‘I’m a teacher – tutoring has given our children a lifeline, now it’s at risk’

The Government risks cutting a “lifeline” to students by axing funding for the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), according to educators speaking to i.

Jeremy Hunt is not expected to announce new funding for the NTP, i understands, which was a central pillar of the government’s Covid school catchup plan.

Cross-party politicians, including former Labour education secretary Lord Blunkett and ex-Tory schools minister Robin Walker, have warned the decision risks killing off an “educational intervention” that could potentially “change the lives of thousands of pupils”.

Caroline Spalding, 39, a deputy headteacher in Derby, said the NTP funding had allowed her school to develop an “incredibly successful” phonics scheme.

It helped pupils at Littleover Community School, a state secondary school, catch up on 30 months’ worth of education in just five months, allowing children who “genuinely were not able to read” to use that skill every day, she said.

“If it weren’t for [NTP] we could not have set up our phonics programme,” Ms Spalding told i.

“Now, morally, we are in a very difficult position because we have a scheme that we know works but, how do we fund it?”

According to the Sutton Trust, in households with a joint income of over £75,000, more than one in three children receive private tutoring. In the most disadvantaged homes, this number drops to one in ten.

Ruby Tuke has been tutoring GCSE students as part of the NTP and said the programme has helped “close the gap” between the most and least advantaged in the UK.

“Wealthy parents,” she said, “will get their children a tutor to give them every possible chance to get the best possible education.

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“It is repeatedly the young people who don’t have access to [tutoring] who fall behind. So NTP was a small step in redressing that imbalance.”

Ms Tuke’s work helps young people who are resitting their GCSEs to qualify for vocational courses and college – which often require students to obtain a grade four or above in English and math.

Speaking about one teenager Ms Tuke helped to pass her English GCSE, she said: “It is not an overstatement to say that [NTP] might have changed the course of her career.”

She said the programme was a “lifeline” to students, showing them how to “achieve things, how to focus and how to aim higher than what they are currently aiming for”.

“[Tutoring] is just taken as a given for middle-class kids,” she added. “Why aren’t disadvantaged kids worth that investment as well?”

Ms Spalding called on the Government to expand NTP funding but said it was far from a silver bullet needed to address inequalities in education.

“There is a much broader problem than a few years of extra funding,” she said. “There is a lot of deprivation that is persistent and ongoing.

“NPT has been a sticking plaster for a wider problem. What is needed now is fundamental change, giving more money over a long period of time.”