19 in more than 100 countries, has taught over 80 000 of them, and covers five curricula across six pathways: the International British Curriculum, Pearson Edexcel, CAPS and its Afrikaans equivalent KABV, the IEB and US K-12. CambriLearn is accredited by Cognia and Pearson Edexcel, registered with SACAI and the IEB, NCAA approved, and every teacher on its staff is degree-qualified.

Enrolment for the 2027 academic year is open. Mapula, Joni and Ruth hear this month whether their projects go through to the Eskom Expo International Science Fair, held at Emperors Palace in Kempton Park.