Heads’ concerns about the sustainability of school-led tutoring have been raised in an evaluation published today.
School-led tutoring is the biggest part of the government’s flagship National Tutoring Programme (NTP), brought in to help with Covid recovery.
And a new report commissioned by the Education Development Trust, and shared with schools today in an email from the Department for Education, has examined how school-led tutoring is working on the ground.
Here are the five key lessons from the report, produced by ImpactEd.
1. Funding does not allow space for ‘strategy and planning’
School leaders told the report authors that the way funding for school-led tutoring is set up makes it difficult to plan how to use the money in the longer term.
“The one-year term of the grant did not allow much space for long-term strategy and planning for children who require and benefit from more intensive support”, the authors noted.
Schools are given a grant each year, but money that is not spent at the end of each academic year cannot be rolled over and is clawed back.
On this issue, one senior leader at a primary school noted: “You just need to know how long it will go for how much you’re going to get. What exactly are the perimeters around it?
“It’s nice to have it renewed each year because it’s an extra piece of funding that you can have access to, but it makes it more difficult to use it as effectively as you might like to because you’re just planning year to year”.
2. ‘High level of support’, but ‘distrust’ of schools bemoaned
The report concludes that overall, “there is a high level of support for school-led tutoring”, and that it is “providing immensely important support for children”.
But at the same time, some leaders felt that the terms of the grant seemed to reflect a “distrust”.
One primary senior leader told the authors: “It just really needed to be a simple grant with some objectives which you need to meet, and this will be evaluated through maybe random sampling or through this kind of evaluation.
“Whereas what appears to be quite a sort of draconian, we’re giving you some money, we don’t really trust you to spend it properly. So we’re going to put all sorts of punitive things in place if you don’t get it right - it feels a bit like that.”
Schools had clear conditions for their grant and had to fill in a form outlining how they used the cash last year.
Heads then complained after some were told their spending would be probed further just before Christmas.
3. Group sizes higher than planned in some cases
Small group sizes are supposed to be maintained by schools using the programme, with guidance from the DfE, saying: “Small groups of 1:3 are recommended in order to maintain high-quality and impactful tuition, with the maximum permitted tutor-pupil ratio being 1:6.”
The evaluation found that some group sizes were larger than this, although it states that the “majority” of tutoring is being delivered in small groups
It states: “Group sizes ranged from one-to-one tutoring (8 of 699 pupils, 1.1 per cent) to 13 pupils in a group (12 pupils, 1.7 per cent), with a mean average group size of 4.1 pupils.”
It adds that groups larger than eight pupils were only implemented in one primary school that participated in the evaluation, and it is also worth noting that the overall sample of schools analysed as part of the evaluation is also a “small subset” - at just 29.
And it says “qualitative research with school leaders, tutors and teachers also supports this finding that the majority of tutoring is being delivered in small groups”.
4. Many pupils not having 12 to 15 hours of tuition
Government guidance also states that blocks of tuition should be 12-15 hours long, in order to have a “meaningful impact” on pupil attainment.
From the evaluation’s sample of 1268 pupils, a quarter (26.7 per cent) were reported to have received between 11.5 hours and 15 hours of tutoring under the scheme.
Many received more than this, but around 10.3 per cent received less.
5. ‘Slight increase’ in leader workload reported
Other evaluations have found that facilitating the NTP has increased school-staff workload.
This evaluation did not reach as strong a conclusion as others, but added that senior leaders “often reported that their workload has slightly increased due to facilitating school-led tutoring”.
However, in contrast to this, some tutors felt that there were tangible benefits from reducing disruption in the classroom.
One tutor at a primary school told the authors that taking some “jumpy” pupils out of the class “takes the pressure off the class teacher to deliver their English and their maths”.
“So the benefit works both ways that they get a class that’s a bit more settled, maybe not requiring so much attention.”
