The government is planning to explore the value of one-to-one teaching for pupils with “exceptional abilities”, as well as those “in danger of falling behind”.
Such “intensive teaching” could be “transformational” for children in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the prime minister said today.
The comments could allude to an expansion of the government’s National Tutoring Programme (NTP), for which Teach First was tasked with recruiting up to 1,000 academic mentors to provide one-to-one and small-group support for disadvantaged pupils.
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The charity said the first mentors would start going into schools from October 2020.
The NTP will also allow schools in all regions to access heavily subsidised tuition from organisations on a list of approved partners.
Delivering his speech at the Conservative Party conference, Boris Johnson said: “It’s in crises like this that new approaches are born.”
He added: “I’m thinking not just about the inputs, but about the outputs - the changes in the lives of young people.
“And so I want to take further an idea that we’ve tried in the pandemic, and to explore the value of one-to-one teaching, both for pupils who are in danger of falling behind and for those of exceptional abilities.
“We can all see the difficulties, but I believe such intensive teaching could be transformational and a massive reassurance to parents.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “The notion of providing one-to-one tuition to children who really need that extra help is laudable, but we would have to question why scarce resources would be spent on this type of support for those of exceptional ability, when these children are already doing very well.
“One-to-one teaching is expensive and school budgets are extremely tight thanks to government underfunding of the education system which has not been fixed by extra money through to 2022-23. So, the prime minister’s idea could not be afforded at any scale without a huge additional investment.
“The danger is that what we will actually end up seeing is a relatively small amount of extra investment, and given the cost of one-to-one tuition it will benefit only a very small number of pupils, when it could be used to produce wider benefits simply by, for example, increasing the value of the pupil premium.”
Dame Alison Peacock, chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, said: “School leaders know their pupils best and should be given the resources to deploy additional routes such as one-to-one tuition in the most effective way possible.
“There are occasions when individual or small-group support for pupils can be transformative but deployment of such resources should always be part of an overall strategy informed by the professional expertise of teachers and leaders.”
