A government phone campaign to drive up usage of its flagship catch-up programme has been labelled a “colossal waste of time” after less than a fifth of the 10,000 calls made it through to senior leaders.
The Department for Education’s outbound call campaign was run throughout this summer and saw officials call individual schools up to three times each to check whether they were using the government-funded National Tutoring Programme (NTP), designed to help pupils recover lost learning after Covid.
But data released to Tes under a freedom of information request shows that just 1,655 of the 10,059 attempted calls made resulted in conversations with senior leaders.
The campaign had the scope to target 4,717 schools, but less than 40 per cent of these were reached, and the DfE has no record of how many of the calls resulted in schools using the NTP, having not previously done so.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the department’s energies would have been “far better spent” on other issues.
Speaking about the latest data, Mr Barton said he was “not surprised” that so few calls got through to leaders, adding: ”Frankly, senior leaders have better things to be doing with their time than answering hectoring calls from the DfE about whether or not they are using the NTP.”
“Making thousands of calls to schools for this purpose seems to us to be a colossal waste of time when the department’s energies would be far better spent dealing with the key issues facing schools and colleges, which are severe funding pressures and a teacher recruitment and retention crisis”, he added.
And Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, expressed surprise that the success of the programme was not recorded by the DfE.
“The DfE apparently do not hold information on whether these calls were met positively by schools or resulted in them engaging in the NTP. Knowing whether schools found these calls useful in navigating the complexities of the NTP is important information to collect if they intend to run similar campaigns in the future”, he said.
When Tes first revealed details of the call campaign back in June, school leaders said that the calls would not be anything other than an “unhelpful distraction” to heads.
The latest criticism comes after another government initiative to boost NTP take-up - the publication of data revealing each school’s usage of the programme - was also criticised by school leaders.
The most recent DfE data shows that there have been over 2 million starts on the NTP, with estimates suggesting 80 per cent of schools are using the programme.
The school-led tutoring arm of the programme, which is organised by schools, has been the most popular in the sector.
The tutoring scheme was operated by Dutch HR firm Randstad last year, but the DfE announced that £349 million of tutoring cash would go directly to schools this year in a bid to “simplify” the system, after very low take-up of the non-school-led programme last year.
The DfE said the call campaign aligned with an estimated increase of almost 600,000 course starts between May 2022 and June 2022, alongside a 14 percentage point increase in school participation in NTP across the same period.
It added that the purpose of the calls was to offer support to schools that had not yet started tutoring, either directly to senior leaders or through appropriate members of their staff.
