The Department for Education has been accused of using a “telesales” campaign in an attempt to bolster its flagship tutoring programme, after figures seen by Tes reveal that government staff called schools more than 2,600 times in a week.
An “outbound call campaign” was launched by the DfE on 28 April, and has seen officials call individual schools up to three times to chase up whether they are using the National Tutoring Programme (NTP).
In the period between the launch of the campaign and half term at the end of May, 7,513 calls were made to 3,388 schools, with a peak of 2,674 calls a week being made in mid-May.
School leaders have said that the calls would not be anything other than an “unhelpful distraction” to heads, and would likely not have much impact on their plans to use the NTP.
This campaign is not the only NTP take-up initiative to be criticised by school leaders in recent months. In May, the government was told that the “hard stick of accountability” was “never the way to win hearts and minds” after unveiling a plan to publish data revealing each school’s take-up of the NTP.
Speaking about the outbound call campaign, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) said the figures - obtained by Tes through a freedom of information request - were “staggering”, and ”more akin to some sort of telesales campaign rather than the work of a government department”.
He said it showed that the government was “fixated” on the NTP as a “silver bullet” rather than “one of the tools that schools can use to support their students”.
“The government is desperate to be able to claim this programme as a roaring success rather than the confused and bureaucratic mess it has actually been.
“It really does need to get a grip and focus its energies where they are most needed - such as what appears to be a mounting crisis over teacher recruitment and retention”, he added.
James Bowen, director of policy at the NAHT school leaders’ union, said the vast majority of schools would have already made arrangements for any additional support they think pupils will benefit from this term.
He added: “It’s not the case that school leaders are unaware of the NTP, it’s that some have made the decision that it’s not right for their pupils at this point in time.
“It’s very hard to see how such phone calls would be anything other than an unhelpful distraction to leaders, nor are they likely to have much of an impact on those plans at this stage in the school year.”
Labour shadow schools minister Stephen Morgan said that the education secretary was “more concerned with making his end-of-year figures look better than delivering real outcomes for our children”.
Michael Tidd, headteacher at East Preston Junior School in West Sussex, said he would be “very surprised” if any heads were learning anything from the calls, though they may “feel pressured into using the programme to prevent their names being added to a list”.
Around a third of schools have not engaged with the NTP this academic year, according to the latest DfE data.
Data released last month shows that there have been 1,197,332 starts on the NTP this academic year, though 913,388 of these have been through the school-led tutoring arm of the programme, which is organised by schools.
Just 165,230 starts have been made under the tuition partners strand and 118,714 under the academic mentor strand, both of which are operated by the Dutch firm, Randstad.
Previous targets suggested that 524,000 pupils should access subsidised tutoring sessions and 252,000 pupils supported by academic mentors by the end of this academic year.
Earlier this year, the DfE announced that £349 million of tutoring cash would go directly to schools from the next academic year in a bid to “simplify” the NTP system.
It then launched a bid to find up to three separate providers to support the running of the programme over the next two years - a £7,987,500 contract for a provider to recruit and deploy academic mentors, £7,423,500 to train tutors and academic mentors, and £2,481,600 to recruit quality-assured tuition partners.
The bids for these contracts have closed, with the providers set to be announced in the coming weeks.
The DfE has been approached for a comment.
