Many school leaders felt “overwhelmed” by their role in setting up and monitoring tuition during the first year of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), according to an evaluation report.
According to research published by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) today, schools had “not always anticipated the resource required to support” the government’s flagship catch-up programme, and had “limited time and capacity” to select the tutoring most suitable to meet their pupils’ needs.
The evaluation, published today, looks at the first 12 months of the programme, which ran in the 2020-21 academic year.
It examines the two key pillars of the programme in that year: tuition partners (external providers that come into schools to provide small-group tutoring) and academic mentors (salaried, in-house members of staff).
The report says that “unprecedented” circumstances - with partial school closures from January 2021 - should be recognised when assessing their success.
The research involved looking at quantitative data, along with more than 280 in-depth interviews with tuition partners, school leads, classroom teachers and tutors; 34 focus groups with pupils and tutors; and five online surveys.
The National Tutoring Programme: key research findings
Below are some of the key findings from the report:
1. Schools needed ‘greater clarity of expectations’
The report argues that “greater clarity of expectations for schools’ role in managing tuition is important”.
It adds: “Given the expansion of the tutoring market since then, including school-led tuition, guidance for schools on their role in different forms of tuition would be helpful.”
Since the first year of the programme, the NTP has been vastly changed, with all money going to schools from this year.
However, schools can still choose to bring in outside tutoring organisations or hire academic mentors, as well as using their own staff to deliver tutoring.
School leaders have consistently told Tes over the past couple of years how they have found navigating the NTP to be complicated.
For example, Michael Tidd, a headteacher at a three-form-entry junior school in Sussex, has previously said the way the funding works and the different strands of the scheme have “put him off” engaging much with it.
He said: “I’m someone who regularly reads and rereads the guidance on this from the DfE, but I’m trying to run a school at the same time as doing this, and there are a lot of other things that have been going on this past year.”
2. ‘More could have been done’ to promote tackling disadvantage
The researchers found that, although the NTP was initially “focused on supporting disadvantaged pupils”, including those eligible for pupil premium or free school meals, fewer than half (46 per cent) of the pupils who received tutoring were eligible for pupil premium.
They found that schools used their discretion for pupil selection to “prioritise pupils they considered most likely to need” tuition, rather than focusing primarily on socioeconomic disadvantage.
Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, called the findings “both a surprise and a concern”.
“The achievement gap between poorer pupils and their more affluent peers is at a 10-year high. If the National Tutoring Programme is to help narrow the gap going forward, it is essential that it is precisely targeted at those that need it most,” he added.
Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said: “The lessons from this review of the government’s flagship education recovery programme are clear: we must explicitly target tutoring support to the most disadvantaged pupils and provide detailed guidance for schools if we are to genuinely level up opportunities in the classroom.”
The finding comes after a letter from multiple tutoring organisations sent to the education secretary last month warned that “urgent” action was needed to ensure that the “original focus” of the government’s programme was not lost.
They wrote: “As a collective, we have serious concerns that if the NTP does not aim to specifically reach those from disadvantaged backgrounds, for whom it was originally intended, and if the interventions provided are not impactful, it actually could stand to widen the attainment gap, which would surely be a travesty.”
3. Some pupils who completed more tutoring sessions saw significantly higher grades
In the summer of 2021 GCSE students were given teacher-assessed grades (TAGs), due to the disruption seen throughout the school year.
The evaluation of the tuition partners programme found that higher amounts of tutoring were “related” to better grades for Year 11s in maths and English, and better scores in English in primary schools, though the researchers stress that this is “not necessarily” a causal result.
But the researchers also found that only just over half (56 per cent) of pupils who engaged with the NTP attended 12 or more hours of tutoring (which is considered a completed block).
This means that a substantial minority of pupils (35 per cent) did not receive the amount of tutoring felt to be “beneficial” for their learning, according to the programme assumptions (with data missing for the remaining 8 per cent).
The researchers also tried to assess the effect of the tuition partners programme on pupil premium pupils specifically - given that the NTP had a specific focus on disadvantaged pupils - by comparing their progress in schools participating in the tuition partners pillar with pupil premium pupils in schools that did not participate in tuition partners.
On this metric, they did not find evidence of an effect, but stressed that this was partly down to a low number of pupil premium-eligible pupils in their sample being selected for tuition, which they said made it “hard to detect any effect that may or may not be present”.
4. The majority of school staff were satisfied with the programme overall
According to the research, the majority (74 per cent) of surveyed school leads and school staff were “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the programme overall, and felt that it had met their expectations.
And the report authors add that by the end of the programme, “the majority of school leads surveyed felt that the programme had ‘helped pupils catch up with their peers’” (81 per cent).
However, they also stress that school staff were “reluctant” to attribute improvements in attainment solely to the programme, as they also had other interventions in place.
