Most schools will not be able to offer catch-up tutoring to disadvantaged pupils until after Christmas, a school leaders’ union has warned. 

The Department for Education announced last June that the majority of funding for Covid catch-up - £579 million of a total £1.4 billion pot - would go directly to schools to fund local teachers, teaching assistants or tutors to support disadvantaged pupils to recover lost learning in the current academic year 2021-22.

But heads have warned most pupils will be unlikely to access school-led tuition within school until 2022 because of a combination of late training and funding and over-stretched budgets.

Covid catch-up: Wait for NTP training is ‘disgraceful’, say heads

School-led tutoring: Everything teachers need to know

Direct funding: Schools to get £203 per pupil for catch-up tutoring

Schools received notice of their funding allocation just over two weeks ago on the 30th September, and mandatory training tutors without QTS [Qualified Teacher Status] isn’t taking place until November.

Heads are also facing difficulties with requirement that 25 per cent of school-led tutoring costs must be come from already over-stretched and allocated core budgets 

Three routes to access Covid catch-up tutoring

The National Tutoring Programme for 2021-22 offered three ways for schools to access recovery support.

They could access catch-up provision through the ongoing tuition partner programme taken over from the Education Endowment Foundation for 2021-22 by HR services firm Randstad.

Or they could access the academic mentoring programme, which is also being run by Randstad this year.

Under “route 3” schools can access ring-fenced funding directly based on the number of students on pupil premium for ‘school-led tutoring.’ The government aims to help the majority of disadvantaged pupils to catch up via this route in 2021-22. It has said previously that 60 per cent of pupils eligible for pupil premium will be targeted through the school-led tutoring route.

The other 40 per cent of pupils receiving pupil premium will be targeted through the Randstad tuition partners programme, which aims to reach “some 750,000 pupils” in 2021-22, according to a statement fromformer schools minister Nick Gibb.

This means around 1 million pupils are set to be supported through school-led tuition.

Under the school-led scheme, where schools can hire tutors directly, including using existing staff members, for catch-up support, the Department for Education said it will fund 75 per cent of the costs for this academic year - £202.50 per pupil, for 60 per cent of a school’s pupil premium eligible cohort, equivalent to £13.50 for each £18 tutoring session over 15 sessions for each child. 

However, Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, told Tes: “This has landed at a time when schools have already spent their budgets.

“Schools have already allocated the money they have for the activity they want to do so whilst on the face of it the government providing 75 per cent and the schools providing 25 per cent sounds like a really good deal, it’s come at a time where that money has already been allocated so undoubtedly that’s going to be a challenge for many schools.”

He said state schools had only been given notice of their funding allocation on 30 September, while academies had heard on 8 October. One school in an academy trust told him it had only had its funding confirmed on Wednesday of this week.

As schools budget in advance, and are already financially stretched, this has made in-school tutoring less likely for most pupils before 2022, he said.

Mr Brook added “The mandatory training for tutors for those without QTS is not starting until November.”

He said that the combination of a lack of clarity around the accountability schools would face over tutoring and the late notice of tutoring funding allocations meant “we’re unlikely really to see large numbers of children being tutored on the school-led route this term and unlikely to see an uplift on that until 2022”.

Asked if that will mean most pupils will not access catch-up tutoring this term, he said it was unlikely the majority would “this side of Christmas”.

“That will be hugely disappointing. We’ve been reasonably positive about the ambition of tutoring,” he added.

In June the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned that any measures to help pupils catch up on lost learning could arrive “too late” if the government delayed announcing new funding until the autumn.

One primary headteacher told Tes: “We’ve been reading and looking at what’s available for the next lot of money, which I’ve not seen yet, and the deal with the ‘You pay 25 per cent, you unlock 75 per cent for the tutoring costs’.

“Well there’s a few issues - first, I haven’t got the 25 per cent. They say, ‘Take it from pupil premium money.’ I already commit to some staff in school, for years have done the equivalent of catch up, because I’ve got a reasonably high level of free school meals pupils - 40 per cent.

