Most of the new Covid education recovery cash earmarked specifically for catch-up tutoring today will go directly to schools to employ their own staff, new plans reveal.
However the funding is time-limited, with schools expected to pay a quarter of the costs of their “local tutoring provision” from the start in 2021/22 and meet the “majority of costs” within three years.
The school-led catch-up sessions form part of the government’s new £1.4 billion plan for Covid recovery, announced today, with £1 billion dedicated to launching a “national tutoring revolution”.
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The £1 billion fund, which covers a three-year period, will provide 100 million tutoring hours for pupils across England, the Department for Education said.
The cash will partly be used to fund an extension of the flagship National Tutoring Programme (NTP), with £218 million pledged in addition to the £215 million already earmarked for the scheme in the 2021-22 academic year.
But a large majority of new tutoring money aimed at pupils aged 5-16 will go to schools themselves, who will have flexibility to hire new or existing staff to deliver the catch-up sessions.
The DfE said a total of £579 million would fund schools to “develop local tutoring provision”, which will “complement the NTP offer”.
Tutors will be “directly employed” by schools, which will receive funding based on their pupil premium allocations.
The DfE said the requirement for schools to end up meeting the “majority of costs” for the tutors would “help ensure that tutoring is increasingly embedded as an effective tool for schools to use to help their pupils who are falling behind”.
The news comes after the government’s education recovery commissioner Sir Kevan Collins said in April that he wanted to introduce a “third way into tutoring”, whereby schools would identify who they preferred to deliver the support.
However despite the plans aligning with his vision for tutoring, they did not include his hoped-for longer school day and Sir Kevan said today that “more will be needed to meet the scale of the challenge”.
The rest of the £1 billion for tutoring announced today will fund an extension to the existing 16-19 tutoring programme, expected to deliver around 700,000 courses each year.
Under the existing NTP, schools can access subsidised catch-up sessions from a list of approved providers.
Those in disadvantaged areas also have the option to employ “academic mentors”, trained by Teach First, to deliver one-to-one and small group tutoring on site.
