Teachers 'surprised'
Mohammed Telbany heads the IT department at Sudbury Primary School in Suffolk. He has been experimenting with the "flipped" classroom and recently expanded it to other lessons.
"The teachers facilitate, rather than standing in front of the children telling them what to do, and the children just come in and get on with what they are doing," he says.
"It has surprised the teachers that the kids can excel on their own, with minimal teaching intervention."
In the developing world where, according to some estimates, up to 57 million children are unable to attend primary school, the idea of children learning without much adult intervention is a necessity not a luxury.
Prof Sugata Mitra, from Newcastle University, has been experimenting with self-learning since his famous hole-in-the-wall computer experiments in the slums of Delhi in 1999.