Teach First is to recruit up to 1,000 academic mentors to work in schools with disadvantaged pupils to help those who have been most affected by the Covid-19 disruption.

The education charity has been given £6.44m in government funding to recruit and train mentors who will go into both primary and secondary schools to provide one-to-one and small-group support as part of the government’s National Tutoring Programme.

The mentors need to have either qualified teacher status or a degree and GCSE pass grades in maths and English.

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They will be paid a salary of £19,000 by the government and receive up to two weeks’ training for the role.

Teach First said the first mentors would start going into schools from October.

Schools in disadvantaged areas across the country can have up to two mentors each who will specialise in English, science, maths, modern foreign languages, humanities in secondary schools and in literacy and numeracy in primary schools.

The teacher training charity is the only organisation that will be recruiting mentors to schools as part of the government’s National Tutoring Programme.

The National Tutoring Programme will see £350m being spent as part of the £1 billion Covid catch-up fund.

Teach First will be working with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), Sutton Trust, Impetus and Nesta on its Academic Mentor programme as part of the tutoring funding.

Russell Hobby, the chief executive of Teach First, said: “The attainment gap has widened due to Covid-19 - The Education Endowment Foundation suggests that 10 years of progress towards equality in education outcomes could be wiped.

“Schools have done a stunning job during this time. They have combined traditional and online learning while reaching out to help their communities. We also know that one of the most important steps to recovery is to re-establish whole-school routines and expectations, and to get on with high-quality, whole-class teaching.

“Extra targeted support could help. This is something we’ve been calling for from the start of the lockdown period. But we also wanted to be sure that any such provision was sustainable - not by handing additional unpaid work to already busy teachers.”

“The Teach First Academic Mentor Programme will give schools in the most disadvantaged areas access to a pool of trained graduates and career changers, who they can employ to support their pupils.

“These academic mentors will provide intensive learning support while allowing teachers to focus on delivering lessons.

”Evidence suggests how effective this kind of small-group tuition can be. By directly employing academic mentors within each school, their activity and impact can be shaped to the school’s needs and closely monitored.”

Mentors with qualified teacher status will undergo one week of intensive training, while those without will be trained for two weeks.

Mr Hobby added: “We’ve designed this training based on evidence of what makes for effective intensive pupil catch-up support. Like many organisations, we’ve also learned a lot about digital recruitment and training in the last few months and we’ll use that expertise to deliver this programme.”