The government has been accused of “watering down” its ambition to recover pupils’ lost learning via the £350 million National Tutoring Programme, after it announced a relaxation of the group sizes on the scheme.
The government announced today that schools working with tuition partners can now “use their discretion” when determining group sizes, with a cap of up to six pupils allowed in some cases.
Its original contract with Randstad, the Dutch firm that runs the programme, said the NTP should deliver 80 per cent of its tuition to small groups of three pupils, with 10 per cent via one-to-two sessions and 10 per cent through one-to-one sessions.
Prime minister Boris Johnson stressed the importance of the NTP’s focus on small group tuition in Parliament in January, singling out the small groups as a sign of the government’s commitment to catch-up.
“We have a £5 billion programme of investment in catch-up…We are innovating the whole time, particularly with investment in one-to-one tuition, or one-to-two or -three tuition, for kids who need it,” he said. “That is a huge development, which is of massive benefit to pupils up and down the country.”
One tuition provider described the move as a “watering down” of the programme, while the professional membership body for tutors said the group had not been consulted on the move and described tuition on a one-to-six ratio as a “very different” proposition to smaller groups.
The intervention was originally delivered by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which ran the NTP in its first year before the contract was given to Randstad in 2021.
It was based on evidence that the “average impact of small group tuition is four additional months’ progress, on average, over the course of a year.”
The EEF said that ”evidence shows that small group tuition is effective and, as a rule of thumb, the smaller the group the better.”
The DfE said it was expecting sessions of one-to-three would remain standard, but that relaxing the cap would allow greater flexibility where needed, giving the example of phonics, where pair work is required.
The relaxation was put out among a raft of other announcements about the NTP released by the DfE today.
The CEO of one provider on the tuition providers strand of the NTP said: “Parents paying privately for tuition don’t pay for sessions of one-to-six. We’re selling kids that really need this support short.
“It’s watering down to try to make Randstad and the DfE look like they’ve hit the targets. But they’re just moving the goalposts.”
John Nichols, president of The Tutoring Association (TTA), said that as far as he was aware, the sector had not been consulted about the change.
He added that tuition on a one-to six-basis should “only be used where the students selected have very similar needs” and the NTP or schools would need “appropriate baseline assessments to determine students’ needs or increase teacher workload to do this”.
He said he believed Randstad “almost certainly lacks the capability to do this”, and that while the idea would “not be terrible if the intentions were appropriate”, he would be “concerned” if the sole or main purpose of this change was “to inflate the total number of students reached”.
The DfE also revealed that the government was to shift £65 million catch-up cash to the school-led tuition route of the programme, from the academic mentor and tuition partner pillars.
In newly released statistics, the DfE also said that there had been one million starts on the programme, an estimated 532,000 of which were through the school-led route.
The news comes after a report released by the Commons Education Select Committee yesterday said that the DfE needs to step away from the “spaghetti junction of funding” for its education recovery programmes and give cash directly to schools.
The report said that the current funding set-up for the government’s catch-up programmes has, at times, “been challenging for schools to navigate or use to their best advantage”.
And last week, the NTP was criticised for “moving the goalposts” on the programme, after “confused guidance” over revised targets was sent to school leaders.
