The National Tutoring Programme has been under the spotlight again this week, with Karen Guthrie, Programme Director of Randstad, answering questions on its progress at the House of Commons Education Select Committee Meeting on Thursday morning.
When asked about regional disparities within the programme, Ms Guthrie identified the North East as a ‘coldspot’ in regard to school ‘take up’. Official figures for the exact size of the problem have been very difficult to come by, however, but Ms Guthrie’s comments chime with the Schools North East ‘State of the Region Survey’ of November 2021 which estimated that approx. 64% of schools in the region are engaging with the NTP, with the overwhelming majority (80%) of those using school-led tutoring. 35% are engaging with tuition partners, and 26% with academic mentors.
Ms Guthrie stated ‘what’s important is that we make this programme accessible across England, but we have specifically looked for tuition partners and we have doubled the level of those who can provide tuition in the North East. We currently have 9 tuition providers in the North East.’ Guthrie then went on to add that there are now 60 tuition providers across England, but was not aware of how many are in the north of the country and how many are in the south.
There were a number of questions as to why school engagement with the NTP in the North East was lower than other areas of the country. However, Ms Guthrie was unable to pin down specific reasons as to why so few schools had utilised the programme. She said ‘To combat them [regional disparities], we actively go out to find tuition partners, as well as reaching out to schools and MATS. We’ve spoken to over half of the schools in the North East and will continue to do that.’
Regional engagement with the NTP has been significantly lower than that of other areas since the scheme’s inception. There are a number of structural reasons for this that have been repeatedly raised but not addressed, including schools finding it difficult to access external tutors, both in terms of quantity and quality, with poor capacity and infrastructure in the region pre pandemic that has been further exacerbated by the impact of current Covid-related issues.
The Schools North East ‘State of the Region Survey’ showed that those schools who had decided to utilise school-led tutoring felt that, by calling upon their own staff, their pre-existing relationships with students made it easier to identify where interventions were needed and to deliver them more effectively. In addition to the structural issues the North East faces as a region, accessing funding has also proven to be excessively bureaucratic. The processes to record what interventions and tutoring are taking place involve significant extra workload for administrative staff, with school leaders saying that is almost a separate job in its own right. Where schools already have significant intervention programmes in place, it has also been more difficult to explain what additional work they are doing, to enable them access to this funding. Staff involved in school-led tutoring are also expected to complete 11 hours of tutor training, and this has proven to be an obstacle in getting existing highly capable support staff involved.
Director of Schools North East, Chris Zarraga, said “whilst we welcome the allocation of additional support for the NE through the NTP, this will do little to address the serious structural issues that underlie the NE being a so-called ‘cold spot’. NE schools are already experts at ‘catch up’. This needs to be recognised with a more flexible scheme that focuses on supporting them according to their contextual needs”.
While the Director of Randstad praised the programme for the amount of engagement its received across the country – 302,000 pupils have accessed it so far in 2021-2022, the same amount as the whole of the last academic year – Gateshead MP Ian Mearns, who chaired the Education Select Committee, stated that that is still significantly short of the 2 million pupils targeted by the Government – a disparity of 85%.
Guthrie then went on to say that ‘while it’s encouraging that so many pupils are accessing the programme, we are aware that the NTP has very ambitious targets’, before reiterating her earlier point that Randstad are ‘communicating with schools on a regular basis and are continuing to raise awareness of the programme, so that when schools are ready to access the NTP, we are ready to deliver it to them’.
This sentiment was later echoed by Minister of State for School Standards, Robin Walker, who announced that the NTP is there to support schools when it comes to staff shortages. He stated that ‘while the figures [of schools utilising the programme] are low, the supply agencies themselves are saying that it’s early days’. He also said that schools have the choice as to whether they use the NTP staff to assist when staff absence figures rise.
However, feedback from various Head Teacher and trust CEOs roundtables in the North East strongly suggest that the current ‘covid crunch’ in staffing is being exacerbated by the NTP itself. Schools across the region and beyond are reporting that getting supply staff cover for covid and other absences is becoming increasingly difficult as the NTP is draining capacity away from supply cover. Moving forward, it would appear doubtful that the NTP will plug the gap left by absences, while simultaneously trying to catch students up with the learning they lost during the pandemic.
