The National Audit Office (NAO) will examine how the government is achieving value for money from the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) as part of a study into the government’s education recovery programme.
The NAO released a report last March that looked into support for education during the early stages of the Covid pandemic.
And it says its latest study, scheduled for release this winter, will complement that work.
It says that the main interventions it expects to cover in the study are the NTP, universal and targeted financial premiums paid directly to schools, training and continuing professional development for teachers, and summer schools.
As part of this, it will look at how the Department for Education is managing the programme for education recovery in schools in an effective way, how it is achieving value for money from the NTP and how it is achieving value for money from the other funding it has provided to support education recovery.
The previous NAO report on the DfE response to the pandemic was relatively critical, and said aspects of it “could have been done better or more quickly”.
It accepted that the pandemic was an “unprecedented challenge”, but said the response could have been “more effective” in mitigating the learning that pupils lost as a result of the disruption.
As an example, it said the DfE could have set “clear expectations for in-school and remote learning earlier and addressed the barriers that disadvantaged children faced more effectively”.
The NTP endured a difficult year, with Randstad - the provider that has run the programme - coming under consistent fire since the early days of its contract, with tuition partners complaining that its online booking platform was bureaucratic and “dysfunctional” to use.
In January, Tes revealed that tutors were running sessions for “ghost pupils” who don’t turn up because of confusion over whether students who repeatedly failed to show up for sessions were allowed to be removed from the programme.
And in March, the DfE announced that all £349 million for the NTP would go directly to schools from the next academic year.
