The Department for Education (DfE) has admitted that it is “a challenge” to find tutors to deliver the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), which has been launched to help pupils to catch up on lost school work after lockdown.
Speaking to MPs on the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee this morning, Andrew McCully, the DfE’s director general for early years and school groups, said teaching assistants would be encouraged to develop their skills to help meet demand.
Mr McCully said: “The experience so far in terms of tutors signing up, and the number of schools signing up to this [the NTP], is very encouraging, certainly, against the expectations and trajectories that we’ve set.”
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But he added that “continuing to grow the workforce capacity” was “a big task”.
He said: “A key part of the development of this programme is making sure that we’ve got the workforce capacity behind this, and I think there is going to be increasing capacity to bring in teaching assistants to improve their capacity and their skills…I think bring those teachers, for instance, who left the profession…[who] may want to return to teaching in these different ways, and there’s a number of routes that are being followed.
“I agree that the workforce expectations for a full infrastructure of tutoring is one of the key challenges.”
He was later asked by committee chair Meg Hillier MP: “Where are they going to come from, all these additional tutors?”
He replied: “That is a challenge for the programme and a challenge for individual providers both to secure tutors and develop the workforce.”
The DfE’s permanent secretary, Susan Acland-Hood, told MPs that people were asking why the government was setting up a national programme rather than leaving it to schools themselves to hire tutors.
But she said one advantage of having a national programme was that it was difficult to access tutoring in parts of the country where it was most needed, for example, the opportunity area in Bradford.
Ms Acland-Hood added that there was “the ability of someone like the EEF [Employment Endowment Foundation] or whoever wins the contract for the following year to help us set the quality bar and actually do some of the organising that helps match people to the right places”.
The alternative, she said, “is 22,000 schools running their own separate procurement exercises…and if they want to do that it is absolutely open to them”.
