A year-long, £1 billion programme was announced on 17 June by the government to support pupils who have fallen behind with schoolwork as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Tutoring schemes are nothing new. In the early 2010s, I did private tutoring before school, which was funded at the time by the Standards Fund.

Over the years since then, I have also seen many children and their families pay for private tutoring services, sometimes as part of a wider opportunity to improve their child’s academic progress; sometimes as an opportunity to boost confidence in a specific subject. In my corner of Kent, private tuition is also very common for children in Years 4 and 5, as most children still sit the 11+ at the start of Year 6.

But what does good tutoring look like? And how can classroom teachers support the tutoring process? I have observed that there are key opportunities for success when you know you are working with a child who is also using a tutoring service.

Communication

Clear and open dialogue between all stakeholders will enable the tutor to establish quickly what the child’s starting point is and where the gaps lie. SMART targets will focus the tutoring and allow success to be measured.

If the tutoring is more focused on boosting confidence, then it may be that a broader assessment measure of wellbeing and mental health is appropriate, such as the Boxall Profile.

Additionally, parents will benefit from knowing what is happening in the sessions as they may wish to capitalise on this at home, or for their child to be able to share with their families what they have learnt.

Know your child

Personal tuition needs to be exactly that: personal. Tutors need to get to know the children if they are going to be confident in understanding what motivates and engages them. This may well require a “trial and error” approach in initial sessions but, with clear lines of communication already established, the opportunity to build a programme which suits the child should be more straightforward.

Flexible tutoring sessions in the past have meant I have been able to take screenshots of work that pupils have found challenging, send it to the tutor, and then they have worked on it, often in a different way, during their sessions. Sometimes this has made all the difference for pupils who are trying to grasp a tricky concept.

Link to the classroom

Research shows that interventions are most effective when work from one-to-one sessions is explicitly reinforced during classroom practice. Giving children opportunities to make cognitive links and to apply knowledge from their tutoring sessions to their classroom practice will be a key feature of success for any tutoring programme. Some of the more successful private tutors I worked with have shared their methodologies with me, which allowed me to demonstrate and build these into my lessons. This, in turn, can have the added benefit of allowing the tutees to become “experts”, further building and enhancing their confidence. For teachers, it can be an opportunity to build up their profile of the child, gaining a deeper understanding of how they learn and what strategies work best.

While I am encouraged by the £1 billion drop, and think it is a step in the right direction, I do think that tutoring needs careful planning and structure, with communication being critical to the success of any program.

For those children who have not been successful with their homeschooling during the coronavirus pandemic, this could be a potential route forward to boosting their academic confidence and supporting them to make a confident transition back to school.

Leyla Gambell is a primary SENCO, and ex-1:1 tutor, based in Kent. She tweets @AgentSenco