Best Practice

A decentralised approach to school-based tutoring

Tutoring Covid recovery Quality First Teaching
Effective teacher-tutor partnerships, where teachers and tutors work collaboratively, can improve access to tutoring interventions and boost outcomes for students who need support. Julia Silver outlines how
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A study last year found that teachers believe tutoring has the potential to boost student confidence, improve academic attainment, and support good mental health (Burtonshaw & Simon, 2023).

Whether you managed to make use of the National Tutoring Programme funding or not, it is significant that at its time of need the government turned to tutoring. This is because tutoring, when done well, works better than most other interventions.

According to the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, effective one-to-one tuition can accelerate a student’s progress by providing up to five months’ worth of additional learning across a year. Small-group tuition is nearly as effective, providing up to four months’ worth of additional learning for significantly lower costs (EEF, 2021).

This four months’ progress could transform outcomes for your lowest attaining students and could enable your highest attainers to fly. Four months could go, in some small way, towards levelling the playing field for your Student Premium students. It could allow you to find out what the silent middle is really capable of. It could rehabilitate the disengaged and improve attendance with your hardest to reach students – as a recent case study from Nottingham Emmanuel School illustrated (see DfE, 2023). Tutoring sessions could be the missing piece of the puzzle for GCSE and A level students, giving them the boost they need to face their exams with confidence.

In order to implement tutoring into secondary schools and maximise its benefits, I propose a collaborative approach based on successful partnerships between teachers and tutors.

This partnership should rely on mutual professional regard, relational trust, and a student-centred approach. Done well, it would allow teachers, with the help of their tutor-partner, to provide that ideal of one-to-one input for every student. I call this model teacher-tutor partnerships and it is very simple.

 

Teacher-tutor partnerships

Through these partnerships, teachers and tutors collaborate closely to design, deliver and evaluate the intervention. Together, they choose the students, deliver and interpret assessments, and plan and adapt instructional approaches. By communicating regularly and picking up where the other leaves off, the teacher and tutor can jointly deliver an optimal learning experience.

There is much research informing this approach. According to the Burtonshaw & Simon study cited above, tutoring works best when:

  • It targets the students who will benefit the most.
  • It is accessible to students anywhere.
  • It is embedded from 5 to 19, to ensure learners are supported across their education.
  • There is a commitment to ensuring that provision is consistently high-quality.
  • The model is flexible to meet the needs of the school and the student.
  • Communication between school and students and tutors is effective.
  • The burden on schools is reduced wherever possible.
  • It is committed to measuring impact, evaluating implementation, and consistently improving based on this evidence.
  • It is able to continue to scale in order to support schools and students who would benefit.

The teacher-tutor partnership model enables a strategic selection and targeting of students based on both what the teacher knows, and how the tutor feels they can help.

It can accommodate any age, subject or special need, providing you seek out tutors with the correct expertise. It creates a shared responsibility for high-quality provision and is built flexibly around the needs of all stakeholders.

The model should localise the administration to the instructional level. Rather than reducing admin, we are imbuing it with greater purpose and pedagogical gains.

The partnerships should take an assessment-first approach to planning, with a built-in feedback loop that measures impact to inform implementation. These assessments can take place in the classroom or in the tutoring sessions. Either way, the partnership should interpret the results together.

Ultimately, the scalability of this decentralised approach is based on finding and keeping the right tutors, by really getting to know them and integrating them as a valued part of the teaching team.

 

Implementing teacher-tutor partnerships

For a secondary school looking to implement these kinds of partnerships, the first step is to gather a collection of trustworthy tutors for each of your core subjects.

Look for tutors who can complement and supplement your existing approach. Place particular focus on putting the right team of alternative provision tutors in touch with your SEND, attendance, safeguarding and pastoral care staff. Brief the teachers on which tutors you have selected and why, or if they have capacity, invite them to participate in the selection process.

Pair-up the tutors with teachers by subject and year group. Each tutor-teacher partnership will propose which students they would like to put forward for tutoring and what format the intervention would take.

The recommendations of which students should receive tutoring each term, which learning objectives should be covered, and how impact should be measured will be put forward by the tutor-teacher team.

Particular attention should be paid to the guidance around setting and streaming when it comes to selecting groups for tuition. The final decision will be taken by one specific member of the senior leadership team who has overall responsibility for the tutor-teacher partnership.

 

Evaluating the teacher-tutor partnerships

Although the weight of the work sits between the tutor and the teacher, the senior leader responsible should support and guide the partnerships.

Therefore, for teacher-tutor partnerships to work well, training must be provided at every level on the delivery of effective research-informed tutoring. Scaffolds should be developed that enable the teacher, tutor and senior leader to plan and evaluate the tutoring intervention on equal terms.

  • Julia Silver is the founder of Qualified Tutor, a professional development community that develops and certifies tutors. The Qualified Tutor directory offers listings for certified tutors all of whom have enhanced DBS checks. Visit www.qualifiedtutor.directory. Julia’s book, Love Tutoring: Be the tutor your student needs (Crown House Publishing, 2024) is out now: www.crownhouse.co.uk/love-tutoring 

 

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