The Department for Education will fund half of tutoring costs next year under the National Tutoring Programme (NTP).
Currently government NTP funding can be used to pay for 60 per cent of the total cost incurred by a school to deliver catch-up tutoring. Schools must stump up the remaining 40 per cent to get any of this funding.
The DfE contribution was set to fall to 25 per cent from September.
But today the DfE has said it will double that, offering 50 per cent of the costs in 2023-24.
The move comes after figures revealed that around one-third of schools in England have not yet used any catch-up funding so far this year.
Headteachers said this was because the scheme was only partially subsidised and school budgets were “already stretched beyond breaking point”.
Meanwhile, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has called for an increase in the subsidy provided to schools, up to 75 per cent.
Susan Acland-Hood, the DfE’s permanent secretary, previously said that next year’s drop in government subsidy for schools for the NTP was “significant” and something the DfE “will have an eye on”.
Call for NTP tutoring to be fully funded
Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, welcomed the increase to the funding originally planned for next year but warned that schools that struggled to afford 40 per cent of the cost of tutoring this year “aren’t going to find it any easier to afford 50 per cent next year”.
She added: “ASCL has suggested several times that schools should be able to access their allocated NTP funding without having to top this up from their own extremely stretched budgets. It’s disappointing that the government has again chosen not to make this simple change, which would, in our view, enable many more schools to access the programme and many more pupils to benefit from it.”
Tes revealed last year that the ASCL had written to schools minister Nick Gibb to push for the requirement for schools to put their own funds towards the scheme to be scrapped.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “School leaders have been clear that dramatically reducing the tutoring subsidy next year would have been disastrous for the programme.”
While Mr Whiteman said it was good news that the subsidy will be at a higher rate than planned, he added that it was “important to point out that due to the current financial pressures schools are facing, many will still find it extremely difficult to fund the remaining 50 per cent that is required from them, particularly given that the amount of funding schools will receive overall for tutoring will not change”.
