The national tutoring programme (NTP) was heralded by Boris Johnson as the government’s great education leveller after the mass school closures of the Covid pandemic. I was one of the policy’s most vocal champions and even helped create the toolkit that so powerfully backed its use. But unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a little more complicated than the former PM’s rhetoric made out.
This is one of the biggest education experiments ever conducted in England’s schools, and the long-awaited evaluation of its rapid roll-out is essential reading for all who still believe targeted tuition can be a powerful equalising force for poorer pupils. The NFER report reveals nothing if not just how difficult that ambition is, even for the best-evidenced bets.
The review concerns the Tuition Partners (TP) programme, delivered by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and its charity partners between November 2020 and August 2021. Drawing on extensive evidence that tutoring can significantly boost pupil progress, the EEF allocated £80 million to provide tutoring (through a range of organisations) with the aims of reversing Covid learning losses and closing attainment gaps.
Targeting
The finding that will doubtless raise eyebrows is the relatively low numbers of poorer pupils who actually received tutoring. A total of 232,892 pupils in 6,082 primary and secondary schools were enrolled, and fewer than half (46 per cent) were eligible for free school meals (FSM) or pupil premium (PP) (compared with 22 per cent nationally).
With regards to the other 54 per cent, the report suggests schools may have focused support on other vulnerable pupils. Yet a lack of understanding of the programme’s aims and the preponderance of pupils picked in the run-up to examinations suggest schools may have deployed tutoring to improve results in general. Indeed, a parallel report into the academic mentoring programme found that the majority of PP-eligible pupils did not benefit from mentoring.
Impact
By picking a subset of secondary schools, the researchers suggest ‘a positive and significant impact […] for both maths and English achievement’ (using teacher assessed grades (TAGs)). But frustratingly, the low numbers of FSM pupils being tutored prevent them from making robust estimates of its impact for this group.
In addition, a substantial minority of pupils (35 per cent) had not completed the requisite number of tutoring sessions thought to be needed to affect their learning. Unsurprisingly, secondary school pupils who completed more sessions had significantly higher English and maths TAGs than peers who completed fewer, but it is unclear whether poorer pupils were more likely to be non-completers.
Subject and phase differences
School leaders across both phases felt that face-to-face tuition was more effective than online due to better attendance and perceived quality, but some interesting differences arose.
For example, 63 per cent of all programme tuition took place during lesson times. Primary school sessions scheduled in school hours were associated with better English scores, but the timing of delivery for maths didn’t seem to make a difference to maths scores at all.
For secondary schools, the inverse was true for online sessions. Those scheduled outside school hours were associated with better results, yet the timing of face-to-face sessions didn’t make a difference one way or another.
Meanwhile, though only associations, some of the evidence gives further confidence that a proposed university-led tutoring programme could make a real difference – and some ideas as to how.
Primary school pupils assigned a tutor with an undergraduate qualification got better scores for English and maths than those assigned a tutor with a postgraduate degree. And secondary school pupils working with a tutor with a postgraduate qualification got higher results in English and maths than their peers whose tutor was simply qualified to teach.
Future implications
One key lesson has already been learned: that targeting support to the most disadvantaged pupils should be a crystal-clear priority. This year’s reconstituted NTP is already doing that.
The challenge, now that schools are free to decide how to deploy tutoring, is to ensure it is delivered consistently and effectively. Insights from this report should help guide future efforts, but detailed guidance and continuing evaluation need to be part of of the ongoing programme if it is it to deliver on its levelling promise.
And with the cost-of-living crisis affecting communities, that matters even more now.
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