Some schools may not be accessing the government’s flagship catch-up National Tutoring Programme (NTP) because they currently lack the “bandwidth”, the director of the programme suggested to MPs today.
Appearing at the Commons Education Select Committee this morning, Karen Guthrie, NTP director at Dutch multinational firm Randstad, which was contracted by the government to run the programme this year, said that 300,000 pupils had now “accessed” the £25 million 2021-22 programme - more than halfway towards the 524,000 target for this academic year.
Tes revealed last month that only 43,000 pupils - just eight per cent of the target total - had “started” tutoring courses under the NTP since the start of the academic year.
Ms Guthrie said: “What we are seeing is that schools are deciding to choose the programme and we’ve had 300,000 [pupils] already access [it]. We still have work to do in this space. There is lots of schools we need to work with and lots of pupils we need to reach.
“The capacity is there. I am very, very aware that there is a lot going on in schools. They have a lot on their plate. They are dealing with staff absences, they are dealing with Covid.
“Our objective is to make sure that when a school is ready to access the programme, regardless of whether you select an academic mentor or a tuition partner, the back capacity is there and ready for them to access this.”
“We want to work with schools and make it easy for them to access the programme,” she added.
However, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said it is more likely schools had trouble accessing the NTP because it is costly and complicated.
He said: “Some schools may find the NTP works well for them and, where this is the case, then that is something to be welcomed.
“However, it is clear that others do not find it a very attractive option, and we are not sure this has anything to do with a lack of ‘bandwidth’.
“The reasons are likely to be the fact that the tutors do not know the students, the logistics of arranging suitable tuition times and the mechanics of the scheme which means that schools have to fund 30% of the costs from their budgets. It is easy to see why many prefer the option of using their own staff to deliver tuition.
“We have repeatedly warned that the NTP is too complicated and unwieldy and that it would have been far better to have allocated this money directly to schools and colleges for recovery support.”
Tes reported how, in December, 92 per cent of the 481,000 students that the government has contracted Randstad to target are yet to receive any catch-up tuition, a third of the way through the academic year.
A research report, published yesterday looking at learning recovery in 2020-21 by the Department for Education, found externally developed interventions (such as the NTP) were less popular than those developed internally, saying: “leaders believed that more tailored approaches, fine-tuned by the teachers to meet specific learning needs, were more effective”.
Randstad, which was awarded the NTP contract this year, has faced criticism for lacking the capacity or competence to deliver the scheme “effectively”.
Figures released on Tuesday showed that only around a quarter of catch-up tutoring courses for this academic year have been delivered by Randstad.
Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “Schools have told us that they find accessing tuition support through the NTP confusing and difficult.
“But schools are stepping forward to arrange their own tutoring support for pupils, using the more flexible school-led tutoring grant. This shows real appetite for tutoring but that schools aren’t finding the national route accessible.”
‘Confusing and difficult’
Headteachers have suggested that schools are finding the system “confusing and difficult” to navigate.
The latest DfE figures show that 302,000 tutoring courses began last term under the school-led tutoring route, but only 72,000 courses began under schemes coordinated by Randstad.
The government has set a target of delivering two million courses this academic year.
When asked by MPs why the programme is currently 85 per cent short of its annual target, Ms Guthrie said: “Some are using the facility. I suppose I go back to the bandwidth that schools have at the moment.
“We’re very mindful that schools are under a lot of pressure at the moment. There’s a lot going on in schools.
“We want to make the programme available to them so that when they are ready and able to use [it], that it is there and easy to access, and they can put pupils on programmes as and when they want.”
She added: “The programme is ambitious and it’s 100 per cent correct that we have ambitious targets because making up for lost learning for pupils is hugely important.”
Ms Guthrie said that Randstad had doubled the number of suppliers that schools can access “so that when they are ready to access the programme, the capacity is there for them to do that”.
Last month, Nick Bent, chief executive of the Tutor Trust, one of the partners delivering tutoring in schools, told MPs that Randstad did not “have enough staff or the right expertise” and there were “problems” with the tuition hub.
And a report commissioned by the DfE on recovery strategies, published yesterday, revealed that school leaders were less keen on “externally developed interventions (such as the NTP)” and ”believed that more tailored approaches, fine-tuned by the teachers to meet specific learning needs, were more effective”.
Cold spots
Ms Guthrie was also asked about regional disparities with the NTP, Ms Guthrie said she is “aware of the disparities” and are doing a mapping exercise on all local authorities across England. She said: “When identifying cold spots, we have sent tuition partners out to these areas.”
Ms Guthrie said Randstad have doubled the numbers of tuition partners working with the North East bringing the total to nine providers.
A poll by Schools North East last January revealed that more than four in five heads in the North East were not using the NTP.
Of the 135 school leaders who responded to a survey, 19 per cent said they had participated in the programme, while 81 per cent said they had not.
Chris Zarraga, director of Schools North East, said “whilst we welcome the allocation of additional support for the NE through the NTP, the extra staffing will do little to address the serious structural issues that underlie the NE being a so-called ‘cold spot’. NE schools are already experts at ‘catch up’. This needs to be recognised with a more flexible scheme that focuses on supporting them according to their contextual needs” .
