You can’t move in education policy circles at the moment without discussions of how best schools can deliver catch up. The government’s answer at present is the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), as well as further catch-up funding, all overseen by the new education tsar, Sir Kevan Collins.

But there are already early noises of discontent about the NTP. Some heads report that students’ attendance at tutoring is low. Others say that the quality is mixed and they have low confidence that it will work. Others want more flexibility of funds to commission support for their own students and community.

All of these concerns are linked. But in my mind, they’re also reasons why government must absolutely stay the course.

The National Tutoring Programme: three concerns

Firstly, is tutoring working? Obviously, in one sense it’s far too early to tell. But more broadly, government’s biggest nervousness about a large-scale tutoring rollout was that there wasn’t much high-quality capacity out there. Government made a deliberate policy decision to further restrict the market to a smaller group of approved suppliers. We must keep a focus on high-quality tutoring - only fidelity to this model will produce any gains.

Secondly, why are some students not turning up and engaging? Almost certainly for the same reasons that some are disengaging from mainstream schooling - learning remotely is hard, and even harder when it’s a subject that students aren’t good at and with someone they don’t know.

But this is a temporary phase. We shouldn’t judge tutoring over Zoom now compared to what ought to happen when tutors are regularly coming into schools and working on a sustained, face-to-face basis with students.

Flexibility for school leaders?

Thirdly, should heads have flexibility? There’s certainly some who might be able to procure more flexible solutions. But many won’t - either because they can’t or because the options locally aren’t available. And the policy question is, how do we best build up capacity in the tutoring market to give all schools, over time, those options?

The only way to address all three of these concerns is to create long-term certainty that tutoring is going to be funded, and is going to become a permanent feature of the English education system.

That certainty is what makes it worthwhile for more tutoring companies to be set up. It’s what makes existing organisations train their staff and invest in curriculum and pedagogical models that make their tutoring effective. It’s what makes it worthwhile schools creating permanent tutoring hubs within their buildings, and demanding long-term consistency from partners about where they tutor, when they tutor, consistency of personnel, and fidelity to long-term schemes of provision.

And it’s what makes it worthwhile schools giving a consistent message to students that this is a core part of schooling, that it will work, and that it’s as important that they attend this as it is that they attend any lessons.

Long-term prospects

This concept - of government guaranteeing a price and a demand for a product to build capacity over time  - is familiar in policy areas where capital investment is needed.

Green energy is a classic example. Is it worth a company building new wind turbines or a household buying a solar panel? Yes, if they know that there will be a price for green energy that can be bought and sold over a long term that makes their investment worthwhile.

But human capital is worth investing in just as much as physical capital. And so we need similar certainty to allow the tutoring market to grow and mature.

The task for government is clear: tutoring must replicate the success of the pupil premium. Government must commit to multiple-year tutoring funding in the next spending review - and keep the subsidy for tutoring going while schools need early encouragement to take it up at scale.

The government must focus on sharing best practice as it emerges. And it must make it clear that this is an established part of the system.

If we do this, then the gains for students could be significant - even after Covid has, hopefully, become a distant memory.

Jonathan Simons is a director and head of education practice at Public First