Government waters down mentor standards for education catch-up programme
Charlotte Goddard and Fiona Simpson
Thursday, July 21, 2022
Qualifications required for applicants to the government’s Covid-19 catch-up tutoring programme have been relaxed since the scheme was launched, CYP Now can reveal.
During 2020/21, when Teach First was contracted by the Department for Education to recruit academic mentors for the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), applicants were required to have a degree at 2:2 or above or a Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), as well grade C/4 or above in GCSE maths and English or equivalent.
However, latest information published on the NTP website now says that academic mentors require a minimum of three A-levels at A*-C grade (or equivalent), a minimum of a grade 4 in English and maths at GCSE level and the right to work in the UK.
Teaching unions have accused the department of “cutting corners” over the relaxation of the qualifications for academic mentors recruited to the scheme.
The NTP, which was launched in November 2020 to help children and young people whose education has been affected by the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, has been widely criticised over its failure to reach its target of delivering support to two million children in two years.
Earlier this week, the Department for Education announced that the Tribal Group, Education Development Trust, and Cognition Education have been awarded contracts to deliver the programme until 2024.
The partners will take over from consultancy firm Randstad which delivered the scheme in 2021/22.
The new delivery partners will each deliver different elements of training and regulation of the scheme, according to the Department for Education:
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Tribal Group will support schools by quality assuring Tuition Partners.
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Cognition Education will recruit well-qualified people to work as academic mentors and deploy them to schools that are most in need of additional tutoring resource.
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Education Development Trust will provide high-quality training for new tutors, which will ensure that all tutors employed in schools have the right skills and knowledge for the role.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said relaxing qualification levels for mentors “is no way to support children's learning”.
He highlighted sector concerns that the programme already falls short of plans put forward by former education recovery tsar Kevan Collins last year.
"Collins told the government that it needed to invest £15 billion to ensure that children's learning and future development would not be severely damaged by the effects of Covid-19. “The government did not accept his advice and instead put all its meagre recovery eggs in one basket, the National Tutoring Programme. It has applied enormous pressure on schools to adopt the programme, while at the same time cutting corners on the qualifications of programme staff,” he said.
Social action charity Catch-22 said that the downgrading of qualifications “may well mean children have greater access to the catch-up support they need via a school’s existing support staff” but only if delivery partners ensure staff have the knowledge and support to tutor pupils.
A spokesperson said: "This year a lot of our schools struggled to find face to face tutors through the providers, and online catch-up is not suitable for many students.
“[Changing the qualifications needed to apply for the scheme] may allow children the opportunity to receive tutoring from staff who already have excellent relationships with the students and can provide continuity of learning.
“However, the National Tutoring Programme is about filling gaps in pupils’ knowledge and understanding. The ability to teach them well, and with a good understanding of the subject knowledge, is therefore essential. If we follow this model we must ensure that we are confident staff have sufficient professional knowledge to enable students to catch-up.”
Meanwhile, latest DfE analysis of the scheme finds that 2,092,663 children started NTP courses across 84 per cent of schools in England.
This comes after research by the education select committee, which evaluates the success of the government’s catch-up programme for schools, found in its first 18-months of delivery the programme met just 15 per cent of its overall target to deliver tutoring to two million children.
DfE was also criticised earlier this year over plans to “penalise” schools which had not signed up to the scheme.
