Kieran Hayward was recruited by a county lines gang to sell drugs in his school lunch hour at the age of 13 (pictured aged nine)
Recruited at 13, he was the lost boy who fell into the grip of a county lines gang.
By 17, Kieran Hayward had stabbed an addict to death following a petty row over drugs.
Now the Daily Mail can reveal a crucial element in how more and more youngsters like Kieran are falling prey to the modern plague of the drugs gangs.
They are ‘off-rolled’ by their schools and offered online tuition at home for just over an hour a day – leaving them with plenty of time to work for the gangs.
Figures show that almost 1,000 children a year in England are being off-rolled, which is where pupils are dumped from the school register without being formally expelled.
Dozens of these pupils are receiving online tuition at home.
Online tutoring firms are cashing in on the rise in the number forced out of mainstream schools by offering web chat lessons for just a few hours a week.
Last week, the Mail told the heartbreaking story of how Kieran was recruited by a county lines gang to sell drugs in his school lunch hour at the age of 13. He descended into drug dealing after being forced out of his outstanding school for selling cannabis to children.
His school, County Upper in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, engaged online tuition firm TLC Live to provide lessons at a cost of £22.80 an hour.
The 15-year-old was instructed three times a week to log on to a website at home to watch an hour of English and an hour of maths lessons, communicating with a faceless tutor via a live web chat.
For the rest of the time, he was free to do the bidding of a gang who ordered him to courier drugs from London to Newmarket, Stowmarket and Colchester.
The phenomenon of county lines gangs has seen dealers in big cities recruit thousands of children to sell drugs in rural areas and affluent market towns such as Bury St Edmunds.
Kieran’s mother, Andrea Hayward, recalled: ‘The school often used to point out just how expensive this online learning was and how much it was costing them so we were grateful at the time’ (Kieran aged 13 with his mother)
They offer easy cash and designer goods to tempt children into couriering drugs, often using phone line ordering systems. TLC Live does not ask why students have been referred to them and it is unlikely they would have known Kieran was vulnerable to being groomed by drug dealers.
His mother, Andrea Hayward, recalled: ‘The school often used to point out just how expensive this online learning was and how much it was costing them so we were grateful at the time.
‘Then we had a meeting with the education authority and they said he was meant to be getting 20 hours of education. Looking back at it, I blame the school. He should have been in education, but they were not providing that, so at a time when he was vulnerable, Kieran was out there on the streets where he could be groomed by gangs.’
Kieran stabbed a 32-year-old addict to death in a row over drugs in an Ipswich alleyway. Last month he was jailed for life for killing Daniel Saunders
A second mother has accused the same school of offloading her 15-year-old son onto TLC Live when he too was being groomed by a county lines gang. Their identities have not been revealed to protect the teenager.
The Mail has learnt that TLC Live is offering online tuition to children excluded or off-rolled in more than 100 schools across the UK. The founder of the firm has described such lessons as a ‘growth area’. Chief executive Simon Barnes insisted online lessons can help pupils get back into school.
‘We are working with more councils than we have been before,’ he said. We use only qualified teachers, all Disclosure and Barring Service checked, and all lessons are recorded and monitored here in head office.
‘Very often it is short-term exclusion. It is typically very successful. We liaise with schools to cover the same ground that they would have studied so when they go back they have not missed those bits that they would have. We try to get the students into mainstream schools as quickly as possible.’
But yesterday Ofsted raised concerns about the growth of the unregulated industry.
A spokesman said: ‘Online tutoring can be appropriate in short-term situations.
His school, County Upper in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk (pictured), engaged online tuition firm TLC Live to provide lessons at a cost of £22.80 an hour
‘But we don’t think children should be receiving their full-time education in unregulated online provision.’
Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner, said falling out of a school was a ‘trigger point’ for young children at risk of being drawn into county lines gangs.
She is due to publish a report next year outlining the extent of off-rolling in schools.
County Upper School did not respond to requests for comment last night.
But the chairman of the trust board that runs the school has said: ‘The Bury St Edmunds All-Through Trust does not comment on matters which are confidential to individual students.