Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the National Tutoring Programme’s Tuition Partners pillar, if he will publish the methodology his Department plans to use to allocate additional provision to the Opportunity Areas.

The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) has been set up as part of the Government’s £1 billion response to support disadvantaged pupils to catch up from disruption to their education. The tuition partners pillar, delivered by the Education Endowment Fund (EEF), has 32 approved tuition partners, selected against a robust set of criteria, to provide high-quality subsidised tuition to schools.

The NTP tuition partners will support schools in all regions of England through a good blend of national and regional providers. Additional places have been allocated to regions with the largest numbers of disadvantaged pupils and in regions where access to tutoring has historically been lower. Regional allocations were determined by taking as a baseline the proportion of pupils eligible for the pupil premium within a region and then adjusting to recognise the disparities in current levels of tutoring provision. This also reflected the allocations made to Opportunity Areas and the North East of England. The programme opened to schools on 2 November and, working with EEF, we will continue to monitor tuition take-up throughout the course of this academic year to ensure that the NTP is taken up by schools with pupils who need the most support.

Further information on how schools can access tuition partner support can be found here: https://nationaltutoring.org.uk/faqs.