The high-profile programme has prompted complaints of missed targets and poor-quality tuition
It was a Saturday morning and Garry Ratcliffe, chief executive of a multi-academy trust of primary schools in Kent, was in school early to supervise the start of tutoring sessions provided by the government’s national tutoring programme (NTP).
The programme aims to help pupils most in need of catching up after the disruption of COVID, and 12 children had been promised tuition. Ratcliffe’s school is in a deprived area, with no culture of Saturday morning clubs, and parents had to be persuaded that it was worth sending their children in at the weekend – but just 10 minutes before the sessions were due to start, the tutoring company rang to say they couldn’t find any tutors.
Like many headteachers, Garry does not need convincing that one-to-one or small group tutoring can be a great way to help children – middle-class parents pay for private tutors in their droves; 41% of 11- to 16-year-olds in London receive tuition outside school, according to research by the Sutton Trust, a charity that works on social mobility . The government’s £1.5bn programme is intended to ‘level the playing field’, bringing tutoring to pupils all over the country whose families could never afford it.
“We really believed in it as an idea,” Garry said. “We contacted a tutoring company that was a registered partner. They promised the earth and delivered very little.”
Ratcliffe’s trust arranged for pupils “in real need” of help with lost learning to come in for three-hour sessions over six weeks; on three of those Saturdays the company called moments before the sessions to say it couldn’t find tutors. He said the tutors who did turn up were “a real mixed bag” in terms of quality. “One tutor was an absolute gem; another was on her mobile the whole time, and a third turned up asking us to print things out and whether we had anything on the four times table. We gave strong feedback, which obviously the company was disappointed by as it would mean they might be dropped. They weren’t.”
Poised to axe?
Sources said the government is poised to axe Randstad, the Dutch multinational company appointed to deliver the programme, after revelations that pupil enrolment is more than 90% below target. School leaders report serious problems with the service, including lack of availability and poor quality of tutors. Many say they have found the main NTP website too difficult to use and many are turning their backs on the main route and organising tuition through a schools-led path instead.
Randstad was awarded the contract to run the programme last June, after submitting a £25m bid that significantly undercut a bid from charities – including the Education Endowment Foundation which ran the programme in its first year. Randstad’s bid came in well below the £62m maximum proposed by the government.
Sam Freedman, senior adviser to the education charity Ark, and special adviser to Michael Gove when he was the secretary of state for education, said the procurement process was developed in a way that allowed price to become too important. Although Randstad was considerably cheaper, Sam said its bid was “only just over the threshold” on quality. “Why was that allowed? It’s not a scientific judgment; someone must have decided to let them in.”
Experts say that finding enough high-quality tutors – especially in more deprived areas where there is no established market for private tuition – was always going to be a challenge for a programme of this scale. “A proper provider would have been running a high-quality recruitment and training programme to get numbers up; they just don’t have the money to do that as the bid they put in was so low,” says Sam.
A spokesperson for the Department for Education said, “We are determined to support children from all backgrounds to catch up on lost learning and reach their potential. Over 300,000 courses were delivered in the last term alone, and the programme remains on track to deliver the ambitious target of teaching two million courses this academic year.” The spokesperson added that a range of measures would ensure all tutoring was of high quality.
Disastrous
However, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) recently asked their members for feedback on the programme; the responses paint a very different picture. One secondary school head said, “I have one word for our experience of the programme; disastrous. No-shows, lack of subject specialist knowledge, punctuality issues. One of the tutors withdrew her services entirely on the day the students were expecting her.”
The head of a secondary school in the south-west said they hadn’t been able to find any tutors through the main NTP programme. “We have had appointments booked [with NTP tutoring partners] to discuss, which have been cancelled at the last minute. We have heard from other schools that you don’t often get the same tutor each time, which is difficult for the students. We have tried local tutors and have had no response.”
The school has decided to use the direct schools’ funding pathway to pay its own staff to deliver extra tuition after school. “Our staff are exhausted, but want to make sure our students get a good deal,” the head said.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the ASCL, said, “If you are in an area like the north-east or south-west, where tutoring isn’t part of the cultural tradition, and you’re not allowed to employ your own people, supply is always going to get in the way.” He says the programme is currently operating with “byzantine complexity” and his union is calling for all the money to be given directly to schools instead.
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