Report calls for more ambitious plan for tutoring

The Centre for Education and Youth has released a report, ‘Levelling Up Tutoring', which focuses on the government’s covid recovery policy – The National Tutoring Programme (NTP).

Almost all interviewees and survey respondents had some positive perceptions about the NTP, especially its ambition, scale and grounding in evidence. Of the survey respondents, 70 per cent said they believe the NTP should continue for at least a year longer than is currently planned. However, 50 per cent also said they think the programme needs to be radically or significantly redesigned.

However, many school and trust leaders had negative perceptions of the NTP before enrolling, with some believing it was “more effort than it’s worth to apply for”, and “corporate”. Others had heard that enrolment was a “bureaucratic nightmare”.

The report highlights five design principles to better guide the design and delivery of the remainder of the NTP, but also in-school tutoring policy beyond the programme.

It says that schools want and need autonomy to procure and deploy tutors as they see fit. But to do this effectively they need of support services around them.

The programme should be simple and accountable. Many barriers to the uptake and impact of the NTP relate to overly complex funding and accountability models. Simplification of these elements would attract schools to in-school tutoring.
    
It also needs to be stable and adaptive. Frequent changes to the NTP have undermined its delivery and impact. Consistency over time, while responding to evaluations of the programme for continuous improvement, would resolve this issue.
   
What's more, the focus of tutoring in schools policy needs to be on reaching disadvantaged young people, without creating an unfair workload for teachers or resulting in exploitative labour market practices with tutors.
    
Lastly, the report says that to support the ongoing continuous improvement of the NTP and tutoring in schools policy, rigorous, wide-ranging evaluation must be woven into the fabric of the programme.