School leaders are being encouraged by the government to complete as many tutoring packages as possible before the end of August by adopting more flexible ways of using the National Tutoring Programme (NTP).
In an email from the Department for Education, schools are advised that in order to reach targets they could run classes over the summer, deliver more than one session to pupils each week or extend sessions to more than an hour “if appropriate”.
The department added that there was “still time to support pupils through the NTP” by adopting these ideas.
But the Association of School and College Leaders has questioned why the “flexibilities” were “not in place in the first instance”, given how far take-up of tutoring schemes has lagged behind availability.
The advice comes after new figures showed just 1,197,332 of the 2 million courses that Randstad planned to deliver have so far been started this academic year. Almost a million of these (913,388) were through the school-led tutoring arm of the programme.
The DfE is urging schools to find new ways to use as many of the courses available as possible, including the suggestion that schools could continue tuition throughout July and August if they offered summer tuition.
Another option suggested was allowing “pupil swapping”. This would involve schools dividing the 15-hour package between two pupils “depending on need”. This means that one pupil could receive 10 hours from the package and another five.
Responding to these proposals Julie McCulloch, ASCL’s director of policy, told Tes that the union welcomed the “flexibilities to the NTP”.
However, Ms McCulloch said the union did “wonder why they were not in place in the first instance as this would have made the programme easier to deliver”.
She added that the “NTP has been far too wrapped up in a set of complex rules and bureaucracy in general”.
“All the funding should have gone directly to schools from the outset with as much flexibility as possible over how tutoring is delivered,” she said. “This was and is an emergency situation and speed rather than red tape should have been the priority.”
The move to bring more flexibility to schools comes after the government revealed in May that it planned to publish data revealing each school’s take-up of the NTP. This was criticised by many at the time as shifting blame for the low take-up to schools.
Last month, Tes revealed that the firm Randstad, which was behind the government’s flagship tutoring catch-up program, was rebidding to have a role in the scheme next year.
