Education secretary Nadim Zahawi has said he is ‘determined’ to push ahead with an initiative that would mean every school pupil would get one-to-one personal tutors.
The Tory minister said that, until now tutoring had been a way for wealthier parents to ensure their children get ahead, and said he wants that advantage for all pupils.
In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Express, the education secretary said he and the Prime Minister were ‘determined’ this would happen, despite only a fraction of schools in many areas taking up an initial project to increase one-to-one tutoring because they didn’t have all the money to pay for it.
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Speaking to the Sunday Express, Mr Zahawi said Boris Johnson and instructed him to make it work, and ensure every pupil had access to one-to-one tutors.
He said a project brought in to help schools and pupils catch up with lessons after the Covid pandemic would now become permanent - even though it hasn’t been a success.
The Education Secretary said his department was looking at ways to provide more counselling and support to “generation lockdown” children whose mental health suffered during the coronavirus crisis. The existing national tutoring programme, currently in its second year, provides personalised support for pupils whose education was disrupted by Covid. Schools can recruit outside staff or use their own teachers, and children are usually taught in groups of no more than three, sometimes receiving one-to-one support.
Mr Zahawi said: “My target, and my instruction from my boss, the Prime Minister, is to make it permanent. That means schools will have the ability to use tutoring for pupils when they need it. “A teacher will identify where the gaps are in a child’s learning in Maths and English, and communicate with parents how they are going to deal with that gap,” he said.
The measure will form part of a new “parent pledge” introduced in the Government’s Schools White Paper and due to be enshrined in law, giving parents a right to know what action schools intend to take if a child is struggling. But just a fortnight ago, headteachers at schools across the country said they had not been able to undertake the full tutoring scheme because the Government hadn’t provided enough money for it.
SchoolsWeek reported that headteachers said they feared getting the blame for what they described as ‘the failing programme’, after the Government announced it would publish the amount of tutoring schools had done in the autumn term.
Under the scheme, which the Education Secretary said he was now making permanent, schools get a ring-fenced grant to cover 75 per cent of the costs of tutoring - with headteachers expected to find the remaining 25 per cent from their existing budgets and pupil premiums.
Robina Maher, headteacher at St Mary’s Primary School in Hammersmith, west London, told SchoolsWeek: “I am working hard to balance my budget, so that top-up is a lot of money to come up with.” In March, just under 30 per cent of schools in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham had run tutoring under the NTP – the lowest in the country, and in contrast to 60 per cent across England.
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