“My budget is overstretched, I’ve run a deficit budget for seven years.

“The other issue is [if] I want to use the staff members I’ve got, I have to do extra hours after school or before school.

“One of the people doesn’t want to do it. Trying to get other local tutors in is a bit difficult and also they’re not going to know the children in the same way as the staff we’ve already got. So I’m a bit stuck really.”

Primary heads who spoke with Tes raised concerns not only about how to budget for the NTP but also whether external tutors could support the most vulnerable pupils. 

“For me, tutors coming in who don’t know our children - it does take a while to get to know children, then you’re more effective,” one said.

“Whatever money I’ve got I just use it for my own supply teachers who know the children and can do it in school because I am hearing stories from other heads who have been waiting and waiting for tutors and have not managed to start their catch-up plan,” another told Tes. 

“We’ve been doing it [catch up] as soon as money came in in the summer.”

The primary head, who runs a small village school in Hampshire, said that while they felt supported by their local authority, they did not trust the government and had heard “horror stories” of schools that had “put in for tutors and people hadn’t got back to them and they were still waiting and they hadn’t even started their catch-up programme”.

“For many schools what we want is somebody in-house who the children trust and have that rapport and relationship with because with vulnerable learners you need to understand those children and their specific needs before you tackle the academic,” another head said.

Funding 25 per cent is ‘insurmountable’

Another primary head said: “There are difficulties with school budgets so we’re having to find the 25 per cent. Yes, we get the 75 per cent back but when schools are already on the verge of deficit that additional 25 per cent is insurmountable.”

Some school leaders have also raised concerns about the quality of external tutors provided under the NTP.

One secondary head told Tes: “People felt the national programme, when it wasn’t school-led, was detached and very hard work.

“We spent a lot of time talking to tutors, and it was very time-consuming for subject staff. We are quite relieved that we can now approach it in a school-based way.

“We would be very much looking to do [tutoring] within our own staff,” they added.

“Staff have given freely of their time for intervention work with students so the issue of whether we pay for someone to do that when someone else might be giving of their own time on a voluntary basis is a difficult thing. That makes it problematic with whether we pay some people to do that work and not others.”

They said that last year, in the NTP’s first year before schools could choose to run tutoring in-house, “the tutors were unversed in the curriculum to be followed”.

“They needed to liaise with school to make that meaningful. By the time you’d done that you may as well have run the session yourself. And if you let tutors get on with it then that wasn’t…using the notion of catch-up tutoring really.”

Mr Brook said that NAHT was supportive of the idea of tutoring but that the NTP needed to be delivered in addition to catch-up provision already happening within schools to have an impact, rather than as a substitution for existing in-school support.

“A lot of the narrative seems to be about taking your teaching assistants or other people without QTS and putting them through an online course in November to enable them to do tutoring,” he said. 

“For tutoring to narrow the achievement gap or help to support recovery, it’s a really important concept that it needs to be in addition to the work going on in schools,” he said.

“Expecting teaching assistants to tutor suggests that they’re going to have to stop doing something they’re already doing, and substituting one meaningful activity for another is not actually going to shift the dial at all on this.”

“The ambition is the right one - the concept that every child in every part of the country in every school, irrespective of their family wealth, can have access to high-quality tutoring in the subjects they need when they need it is a really worthy ambition,” he said.

“Everyone can kind of get behind that ambition.

“I suppose where I worry is I think too much of the emphasis has since then been placed on tutoring being something which is about redeploying your teaching assistants to deliver tutoring, rather than perhaps re-engaging some of the 450 000 people with QTS in this country who are no longer teaching.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We are significantly expanding the National Tutoring Programme this year, reaching hundreds of thousands more young people and giving schools more flexibility to deliver tutoring that works for them and their pupils.

“All tutoring routes have been accessible since the beginning of the school year, with schools up and down the country already successfully delivering high-quality tutoring for young people and building on the 300,000 students who received tutoring in the last year.”