Department of Education overhauls its flailing programme
The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) is a £1.7 billion fund created in 2020 to support pupils who fell behind in their studies during the pandemic. The NTP used tuition providers across the UK to give schools additional support. They offered tuition services under two main options. With School-Led Tuition, schools could use NTP-approved or external tuition providers to provide tutorial sessions to their pupils. Alternatively, Academic Mentors were salaried members of staff hired by the school to run tutorial sessions and work alongside teachers.
Toranj Tuition was made an Approved Tuition Partner in 2021 after a thorough review of our recruitment, training and monitoring practices.
What went wrong?
In April 2022, the Department of Education (DoE) announced a change to the programme. The £349 million allocated for the 2022-23 academic year will go straight to schools in an effort to simplify the system. This came after a critical report on the NTP’s success by the Education Select Committee was published in January of this year. It revealed that Yorkshire and the Humber and North East England are the worst-affected areas for educational inequality, as caused by school closures during the pandemic.
“[These pupils] experienced the greatest learning loss… around 2.4 months and 2.3 months respectively in primary, and around 1.6 and 2.5 months respectively in secondary. The same areas also experienced the greatest loss in mathematics (around 5.1 and 5.7 months respectively). This was more than double the loss experienced in the South West and London.”
Education Select Committee
Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, said that he feared “this funding is not reaching the most vulnerable children in our communities.” Headteachers reported to the committee that tutors provided by Randstad were “inconsistent” in quality and not always “very good with children”.
Randstad, a Dutch private recruitment company, delivered the NTP project since its inception but the changes made by the DoE have terminated this contract. The DoE will launch a procurement process for a new supplier. This supplier will be responsible for quality assurance, recruiting and deploying Academic Mentors and offering training, which will support schools to make best use of their funding.
What is changing?
The most significant changes to the NTP project are:
- All funding will go to and be managed by schools. This puts an end to the NTP Partner option, which saw tuition providers directly invoicing the NTP for the subsidised portion of tuition feed. Money will go directly to schools who get decide how they will spend it.
- Reduced constrictions on tuition groups. There was a cap on the number of pupils allowed in each tutorial group at 1:4 under the School-Led Tuition option. The focus remains, however, on small groups and one-to-one tuition which can boost pupil progress by 3 to 5 months (GOV.UK).
- Tutors do not have to be graduates. A relaxation on the rules of who can deliver tuition will benefit schools in areas with a limited number of tuition agencies or freelance tutors, and can work with local universities to source tutors looking for work experience in an education setting.
Even though the NTP was introduced to help with the loss of learning, it required schools to pay out of their existing budgets to cover the remaining fees. These budgets had little surplus to spare for additional learning support. Schools would have massively benefitted from direct access to this money from the beginning, knowing best how to support their pupils. Toranj Tuition believes these changes will better help the NTP project to address the loss of learning caused by the pandemic and get pupils back on track.
The Department of Education has urged all schools to access this funding. Currently it estimates around 40% of schools have accessed NTP funding for this academic year, well below its target.
NTP and Toranj Tuition
Toranj Tuition is still an Approved Tuition Partner for the NTP, which means our recruitment, training and monitoring methods have been reviewed and validated. We will still provide tutors to schools using NTP funding under the School-Led Tuition option and continue to deliver charitable schemes such as our upcoming Informal Science Clubs.
Unlike tutor recruitment agencies, we are a tutor provider and ensure that all our tutors are fully trained, DBS checked and undergo regular continuing professional development (CPD). For us, the continual improvement of our tutors’ skills is as important as the education of the beneficiaries we support through our charitable and private projects. This is one of the reasons that our application to become an Approved Tuition Partner with the NTP was successful, and we pride ourselves on being the first Hull-based provider to gain this distinction.
For full details on our NTP delivery, which have been revised to include the above changes to the programme, visit our website or get in touch today.