National Tutoring Programme

(asked on 14th April 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if his Department will publish data on the absence rate from National Tutoring Programme sessions during the academic year 2021-2022.


Answered by
Robin Walker Portrait
Robin Walker
This question was answered on 25th April 2022

The initial term of Randstad’s contract expires on 31 August 2022, and the department has chosen not to exercise the option to extend it for another year. We announced this on 31 March. The decision not to extend Randstad’s contract will not result in any further costs. The final cost of delivering this year’s programme will be confirmed once the current contract ends.

The department is launching a competitive procurement process in April to appoint one or more delivery partner for the National Tutoring Programme in the 2022/23 and 2023/24 academic years. All tender documents will be published through the usual commercial channels. The delivery partner(s) will be responsible for quality assurance, recruiting and deploying academic mentors and offering training. This new approach for our delivery partner(s) is in line with wider reforms to the programme, including providing all funding directly to schools, which will make the programme simpler and more flexible.

The department expects to appoint the delivery partner(s) for the 2022/23 and 2023/24 academic years in June. We will also publish full guidance for schools in the summer term. This will set the parameters around how the funding should be used and provide advice on how schools can make best use of their funding to develop an effective tutoring offer for their pupils.

Up to 13 March 2022, the department estimates that at least 1,198,239 starts had been made by pupils on courses of tuition provided through the National Tutoring Programme since its launch in November 2020. An estimated 311,000 starts were made by pupils on courses of tuition provided through the programme in the 2020/21 academic year.

Up to 10th March 2022, the department estimates that 674,941 starts had been made by pupils on courses of tuition provided through school led tutoring on NTP in the 2021/22 academic year. A further 128,776 starts were made by pupils on courses provided through tuition partners and 83,805 starts were made by pupils on courses provided through academic mentors.

The latest figures on starts made were published on 31 March, as detailed above. The department will be publishing more information about the programme in the future.

We regularly review the programme to ensure improvement. Based on lessons learnt from the current programme and the feedback from schools, we have made changes to the programme for next year and this was communicated on 31 March 2022.

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