On the 18th June the government announced a £1 billion “Catch-Up” fund in order to tackle the impact of lost teaching time as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown.

On 20th July, a number of new announcements were made in relation to this scheme.

Positive update: Pupils aged 16-19 will now be receiving a chunk of this support.

Not so positive:  The scheme won’t launch until the October half term.

Here’s everything we know…

£1 billion

It’s a wonderfully elegant headline number, but actually encapsulates three separate areas of funding:

• £650million catch-up fund handed directly to state primaries and secondaries to be spent as they see fit (with guidance provided by the Education Endowment Foundation)
• £350 million for a new National Tutoring Programme, itself being split into three sections, NTP Academic Mentors (previously called NTP Coaches), NTP Tuition Partners (previously called NTP Partners) for pupils in years 1-11, and now a 16-19 tuition fund.  As of 28th August we now have some more detail regarding the split of this funding.

Catch-up Fund

The £650million will be distributed to schools based on the number of pupils enrolled in years 1-11 at a rate of £80 per pupil, and can be spent in whichever way they see fit.  It has, however, been speculated that Oftsed will be asked to review how these funds were spent, ensuring that it was indeed used to effectively help pupils catch-up, and not simply swallowed into the general school budget.

Guidance has been published by the EEF on how to spend this funding.  Please forgive us for pointing out that one-to-one and small group tuition is included in this advice!

Funding will be released in three stages:  Autumn 2020, early 2021 and summer 2021.

• £46.67 per pupil will be released spread across the first two payments
• £33.33 per pupil in the final payment

National Tutoring Programme (NTP)

There are four organisations responsible for overseeing this programme:  The Sutton Trust, The Education Endowment Foundation, Nesta and Impetus.

As detailed above, this will be split into three sections

• NTP Academic Mentors:  Trained graduates will be directly employed by schools in the most disadvantaged areas in order to provide intense catch-up sessions.  It was announced in mid-July that Teach First will run the entirety of this scheme.

• NTP Tuition Partners  This funding will be provided to state maintained primary and secondary academies in order to subsidise one-to-one and small group tuition.  Up to 75% of the cost of these sessions will be covered by the funding, with the school responsible for the remaining 25% – this can come from their existing budgets, or from the £650million tranche of the funding.

• 16-19 tuition fund:  £150 for each pupil “without a GCSE grade 4 or above in English and/or maths” to be spent directly on small group tuition.

These three programmes are intended to go live from the October half term (at the earliest)

Extent of funding

ACADEMIC MENTORS

Teach First have been asked to recruit up to 1,000 mentors (although we recently heard this figure is going to be closer to 500) who will be paid a £19,000 salary, and that the value of Teach First’s contract is £6.44million.  By our maths, that means a spend on NTP Academic Mentors of roughly £15-25million.

With around 25,000 state schools in the UK, and only 500-1,000 mentors, it would seem this programme is only going to be available to 2-4% of schools and will likely be awarded to those with higher rates of disadvantaged pupils.  We’d highly recommend schools make early enquiries here

16-19 TUITION FUND

A definitive figure has been announced for this:  £96million.  Based on the £150/pupil allocation it would appear that this will be supporting around 640,000 pupils.  This can be spent on “English, maths, or other courses where learning has been disrupted,” so will likely be best utilised for GCSE retakes, or for catching up on missed AS / A Level content.

Based on a group size of 4 pupils, these funds would purchase either 15 hours of Manning’s KS4 tuition or 13 hours of KS5 tuition.

TUITION PARTNERS

£76million has been allocated to Tuition Partners to reach “200-250 thousand disadvantaged pupils, with 15 hours of 3-to-1 tuition”.  Rather than being distributed to schools, or on a ‘per-pupil’ basis, NTP are in the process of selecting 50-60 trusted partners to deliver the scheme, and funds will be split between them based on size and scalability.

Schools should begin making preparations to setup a tuition scheme to reach at least 20% of their disadvantaged pupils (most likely focussing on years 6, 10 and 11 in the first instance), and also begin conversations with their preferred provider now ready for a November launch, as the funding made available to each agency will be finite.

For reference, Manning’s charges £39/hour for 3-to-1 tuition.  Under NTP this will be split as £9.75 for the school, with the government picking up £29.25.

Quality Control

Tutoring agencies will need to apply to the NTP in order to be included on the list of trusted providers.  These positions will be awarded based on their experience of working with schools / disadvantaged pupils, their quality, scalability, training and safeguarding practices and impact monitoring.

The Tutors’ Association is the only professional membership body for tutoring and the wider supplementary education sector in the UK, and has been in talks with the four organisations leading this scheme.  We would highly recommend schools utilise agencies who are members of the TTA.

Due to Manning’s extensive experience supporting schools and academies with the tuition of their disadvantaged pupils across for the past 12 years, we’re delighted to be providing training to other agencies within the TTA who have previously been more focussed on the private market.

Where’s the rest of the money?

The mathematically astute will have noticed £76m has been assigned to NTP Tuition Partners, £15-25m to NTP Mentors, and £96m to 16-19.  This leaves around £150-160m of the DfE’s promised £350m still to be allocated.  We are of course looking into this and will update when we have an answer.

This page was last updated on 30th August in response to updates on the NTP site.  We will provide more information as and when it is released.