NTP: What we’ve learned- and haven’t – about tutoring’s impact
Wednesday 9 October 2024
This blog post was published in Schools Week on Friday 4 October 2024.
- What is the future of tutoring now the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) subsidy has stopped?
- Should school leaders spend their pupil premium on tutoring? Is tutoring cost effective at improving attainment for disadvantaged pupils?
These are legitimate questions to ask, and it is challenging to get answers.
The DfE recently published NFER’s impact evaluation of the National Tutoring Programme’s third year (2022/23). This was alongside our Evaluations and Reflections paper on the programme’s fourth year.
Before the NTP was conceived, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) included small group tutoring in its toolkit [1]. The meta-analytical results of four months’ progress in primary schools and two months’ progress in secondary schools mask a couple of important details: most of the source research was conducted on reading and the security of the evidence was rated as ‘moderate’. All the same, it is understandable that DfE backed tutoring as part of its £1bn package to avert missed learning which occurred during Covid-19 partial school closures – there are few interventions that are so targeted and acceptable to parents [2].
However, this evidence, collected from a series of small-scale studies undertaken in “ideal” (research) conditions, doesn’t automatically apply to the effectiveness of a national programme involving a myriad of tutoring methods, academic subjects and year groups. This is why the EEF (in year 1) and DfE (in years 2 and 3) funded impact evaluations of the NTP. In its first year (which was heavily disrupted by further school closures), we struggled to find any impact in our main analyses.
In its second year, we reported impacts of around one month, on average, for School-Led Tutoring and were not able to detect any impact of the Tuition Partners route (although it is possible that some of the multiple different Tuition Partners were achieving significant impacts). The recently published third year evaluation also saw one-month improvements in English and maths at Key Stage 2 and very small improvements in both subjects at Key Stage 4. There was no impact evaluation in its fourth year.
The NTP was a mixture of ‘pillars’ such as Tuition Partners, School-Led Tutoring and Academic Mentors. Even within the Tuition Partners pillar, there were 33 different providers in the first year. This variety will inevitably result in variable quality across different year groups and subjects and goes some way to explain the much weaker effects of the NTP as a whole in comparison with studies that contributed to the EEF toolkit.
It is also possible that methodological challenges with the NTP evaluation contributed to the weaker effects seen – our impact evaluation of year three recognises that, due to limitations with the analysis, the true impact of the NTP is likely to be greater than these results suggest. However, a recent meta-analysis from the US [3] indicates the impact of tutoring diminishes when implemented at scale.
National accountability studies don’t help teachers decide whether a particular model of tuition works. In response to some of these challenges, NFER has advocated for smaller scale programme evaluations, the likes of which were in progress before the pandemic and are finally beginning again, to aid teachers in their decision making. Without such research, it is difficult to extrapolate beyond the EEF toolkit results to provide schools with the advice they need to implement tutoring successfully. Instead, teachers need to rely on best evidence guides [4] that build on more tentative aspects of the research.
Tutoring is not cheap but some models use volunteers or undergraduates (for course credits) to cut down on costs. However, without the detailed implementation evidence on how best to achieve 2-4 months’ additional progress, many teachers reading this may be wondering where to place tutoring within their priority list for their Pupil Premium budget. There are now so many other potential draws on that funding - especially given the attendance and wellbeing crises. The benefits of freeing up staff time to build relationships with their students which we know is core to improving pupil wellbeing [5], and which could support improved attendance, may be considered a higher priority.
If schools continue to spend their resources on tutoring – and if DfE choose to make more funding available in future – then it is essential that rigorous implementation research is carried out to ensure the funds are used most effectively.