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'I have heard you' – Zahawi commits £65m more to school-led tutoring as MPs slam NTP failures

School funding and finance Interventions Government policy Coronavirus Covid recovery Tutoring
The education secretary has finally acted to address the elephant in the room of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) – admitting that most schools want to run their own recovery tutoring provision.

It comes as a damning report by MPs on the Education Select Committee said that the NTP “appears to be failing the most disadvantaged”. MPs on the committee have now called on the Department for Education (DfE) to “prove the NTP’s efficacy” or terminate the multi-million-pound contract with provider Randstad.

The NTP has been under fire for some time for its poor performance in delivering “catch-up” tutoring to disadvantaged children in the wake of the pandemic.

The NTP’s approach of making schools use “tuition partners” – a list of 57 “approved” and subsidised third party providers, many of which are profit-making companies – has not been popular. Even less popular has been its “academic mentors” route.

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