By Gavin Mackintosh-
A £350 million flagship programme offering catch up tuition to help pupils in the Uk catch up, is behind schedule, and providers have been told delivery milestones can be “re-forecast”.
The British government offered to provide additional funding to the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) scheme, following the national lockdown that led to school closures in the Uk. Only children of key workers are allowed to school.
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As of last Monday, only 14 of the 33 tuition providers already signed up to the scheme had completed safeguarding and due diligence checks, to ensure they could switch their offer online for pupils to access at home. The implementation of the scheme is behind, and there are many children are falling behind.
Providers have been told they can now work with the NTP to “re-forecast milestone targets” so they don’t feel “pressured by pre-set targets”.
Thousands of primary and secondary school children are expected to fall behind their studies as a result of the transfer to remote learning, although schools are making every effort to keep pupils engaged through remote learning during the lockdown,
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The NTP says it is reviewing the timeline as it needs to “consider the impact that the closures might have on the overall delivery of the NTP”. It said the current uncertainty made it unable to make a firm decision “right now”.
Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that “as with much else” the NTP was “clearly going to face added complications in terms of delivery following the decision to restrict opening in schools”.
“We have always said that this was a particularly complicated way of delivering catch-up support … it would have been far simpler to have provided the money direct to schools.”
Contingency
Approved tuition partners were expected to have contingency plans in place if face-to-face tutoring was disrupted.
The NTP website reads: “This could include moving tuition online (where organisations already have online systems up and running) or pausing tuition until delivery becomes feasible again and changing the onward pattern of delivery.”
The NTP said any postponed sessions could be rearranged or moved online.
“These choices are ones for each individual school to make. Schools and tuition partners will continue to work closely and collaborate to support additional learning for the children that need it most,” said a spokesperson.
The NTP has enrolled 90,000 students in two months, just over a third of the 250,000 promised catch-up under the programme.
However, teaching unions say catch-up funding to support children is not enough.
Barton said the “catch-up funding provided by the government was in respect of lost learning in the first lockdown. Since then we have had a highly disrupted autumn term and now another lockdown.
“This is very likely to have led to further learning loss and the government will need to provide more funding for catch-up support to schools and colleges over the coming months.”
In the meantime, a number of parents have had to step up to home schooling their children, but not all parents have the motivation or educational background to be helpful in every subject.
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