When colleagues in Bradford’s Opportunity Area decided three years ago that the city’s schools needed tutoring help to improve their GCSE results, they put a contract out to tender.

No one wanted to bid, no one was capable of delivering a bid, no organisation was prepared to provide tuition across the city, even when the contract was scaled back.

Good tutoring wasn’t an option because in Bradford, as in many deprived areas, it wasn’t available to schools. High-quality tutoring isn’t evenly distributed across the country; school-based tuition even less so.

The National Tutoring Programme

Since the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) was launched four months ago, several school leaders, understandably eager to support their children as quickly as possible during the pandemic, have asked why the money spent on the NTP couldn’t be given directly to them - they know their students and they know what they need.

And my answer is always the same: “Because of places like Bradford, and many others like it”.

I don’t dispute that school leaders are best placed to determine what support their most disadvantaged pupils need, but the options are not equally available to all.

Tutoring and catch-up

Even where tutoring exists, it is not necessarily good or designed to complement what is being taught in schools. Access to high-quality tuition in this country remains very unequal.

Which is why another objective of the NTP, alongside establishing the first sustainable national tutoring service for disadvantaged children, was to inject some rigour and quality into a largely unregulated market.

Although there are some excellent tutoring companies out there, not all have high standards, not all implement robust safeguarding practices, not all are cost-effective and not all take the effort to train their staff or fit tuition into a school’s curriculum.

Tutoring in England

The NTP was partly designed to help leaders navigate this “Wild West”, providing additional capacity in this most challenging year and thanks to a robust applicant selection process, it is beginning to do that.

For an average of £72 per pupil for a block of 15 sessions, schools can procure high-quality tuition tailored to their pupils’ needs.

Previous EEF evaluations - as well as new studies from overseas conducted during the pandemic - suggest that high-quality tuition can result in three to five months of additional progress. This makes tuition one of the most cost-effective approaches available, according to the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit.

And it’s especially suited to learning recovery after Covid, offering bespoke support to meet pupil needs.

Learning interventions

How does the NTP compare to other tutoring options?

Again, pretty well. Value-for-money assessments formed a prominent part of the initial assessment process and only those applications that could demonstrate value for money were approved.

The average cost of tuition provided via the NTP is £19 per pupil per hour. Seventy per cent of the tutoring costs schools less than £20 per pupil per hour and only 9 per cent costs more than £30 - and that’s before the 75 per cent subsidy to schools.

Most of the more expensive tuition caters to children who need specialist support from highly qualified individuals.

Coverage of NTP

The programme is based on the best available evidence, but it can be better. It was designed to support 250,000 disadvantaged children in its first year - a target that we are well on the way to achieving despite the third lockdown. To date, the NTP is working with 61 schools in Bradford alone.

But queries have been raised about reach, compared to the number of disadvantaged pupils out there. It’s absolutely right that the NTP should go bigger, and it’s great that the government have set the ambition of doubling provision next year. And of course, as with any new service, there will be teething problems.

The NTP isn’t for every disadvantaged child nor every school. The final choice of which evidence-informed approach best suits which child must be left to teachers, who know their children best.

When considering the NTP, school leaders will judge it not only against the provision supplied by other tutoring companies but also against other interventions for pupil premium children. Are they as effective, are they as good value for money?

Who is tutoring for?

There is one final consideration I would ask teachers to bear in mind. Tutoring has been a favoured option for better-off parents for years. In London and the home counties, almost half of all secondary school-age children will at some point receive this additional help. This type of help is beyond the reach of many economically struggling parents, even as studies suggest that they would pay for it if only they could afford it.

The principal aim of the NTP is to level the playing field, by giving disadvantaged pupils access to high-quality tuition support, which is especially urgent following the pandemic.

The pandemic has shone a spotlight on the economic and geographic inequalities of our system more sharply than any other event in living memory. As we work to recover, the NTP represents an unprecedented opportunity to provide the additional support for disadvantaged children that their better-off peers take for granted. It’s an opportunity we must not let pass.

Professor Becky Francis is CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, an independent charity that helped establish the Tuition Partners pillar of the National Tutoring Programme