Government to fund private tutors for schools in ‘catch up’ plan

Government to fund private tutors for schools in ‘catch up’ plan

After Boris Johnson promised a ‘massive catch up operation’ last week, it has emerged that the Government will invest £1 billion into schools, aimed at a year long programme of private tutoring in efforts to make up for the learning loss from Covid-19.

The programme is reported to begin in September, with funding available from the DfE which will enable schools to hire private tutors. The tutoring will be available to state primaries and secondaries and is likely to be offered individually, in small groups and virtually. However, there will be no funding for early years or post-16. It is unclear as to whether current year 11s will receive any support, with some Head Teachers increasingly concerned that they will become a ‘lost generation’ of covid casualties. In particular the lack of funding for early years will be a big disappointment to schools and impact children’s readiness to learn at reception and Year 1.  

Reports say the programme will be particularly targeted towards schools in deprived areas to combat the widening disadvantage gap due to children from these backgrounds being less likely to engage in home learning. It has been suggested that school leaders will have discretion over how the funding is spent, but that it will be expected to be spent on tutoring. This surely restricts the choices of school leaders where it is felt that the gaps caused by Covid-19 are social and emotional as opposed to academic. 

The evidence base for tutoring

Tutoring has been supported by The Sutton Trust and EEF as a means to close the disadvantage gap, lending weight to the idea that this could be an effective solution to the four months of learning loss children will have experienced due to school closures. The EEF has pointed to strong evidence that tutoring can be effective, delivering approximately five additional months’ progress on average, though this is based on one-to-one tuition. 

However, the EEF also states that “tuition should be additional to, but explicitly linked with, normal teaching, and that teachers should monitor progress to ensure the tutoring is beneficial”, which may be difficult when the government seems intent on having this delivered  by external tutor companies. The EEF report also suggests that it is the particular type or quality of teaching that is most important, raising the question of how quality will be ensured before schools are expected to roll this out either over the summer or in september. 

Is 12 months enough?

As speculation had previously focused on summer opening following calls from Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield and Sir Michael Wilshaw, this announcement may come as a relief to school leaders who are at risk of burnout after working in an ‘emergency’ capacity for the last three months. However, this also raises its own questions and logistical issues, including confusion over how the funding will be disseminated. One emerging concern is that this puts pressure on schools to ‘solve’ learning loss and close the disadvantage gap in just one academic year, and potentially makes school leaders responsible if this doesn’t happen within what many think is a relatively short space of time. 

Furthermore according to BBC Radio 4 the amount pledged equates to £80 per child, while other sources claim that it might be closer to £55 per child. If either is the case, it is unlikely to be able to fund sustained and regular tutoring for a full year.  According to the EEF ‘A typical effective programme might involve 30 minutes tuition, five times a week, for 12 weeks. This would require about four full days of a teacher’s time, which is estimated to cost approximately £700 per pupil. These costs would be reduced by using a teaching assistant to deliver the programme, but the evidence suggests that impacts are generally higher when delivered by teachers. Overall the cost is rated as high.’

With no plans around assessing gaps, or a long term curriculum plan for affected year groups, it is also difficult for school leaders to know how to plan to use this funding for sustainable catch up on learning loss. 

A question and answer document compiled by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) states that schools will be expected to pay for tutoring accessed through the scheme which ‘will be subsidised by up to 75 per cent in the first year, with smaller subsidies in subsequent years.’ This adds further confusion, suggesting the scheme may go on for longer than one year.

Time to plan?

If schools are to use the funding to hire tutors, there will have to be significant planning around how this is done, for example how it will sit in line with a school’s current curriculum, as well as the logistics around how extra sessions will be arranged. The EEF has been tasked with vetting which tutoring companies schools can commission, which will raise interesting logistical questions across the country re supply capacity.

If all schools are eligible for this funding there is sure to be a significant demand on the approved tutoring services, potentially raising questions about the suitability and qualifications of the tutors provided. This is not to mention that school leaders and teachers will have to build relationships with these tutors, who will not know the children or school contexts that they will be expected to work in. 

This raises a host of questions relating to tutor effectiveness. The EEF report states that “programmes involving teaching assistants or volunteers can have a valuable impact, but tend to be less effective than those using experienced and specifically trained teachers, which have nearly twice the effect on average. Where tuition is delivered by volunteers or teaching assistants there is evidence that training and the use of a structured programme is advisable”.

Will all children engage with this?

Another consideration is engagement – with reports that huge percentages of children are not currently doing schoolwork, getting these children to engage in additional hours in tutoring outside of school time may prove difficult. Engagement levels amongst the most disadvantaged children are the lowest. Early indications are that absence rates for those children in returning year groups are also highest amongst disadvantaged children.

Darlington Head Teacher Kate Chisolm has had previous experience of tutoring programmes without much success. While she highlights that this may be down to number of hours of tutoring and the lack of a strong student relationship with a new tutor as opposed to their regular class teacher, she highlights ‘readiness to learn’ as a key factor: ‘The children’s barriers to learning were much more complex than merely not understanding a concept. Their readiness to learn and overcome barriers were more centred in the children’s attachment difficulties… they were typically not ‘in a place’ to take on intensive learning. This, without a secure relationship with the adult teaching them and also the children’s need to have a safe base and be understood on a ‘needs’ basis prevented them from making large leaps.’

Miss Chisolm’s school, Skerne Park Academy in Darlington, faces significant disadvantage, so for her ‘catch up’ begins with supporting children with those basic needs, before they can consider more intensive academic learning. 

‘Many of the children who have returned to us have returned in a state of crisis. They are upset, violent, dysregulated and in fight or flight. This isn’t because they are worried specifically about catching covid (although it will be a mitigating factor) it is predominantly due to the child not having had any specific routine or boundaries for 14 weeks, not having positive role models on a daily basis, being subject to domestic violence, alcohol and substance mis-use, parents in crisis as well and of course, very little engagement with virtual learning.

To enable the learning of the children to return to the positive acceleration cycle again, the school will need to invest in weeks, if not months of restabilising relationships, reaffirming safety, enabling attachment therapies and above all reassuring the child that we are not going to abandon them again.’ 

Another Head Teacher who wished to remain anonymous said ‘I would ask the DOE and Gov to stop making headline grabbing announcements, pause and be still for a moment so that we can do some careful thinking, work out a plan to plug the gaps when we know exactly what they are after our young people have been in school for a while. [The gaps] are as likely to be social and emotional as much as academic judging on the young people in our community.’

Chair of Schools North East and Head Teacher of St John Vianney Primary School, John Hardy said ‘Accepting, that all children have grown-up and are 6 months older, and education in that period has been mixed, we need a ‘re-set’ to learning rather than a ‘catch-up’. I wonder what we are catching-up with? Surely it is more about drawing up a learning journey to prepare children for their next steps and then intensive teaching, learning and practise to get them there.’

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