Staff at a school in Lancarshire are going on a 6 day strike because the school has hired a teacher in Devon to teach top set maths from Y9-11.
The teacher is beamed into the classroom via video link. The article says "Under the scheme, pupils use technology to interact with the teacher, including touch screens and electronic pens." although I'm not sure what that means. Hopefully it would mean that the teacher would be able to see what each pupil is working on in real time, although that sounds very expensive!
There is then an additional adult hired to be present in the room and presumably manage behaviour (if they could help the kids with the work, they wouldn't need the virtual teacher).
On the one hand, I can see that the alternative for these kids is that they don't have a maths teacher at all.
On the other hand, replacing an actual teacher with a teacher-on-a-screen is not an ideal option. Teachers cannot build up relationships with classes that they cannot see, walk around and interact with like actual human beings. There's a lot of things that teachers do in a class that isn't merely standing at the front and delivering content.
If this happens more widely you could then also see teachers opting to become virtual teachers because then they'd get to work from home, not to have to bother with behaviour management or bus duty or staff meetings, or even a commute. And I suspect they are only using this set-up with top sets because they are more independent and compliant, so bottom sets are still going without good maths teachers, and indeed are more likely to go without because the good teacher has elected to do the work from home option.
I don't think it's a positive move. But then classes not having maths teachers at all is a real problem.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/staff-to-strike-over-schools-use-of-virtual-teacher/