A fortnight ago I found myself sitting in the main hall of the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, listening to a discussion on the government’s flagship National Tutoring Programme.

It was peppered with references to a “tutoring revolution” in schools.  

I’m all for a tutoring revolution. How could you argue with an ambition that every child, in every school, in every part of the country should have easy access to high-quality tutoring as and when needed, irrespective of family wealth or background?

The National Tutoring Programme: ‘A short-term sticking plaster’

Yet, in reality, the National Tutoring Programme is too often seen as a short-term sticking plaster to provide an initial boost to support education recovery, rather than an attempt to fundamentally change the education landscape.

Certainly, within schools, I’m not getting the sense that revolution is coming.  

Achieving a permanent shift in the education landscape requires design - if it is left to chance, I simply don’t believe it will happen.

Instead, what we’ve seen is a highly ambitious target set, of 6 million tutoring programmes to be delivered by 2025. And therein lies the problem.

Given the profile of tutoring, there will be considerable political pressure on the Department for Education to hit this target.

Plans and activity could easily become overly focused on increasing through-put, rather than focused on the design and build of a sustainable new tutoring landscape.

In doing so, government could well find itself hitting the target but missing the point. 

Real action required 

At present, too much emphasis appears to be focused on a quick-fix solution of redeploying teaching assistants to deliver tutoring.

Yet for tutoring to help narrow the achievement gap it must be in addition to existing efforts.

Simply expecting teaching assistants to become tutors suggests that they will need to stop what they’re currently doing.

Apart from greatly undervaluing the work they already do, substituting one activity for another is unlikely to shift the dial far.

The additionality of tutoring activity is key to overall success.   

I’d love to see a plan focused on mobilising and re-engaging former teachers in education. There are, astonishingly, 400,000 people in this country of working age, with qualified teacher status who are currently not working in schools. More if you include recently retired colleagues.

We know there are many reasons why people leave teaching, and some of those people would never be enticed back. But many would find part-time work as a tutor an attractive proposition for them, and good use of their professional expertise.

Many of them will already be familiar to our schools, our children and our communities. With a tutoring profession sitting alongside the teaching profession, losing colleagues from teaching shouldn’t automatically mean that we must lose them from education. 

A big effort - but worth it

The point is, building a new tutoring profession will take effort - to promote the opportunity to those that have left, to build professional learning communities and networks, to share knowledge of what works between the professionals within it. This requires a plan and sustained funding.

This year, schools are asked to contribute around 25 per cent to the costs of tutoring sessions, and unless current funding plans change, this will rise to 50 per cent from 2022 and 90 per cent by 2023.   

As reported by Tes, some schools are struggling to find the 25 per cent contribution this year, given funding shortfalls elsewhere and budgets that were set well before tutoring subsidies were announced.

School leaders are doing all they can in very difficult circumstances to respond to needs and balance their budgets, but many schools will simply not have the resources available to fund this, or will look at the reporting requirements attached to the diminishing amount of subsidy available and decide it is not worth the effort.

For those schools that want to provide tutoring, it will disincentivise the use of more expensive qualified teachers, despite all the evidence suggesting that they have the greatest impact. It will encourage substitution, not additionality of activity. 

Without a rethink on subsidy, the revolution risks coming to a screeching halt. 

Nick Brook is deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union