National Tutoring Programme: key questions

Launched in November 2020 to help children and young people whose education has been affected by the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) has so far struggled to live up to expectations.

Through the initiative, part of the government’s Education Recovery programme, the Department for Education will invest £1bn to pay for six million, 15-hour tutoring packages for pupils identified by schools as needing support by July 2024.

However, problems with the running of the NTP – consultancy firm Randstad has had its management contract terminated early – has led to widespread criticism. In addition, only half of the two million courses planned to be delivered this year had been started by 8 May leading ministers to question why 40 per cent of schools were yet to sign up.

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi recently wrote to schools urging those that were yet to sign up to the NTP to do so this term and announcing plans to publish data showing the amount of tutoring provided by each school in England.

What are the government plans?

In a letter to schools, Zahawi said that Ofsted would publish data on schools tutoring delivery in 2021/22 academic year in the autumn term alongside a list of schools that had not signed up to the NTP.

In addition to encouraging schools to use the NTP, the department also hopes that the data will be able to identify tutoring “cold spots” – areas that are struggling to access sufficient tutors to meet pupils’ needs.

One education expert told CYP Now that this approach reflects Zahawi’s philosophy, honed during his time at pollsters YouGov and more recently leading the government’s Covid-19 vaccine roll out, that making the data available “will drive the conversation and highlight what the challenges are”.

What has the reaction been?

In a word, scathing. Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), says publishing school-level data about NTP take-up “we suspect is effectively a league table designed to shift attention from the government’s mishandling of this programme on to schools”.

McCulloch criticises the decision to announce it “out of the blue” and without consultation.

“We are in favour of transparency but also timely and proper consultation which has not happened in this case.”

Natalie Perera, chief executive of the Education Policy Institute, agrees. “It is not fair to blame schools for not buying into it,” she says, adding that in some areas a shortage of tutors has meant it hasn’t been appropriate to use. “If this had been rolled out completely smoothly and data was available then it wouldn’t have been a problem.”

Why would schools not sign up?

McCulloch says there is a range of factors including that the school-led tutoring element of the programme is only partially subsidised – reducing from 75 per cent this year, 60 per cent next year and 25 per cent in 2023/24 – and that schools have to provide funding out of very constrained budgets. “Schools were hit very heavily in the autumn term by high rates of Covid-19 which will have affected their capacity to run tutoring, and some schools spent time trying to use the tuition partners route of private tutors which was beset with problems and which the government has effectively now abandoned,” she explains.

What will the impact be?

Perera says it will “pass the buck” for the scheme’s problems to schools. “Once parents know that children could be eligible for tutoring then they will want it,” she adds. “It feels like the government is now saying schools have to be accountable to parents even though it is their set of decisions that have created the problem.”

James Turner, chief executive at the Sutton Trust, says if delivered well, the NTP could be crucial in expanding access to tutors for disadvantaged children who would otherwise miss out. However, he warns: “Implementation is key, and provision under the NTP needs to be both high-quality and easy for schools to access. Otherwise, the issues with delivery of the NTP could risk an overall loss of faith in the potential of tutoring as a gap narrower, which would be a huge backward step.”

Ben Gadsby, head of policy at charity Impetus, adds: “Tutoring works; we’ve been funding charities that deliver it for eight years. The problem has been the implementation of the NTP. If that is done well it could change the landscape, but a lot depends on the new contractors and DfE working well together.”

What changes should be made?

McCulloch praises the government’s recent decision to provide all programme funding directly to schools but would like to see the reduction to the subsidy scrapped.

“The fact that the subsidy is being scaled down will mean that the NTP will be increasingly difficult to deliver,” she adds.

Perera says rather than being “a stick to beat schools with”, the data should be used to identify which schools need more support to provide tutoring and which areas of the country are struggling to source enough tutors. “We need to be looking at what we can do to build capacity in these areas,” she adds.

Turner says anonymising the data initially – “so we can establish a baseline of where it is and isn’t working well” – could be one way to support schools to take up the NTP and highlight cold spots.