A headteachers’ leader has said that teachers and school staff having to wait until November to start training for the National Tutoring Programme is “disgraceful”.

Speaking yesterday at the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the union supports the idea of one-to-one tuition.

However he criticised the fact that training support for some teachers and support staff to help deliver this will only start next month -  more than 18 months after pupils first started missing lessons because of the Covid crisis.

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It was revealed earlier this year that most of the new Covid education recovery cash earmarked specifically for catch-up tutoring will go directly to schools to employ or train their own staff.

Mr Barton said: “There’s good evidence about the benefits of one-to-one and small group tuition, but we are concerned about the giddying complexity of the pathways set out by the government to deliver tuition programmes to children and young people.

“It is particularly disappointing that under the school-led tutoring route the training programme which is necessary to enable teaching assistants and trainee teachers to deliver tuition will not be available until November.

“This means that more than 18 months since the pandemic began, and with pupils having being hugely disrupted during that time, schools are still not in a position to be able to deploy a number of their staff to support young people in this way.

‘Big on bureaucracy, slow on delivery’

“We welcome the investment that the government is making in tutoring, but it has constructed a system which is big on bureaucracy and slow on delivery. It is also our firm view that the education recovery programme needs to be broader in scope and backed up with more funding.”

Mr Barton said that initially the NTP programme had meant schools were having to “navigate our way through a very complicated system” where... “you’ve never heard of most of the providers, you’ve never heard of most of the tutors.”

But he welcomed schools being given funding directly to employ or train their own tutors. 

He added: “Now the solution you’ve given us is a better one - it basically says one-to-one tuition is really good, you can find out who the people are in your area, we can help you to do that and then you can bring them in during the school day or after the school day and build that sense of doing it on behalf of the community.”

However he added: “It is disgraceful that still those teachers who are going to be trained by the schools will not get their training until November this year, twenty months after those young people first started missing school.”

Last month, Tes reported that while more experienced teachers can start tutoring right away, other staff - including teaching assistants and trainees - will need to wait until November to complete a dedicated training course before they can get involved.

Speaking at an event on tutoring today, Delivering a Tutoring Revolution, Jonathan Simons, head of education at the think tank Public First, said: “When we talk to parents about it [tutoring] and we explain it, and we say, ‘Do you know that if your school decides that your child needs additional support, that your school will help you get free tutoring ’ . . . I’ve never seen a reaction like it.  Parents recognise the benefits of this, they recognise it is personalised to their child, they recognise it is there.”