Beleaguered catch-up provider Randstad would consider bidding to run the National Tutoring Programme again next year if it thought it was in schools’ “best interests”, the programme’s director has told Tes.
Karen Guthrie, who acts as senior programme director for the government’s flagship National Tutoring Programme (NTP) on behalf of the current operator, Randstad, said her team would scrutinise the new contracts to run the catch-up scheme next year, announced yesterday, and added that it would bid “if it’s in the best interests of the programme...and also schools and pupils”.
In an exclusive interview with Tes, Ms Guthrie also said she thought the move towards giving schools catch-up money next year was “positive”, but that the move had come “at the right pace” and should not have happened any quicker.
She also accepted that elements of the scheme had been “bumpy”, but said that she was “proud” and “humbled” to have played a part in the programme.
Randstad not ruling out another bid
Dutch firm Randstad has run the NTP this year but has been criticised for several aspects of the scheme.
In its original contract with Randstad, the DfE said the NTP should offer tuition to 776,000 pupils in 2021-22, with 524,000 pupils accessing the tuition partners strand, but Tes revealed last year that it had reached just 8 per cent of this target (43,000 pupils), nearly a third of the way through the academic year.
MPs were told that Randstad did not “have enough staff or the right expertise” to run the programme, while a senior MP said earlier this year that the government should “seriously consider” breaking its contract with the firm.
It was announced last month that, for the next academic year, all £349 million for the scheme would go directly to schools, to “simplify” the system.
And this week, several fresh contracts were published by the Department for Education seeking providers to support the running of the scheme.
Asked by Tes if Randstad would consider bidding for one of these contracts, Ms Guthrie said: “We’ll need to take a bit of time to get into the detail of them. We have our own due process that we have to look at.
“We will decide to be part of the programme if it’s in the best interests of the programme moving forwards, as well as schools and pupils.”
Move to school-led tuition has happened at the ‘right pace’
The DfE was criticised for the complexity of the NTP over the past year. Last month, a new report from MPs on the Commons Education Select Committee called for the government to step away from the “spaghetti junction of funding” and give cash directly to schools.
Speaking at the Association of School and College Leaders conference, also last month, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said the government would shift £65 million in catch-up cash to the school-led tuition route of the NTP, before announcing that all the money would go to schools for the 2022-23 academic year.
The school-led tutoring part of the programme has been the most popular this year. Estimates published by the DfE show that 887,521 tuition courses have started so far this academic year - with more than three-quarters (674,941) having been delivered through the school-led route.
It has not revealed how many pupils have now received catch-up tutoring after another term of delivery.
School leaders have long lobbied for all the catch-up cash to be distributed directly to schools, arguing they know the needs of their pupils best.
But Ms Guthrie said the move to 100 per cent school-led tutoring next year had happened at the “right pace”.
She added: “I think having the focus on schools has been a positive change for next year.
“The programme is constantly having to be agile and to react to things that are happening externally and internally. I think it’s evolving at the right pace.
“The move towards school-led [tutoring] is a positive move but I don’t think it should have moved any quicker or faster than that.”
‘Hard to answer’ whether another provider could have done better
Asked whether another provider could have run the scheme better, Ms Guthrie said this was a “hard question to answer”.
She added: “What I can stand by is the hard work that went into this from the Randstad side and the DfE side to get it into a really good shape moving forwards.”
And continued: “We didn’t do this by ourselves, we engaged external stakeholders in the education sector, we listened to our tuition partners.”
Elements have been ‘bumpy’, but Randstad is ‘proud’ of its work
Asked what she would improve if she were to run the NTP again, Ms Guthrie said there was “no doubt” that elements of the programme had been “a little bit bumpy”.
She added: “It was the same last year, it was the same this year, you don’t go into a programme this size and not expect to have challenges.”
Asked if she could pinpoint a particular issue, Ms Guthrie said there was “not one [single] thing”, but said that making the programme “easier to access for schools”, was an ongoing challenge she was always “mindful of”.
She then added: “What I’ve really been proud of is that we’ve worked closely with the DfE and other stakeholders in the education sector to say, right, we have a problem, how do we identify what the problem is and actually think about what the desired outcome is.”
She added that there “hadn’t been anything we haven’t been able to resolve between ourselves, the DfE and other stakeholders”.
