The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) risks “sucking teachers out of schools” and leaving them understaffed as Covid continues to infect pupils and staff, ministers have been told.
Speaking during a debate on education spending held in the House of Commons today, Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman Munira Wilson said that the programme “risks proving a disaster”.
Also speaking in the debate, Conservative MP Robert Halfon, who chairs the Commons Education Select Committee, questioned whether the catch-up programme was “fit for purpose”.
The comments come a week after the government was accused of “moving the goalposts” on the NTP, after “confused guidance” over revised targets were sent to school leaders.
Randstad, the company charged with running the NTP, emailed tuition partners on the scheme last week saying that they “were no longer required to ensure that 65 per cent of their tuition support is provided to pupils in receipt of pupil premium funding”.
A subsequent email sent to school leaders by the Department for Education said the target remained on a national level.
Speaking in the Commons, Ms Wilson said: “There are concerns the tutoring partners strand of the NTP is sucking teachers out of schools and particularly out of the supply pool, which as the minister will know has come under significant pressure through Omicron, and although all our restrictions have been eased there are still staff and pupil absences in schools”.
She also called on the government to “explain more” why spending estimates for education had decreased.
She added: “Given that we have just been through one of the biggest crises that have faced our country since the Second World War, which has massively impacted children’s learning, their lives [and] their mental health, if anything I would have thought there would have been a surge of spending through this financial year and I would have expected to see those estimates go up and not down.”
Questioning whether the NTP is ‘fit for purpose’
Mr Halfon, who has previously said the government should “seriously consider” breaking its contract with the NTP’s provider Randstad, said he had heard evidence that in the most disadvantaged communities, in the worst-case scenarios, children are around eight months behind on their learning after the pandemic.
He said: “The real questions that I have, given the importance of catch up…is whether the catch-up programme is fit for purpose, the National Tutoring Programme particularly. And my view is that under the Randstad programme it’s not working.”
He added: “We know that the NTP is reaching 96 per cent of schools in the South East…Well, that is good news, but only 59 per cent in the North East and the North West, so we have got a north-south divide yet again.”
He also warned “progress is now stalling” on closing the attainment gap for disadvantaged pupils - saying it “stalled before Covid” - and said “the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and the better off peers is 18 months”. He also warned that “we are wasting money, hundreds of millions on tribunals that the local authorities always lose” for children with special educational needs.
“Certainly in my constituency, and I have been visiting schools week in, week out, every school is really struggling to make ends meet and increasingly relying on fundraising and parental donations, which I find quite shocking. I see funding our children and young people as an investment not a cost and I would urge the government to do the same and that investment should be made wisely.”
The latest criticism of the NTP comes after Tes revealed that only 43,000 pupils had started the programme by the beginning of December - just 8 per cent of the 524,000 pupils the DfE contracted the firm to reach via the tuition partner route by the end of this academic year.
Ensuring pupils catch up after two periods of prolonged school closures in response to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 was described by prime minister Boris Johnson as the government’s “biggest national challenge”.
The DfE said last week that the NTP was “on track” to deliver the ambitious target of two million tutoring courses to children this academic year “while prioritising tutoring for those children most in need of catch up”.
