Boris Johnson promised a “massive catch-up operation” to help children in England make up for their lost time in the classroom since March, and little over a week later we have it: £1bn, all to be spent in nine months starting from September. Most of the planning appears to have been led by No 10, with Department for Education officials virtually zooming back and forth with dismayed faces after having their input appraised in unflattering terms. But the end result is a headline-grabbing figure, a promise that schools will be given latitude over how they use the money – and a dawning scepticism that the government’s plans may be more ambitious than the reality.
Of the £1bn, only £650m will go directly to state secondary and primary schools, which amounts to about £90 per pupil. The remaining £350m will be used to subsidise individual and small group tuition through an as yet non-existent national tutoring programme (NTP). Those funds will subsidise 75% of the cost of tuition from an approved roster of external providers, with schools having to meet the remaining 25% from their portion of the £650m. Assuming the tuition works out at about £50 an hour – a figure stated by the Education Endowment Foundation, which will help administer the NTP – and that is used in full, then £467m of the £1bn, or nearly half, will be spent on private tuition. Private tuition is also subject to VAT, which shrinks the amount available, although it would of course go back to the Treasury. Most private tuition in the UK is provided by for-profit companies. Charities also work with disadvantaged pupils, but they tend to rely on unpaid volunteers. One headteacher was quick to praise the additional funding, saying that schools sorely needed it. He was, however, also quick to question how the tuition funding would work and where all the extra tutors would come from.
Another head wondered aloud how much time he would need to spend vetting external tutors and “coaches”, supervising their work, persuading parents that their children should miss football or music clubs to come in after school or at weekends, and coordinating with teachers over exactly what catching up was needed for each individual pupil. His conclusion was that he would rather use the funding for his own catch-up plans, but the DfE’s guidance states: “Whilst headteachers will decide how the money is spent, the government expects this to be spent on small group tuition for whoever needs it.”
Even if the tuition is only for the most disadvantaged pupils, there are about 1 million receiving free school meals, and providing all of them with an hour or two a week would require the recruitment of an army of external tutors. To put that in perspective, one of the largest national firms to offer one-to-one tuition reaches only 40,000 children a year. Johnson’s plan also requires schools to spend the catch-up funds only on children from reception to year 11, from age five to 16. It excludes pupils in years 12 and 13, which seems particularly unfair given the latter will have only seven months in school until they finish their A-level or BTec courses. A child in year 1 has 12 years left in the school system, yet they will be eligible. Another school leader said that while she welcomed the funding, she worried that a government that has scrapped its promised “world-beating” contact-tracing app may also prove unable to deliver an effective national tutoring programme for 1 million children by September.