Parents have known for generations that a good tutor can be worth their weight in gold. One-on-one or small-group tuition has long been used to help children get into selective schools, to pass exams or to “keep up” in lessons.

Until recently, the children who benefited from tutoring were largely those with parents who could afford to pay for it. But now, as Covid recovery efforts get under way, tutoring is being touted as a vital tool in helping children from disadvantaged backgrounds make up for the time they lost in the classroom.

The new National Tutoring Programme (NTP), which launched in November and is funded to the tune of £350 million as part of the government’s “catch-up” effort, is an ambitious and far-reaching scheme comprising two strands: NTP Academic Mentors and NTP Tuition Partners.

The former will involve trained graduates being parachuted into schools in the most disadvantaged areas to provide intensive catch-up support, while the latter offers subsidised access to “high-quality tutoring from an approved list of tuition partners”, who will “be subject to quality, safeguarding and evaluation standards” and given “support and funding to reach as many disadvantaged pupils as possible”. Some 150,000 children across 4,700 schools had enrolled by March this year and there is a target to reach 250,000 children by the end of the academic year.

About 17,000 tutors have been signed up to deliver the programme, which is now expected to run until at least 2022, with plans for it to continue, potentially, for two years beyond that. It aims to provide those most in need of help - wherever they live in the country - with access to good-quality academic tutoring and mentoring, via their school.

But how effective can we expect those efforts to be? And what do we know about the type of tutoring that works, in what ways it works and for whom?

Covid and the value of tutoring

The NTP should be able to help us answer some of these questions. While it has been introduced as a short-term emergency measure in extraordinary times, it will also constitute one of the biggest research studies into tutoring ever.

The sheer scale of the project means that it should yield vast amounts of data on many different models of tutoring (33 are being used in the NTP), potentially revealing what works best and for whom.

“There’s a real urgency to the work, but it’s also really important that we keep learning from it,” says Robbie Coleman, director of the NTP and former head of policy at the educational research body the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). “I think we know enough to start to help, but we will always need to make the offer better.”

The NTP, he adds, should offer “a lot of fine-grain and interesting information that’s useful” regarding different tutoring models and modes of delivery.

Longitudinal data will allow researchers to see if tutoring has a long-term, as well as a short-term, impact on pupils and their success in public exams and beyond.

“There will be three useful questions that you can try to answer,” Coleman says. “One is: what impact did the NTP have overall? The second is about individual providers: which are most effective? And then the third is about the features of provision: for example, is online as effective as face-to-face or is a volunteer-led model as effective as a qualified teacher?”

He points out that the data gathered from the programme will add to an existing and growing body of evidence for the effectiveness of tutoring, which already forms the rationale for the scheme’s role in the catch-up agenda.

So, what do we know so far?

According to the EEF, which is overseeing the Tuition Partners “pillar” of the NTP, evidence suggests that one-to-one tutoring adds five additional months of progress over a year on average. The evidence is particularly strong for younger learners.

In 2018, a randomised controlled trial of low-cost tutoring, published by the EEF, found that disadvantaged pupils made three months’ more progress in maths when tutored in small groups by trained university students and recent graduates.

Studies of small-group tuition show that it is usually slightly less effective than one-to-one, although in some circumstances - for example, reading - it can yield better results.

“We know that group size matters. There’s strong evidence for tutoring delivered one-to-one, one-to-two, one-to-three and then as the group size starts to increase, the average impact decreases,” Coleman notes.

Meanwhile, a meta-analysis of 96 separate studies into tutoring programmes, published in July 2020, found that they “yield consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes”, but that tutoring programmes using teachers and “paraprofessionals” were on average more effective than those using non-professionals or parents.

The study also found that while overall effects for reading and maths interventions are similar, tutoring for reading tends to yield higher effect sizes in earlier year groups, while maths tutoring tends to yield higher effect sizes in later years. Tutoring programmes conducted in school tend to have larger impacts than those outside of school, too.

Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in Rhode Island, which is behind the National Student Support Accelerator scheme to promote and research tutoring in the US, says that there are several key principles that effective tutoring schemes usually have in common.

“We see that the best programmes are in schools, high intensity, multiple times a week, 30 minutes to one hour. We see that the tutors are trained, that they have good materials to work with and that they use data - those are the main elements that we see in good tutoring programmes,” says Loeb.

“The tutor doesn’t have to be a fully trained, certified, experienced teacher. Quite inexperienced tutors can be really effective as long as they have the support they need,” she adds.

But both Loeb and Coleman agree that there are a number of “unanswered questions” around tutoring that the NTP in the UK and large-scale pandemic-related tutoring schemes in the US and elsewhere could help to answer.

Coleman stresses, for example, that there may be certain topics or subjects for which it is better to have larger-group tuition.

Both also highlight the scope of the latest Covid-related tutoring programmes to provide more evidence around the effectiveness of online provision and hybrid models of tutoring, and to paint a picture of what good online tutoring looks like in practice.

Already, preliminary findings from an EEF pilot of online tutoring during last summer’s lockdown suggest that pupils had more confidence and engagement in their work when tutored online, but half of schools reported challenges with a lack of equipment.

Important research

Coleman says he expects other valuable information about online tutoring to emerge from the NTP, particularly around engagement.

“We are learning about different ways to encourage kids to attend sessions, and make sure attendance is really high. What are the sort of reminders you need to do - is it WhatsApp messages or using brothers and sisters or parents?” he says.

Coleman is also hoping that the NTP will yield information on what the best ways are to introduce quality tutoring on a large scale in a cost-effective way.

In the UK, access to tutoring through schools has been patchy. With many tutoring companies based in the South of England, schools in the North have previously found it more difficult to access quality provision.

Writing for Tes recently, Becky Francis, chief executive of the EEF, explained that a key objective of the NTP is to change this, and to “inject some rigour and quality into a largely unregulated market”.

“Although there are some excellent tutoring companies out there, not all have high standards, not all implement robust safeguarding practices, not all are cost effective and not all take the effort to train their staff or fit tuition into a school’s curriculum,” she says.

In the US, which does not have a tutoring scheme for the whole country, Loeb says maintaining tutoring quality at scale has been difficult in the past, for example through the No Child Left Behind Act.

“We’ve given parents a lot of responsibilities to be able to determine which programme is good,” she says, adding that this is something that has not always encouraged high-quality tutoring.

Whether the NTP can overcome the issues of patchy provision that have plagued tutoring in the past remains to be seen. But Coleman has high hopes that the programme will provide us with a wealth of knowledge around what works and what doesn’t work in a multitude of contexts - and that this knowledge, in turn, could go on to transform how we view tutoring, who has access to it and how it is funded.

“We know enough to know [that tutoring] is a really good bet, but we need to learn a lot more about the details,” he says.

Irena Barker is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 16 April 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...tutoring”