The education secretary has said the reason why the start of the £350 million Covid catch-up National Tutoring Programme is being delayed until the second half of the autumn term is so that teachers have time to assess what pupils’ needs are.

When Gavin Williamson first announced the programme as part of the £1 billion “Covid-19 catch-up plan” last month, he said “the plan will be delivered throughout the next academic year”.

But last night the Department for Education revealed that the tutoring would not start until after the October half-term, despite prime minister Boris Johnson originally promising “a massive catch-up operation over the summer and beyond”.

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Asked about the delay this morning, Mr Williamson told the BBC: “We worked with schools, and what schools and the teaching profession were saying to us is that they need to be able to have the ability to do the proper assessment of children as to where their needs are, making sure that this money is properly targeted to ensure it delivers the very best for children.”

Coronavirus: Tutoring support ‘will arrive too late’

Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said the “cavalry may arrive too late” for many schools.

“In the long term, we hope that the National Tutoring Programme will become a trusted source of support to schools, in helping to address the needs of pupils that have fallen behind,” he said. “In the short term, the tutoring programme is unlikely to figure in many schools’ plans for ‘catch-up’, simply because additional support is likely to arrive too late for most.

“The government has said to schools to plan on the basis that their curriculum should return to normal by the start of the summer term, yet the tutoring programme will only start ramping up in spring 2021. It appears that the cavalry may arrive too late to be of help to many schools as a response to the immediate crisis.”

Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “While we welcome the Covid catch-up fund, the proposal for the National Tutoring element is a complex way of addressing an immediate and pressing challenge, and will inevitably take time to set up and deliver.

“Schools will be putting in place their own approaches from early in the autumn term, and the National Tutoring Programme may well prove useful as it rolls out. However, it might have been simpler just to deliver the whole funding package directly to schools in the first place.”