Next year’s drop in government subsidy for schools for the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) is “significant” and something the Department for Education “will have an eye on”, its most senior civil servant has told MPs.
The proportion of government NTP funding schools can use towards the total costs of delivering catch-up tutoring is set to drop from 60 per cent allowed this academic year to 25 per cent from September.
Charities and education campaigners including the Sutton Trust have warned against such a drop, and Susan Acland-Hood, the DfE’s permanent secretary, today told the Commons Public Accounts Committee that the DfE would keep monitoring how it will affect schools, and share their findings with the Treasury.
Ms Acland-Hood said a National Audit Office report had made a recommendation that the DfE should model the impact of that shift in the subsidy and that the DfE had accepted that recommendation.
“It is something we’ve had an eye on because it clearly is a significant drop in the level of subsidy and that is an action we will be taking and discussing with our friends in the Treasury,” she added.
Her comments come after PAC member Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown warned Ms Acland-Hood and other DfE officials appearing before the committee that the NTP would “wither on the vine” if schools were not funded adequately to use it.
65 per cent pupil premium a ‘stretching’ target
The DfE officials were also questioned on the original target for NTP providers to deliver 65 per cent of their sessions to disadvantaged pupils.
Asked why this target had not been met last year, Graham Archer, interim director general for strategy group at the DfE, said that “it was always set as a stretching target intended to go beyond the numbers that we had got in the first year”.
“I think the target did contribute significantly to seeing around 50 per cent of the tutoring that was undertaken was undertaken by disadvantaged pupils. So, while we didn’t hit the target that we intended, we did, I think, have an impact,” he added.
Officials were also asked by Olivia Blake when they thought the DfE would be able to “eliminate the disadvantage gap completely”.
Ms Acland-Hood said she was “reluctant” to give a date given no country had done this completely, but added: “I do think we should be able to reduce the gap at least as quickly as we did in the 10 years before the pandemic.
“We ought to be setting ourselves the challenge of going that fast or faster.”
Dame Meg Hillier, the chair of the committee, asked: “So, as fast as a decade? For getting us to where we were before the pandemic?”
To which Ms Acland-Hood replied: “If we can go faster than that, we will.”
