The government has admitted it “needs to do more to understand” the low take-up among some schools of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), its flagship catch-up scheme designed to help pupils recover learning lost during the pandemic.
In a response to a report by MPs, the Department for Education also admitted it could “take more effective action to increase participation” in the scheme, and committed to an “evaluation of the first two years of the scheme” to support its efforts. However, it said it would not implement any changes until next summer.
The response comes after a key DfE adviser told Tes that he had recommended a new “national action plan” to ministers after the government had acknowledged that existing catch-up efforts had not “reached all who needed it”.
The DfE has said it will fund half of schools’ tutoring costs next year under the NTP - which represents a reduction in subsidy from the 2022-23 academic year, when funding could be used to pay for 60 per cent of the total costs. Schools need to top up this funding in order to access it.
The Treasury has published the DfE’s response to the Commons Public Accounts Select Committee (PAC) report released earlier this year, in which MPs said it was alarming that progress made to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers could take 10 years to recover post-pandemic.
The report also recommended that the DfE should look at how much tutoring will be provided between 2022 and 2024, and in subsequent years, and “intervene if tutoring levels drop significantly”.
In its response, the DfE said it was “always interested” to understand more about the barriers that schools face in participating in the NTP, and said it was currently investigating relevant data to understand characteristics of schools that have not taken part.
Increasing NTP tutoring in schools
The DfE also said it is “developing interventions that may be deployed, as appropriate, in academic year 2023-24 or in subsequent years, should there be a significant reduction in the amount of tutoring schools provide”.
And the DfE agreed with the PAC recommendation that it should develop a better understanding of why disadvantaged pupils have higher school absence rates, adding that it had set a target to implement any changes to its approach to this issue by next summer.
An analysis by the Education Policy Institute published earlier this month found that disadvantaged pupils were absent for an average of 7.1 days during the 2022 autumn term, compared with 4.1 days for their non-disadvantaged peers.
However, the DfE did not accept the PAC’s recommendation that it should publish a plan setting out how it intends to reduce the disadvantage gap as quickly as possible, and “the expected trajectory”, because it said it was “already committed to narrowing the gap as quickly as possible” and this work should be “threaded through all of the department’s programmes and work, rather than being a further separate plan”.
But in an interview following the release of this year’s A-level results, which experts warned showed a widening of the disadvantage gap, schools minister Nick Gibb admitted that the gap wasn’t “falling as fast as we’d like”.
The committee also said that the DfE should “set out measures of progress for the 2030 attainment targets”, recommending that the measures for primary pupils should be published by the 2023 summer parliamentary recess.
The government’s Levelling Up White Paper, published last year, revealed its ambition for 90 per cent of pupils to be meeting the expected standard in key stage 2 reading, writing and maths by 2030.
The PAC also said the DfE should report progress against the measures to Parliament each year.
But the DfE said it disagreed with the committee’s recommendation, claiming that it already publishes national attainment data, for phonics, key stage 1, key stage 2, key stage 4 and key stage 5, which it said indicates trends in attainment and pupil progress.
Commenting on the government’s response, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “The reality is that the government has never committed the level of resources required to achieve rapid educational recovery from the pandemic.
“The political decision taken was to only bring forward a fraction of what its own recovery tsar said would be required.”
Mr Whiteman said it was “unsurprising” that “significant challenges remain”.
“Sadly, there is very little in this response to the Public Accounts Committee report that suggests the government is about to change its current approach any time soon,” he added.
