Tutoring Provision

“After the initial set-up period, the children had clearly gotten into it. They came into school, all excited, saying, ‘It’s tutoring day today!’ It’s going really well. It’s quick and easy to set up the laptops each week. The children look forward to seeing their tutors.”

In the past, a disadvantaged but rural community such as Ferryhill would have struggled to get tutoring support, but thanks to the internet, that is no longer the case. I thank Action Tutoring and its brilliant volunteers for what they do; indeed, one reason I am here today is that one of my staff, Douglas Oliver, who is here today, also volunteers with Action Tutoring, and he has massively enlightened me about how important its work is. Action Tutoring’s analysis shows that 65% of disadvantaged pupils pass their maths GCSE after attending at least 10 tutoring sessions with the charity. Action Tutoring pupils were nearly 13 percentage points more likely to pass maths GCSE than other disadvantaged pupils nationally. Those are significant interventions. I could continue, but what I want to say is that Action Tutoring’s work is indicative of so much of the valuable tutoring provided by volunteers and others. We must celebrate that work.

Pupil premium funding was introduced 14 years ago by a Conservative Government working in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Although the Government gave something in the order of £400 billion of temporary support during the crisis of 2020 and 2021, it is vital that one small part of that support is renewed as the legacy of the pandemic endures for our youngest people. Of course, the Government live in a time of fiscal pressure following the shock of the pandemic and the illegal war in Ukraine, but we must continue to focus on education outcomes and the investment they afford us in our future. I hope the Government will look at the national tutoring programme as an option after this school year, because much needs to be done to look at how we embed tutoring for all students in the years ahead. Tutoring can stimulate aspiration in those furthest away from opportunity, and I encourage the Government to give it all possible support.

Key worker parents provided essential services, but their children had less face-to-face teaching at home, so it is likely that many of those children suffered due to that too. The hon. Members for Twickenham and for Sedgefield talked about a combination of issues, and I know that the hon. Members for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) will do likewise.

I always look forward to the Minister’s response, because he tries to encapsulate our fears, concerns and questions, and gives us some encouragement as elected representatives. Funding for Northern Ireland was secured by the Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland and the Charities Aid Foundation. That allowed for the creation of a free online tuition service for the children of key workers from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and for children with special educational needs. The combination of those two issues—parents who are away at work, and the education of children with special educational needs—is a massive problem. I have realised from all the debates we have here that the issues relating to children with special educational needs affect not just Northern Ireland but the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Ask a Tutor scheme really did make a difference, and I thank the Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland and the Charities Aid Foundation for that.

The Government have said that raising children’s attainment is at the heart of their agenda, and that is very true. Being able to obtain good tutoring services is one thing, but that must be deliverable across the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I am a passionate believer in the strength of the Union, and I am sure everybody in this Chamber is of a similar disposition. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North spoke at my association dinner two weeks ago about the strength of the Union, and he enthralled that audience of true Unionists in Newtownards with his words. I put my thanks for that on record, and I am pleased to see him here.

Although it is fully understood that education is devolved, we need to ensure that the initial budget is there to support one-to-one tutoring in our schools. The Assembly is now up and working again, and the Minister for Education back home is my colleague Paul Givan MLA. I know him and I know that he will work hard on this issue, but there also needs to be the support from Westminster. I am sure the Minister will give us encouragement on that through his words, as well as his actions.

One of my staff members was tutored in maths through her fourth and fifth years of secondary school, and her sessions cost £32 for one hour each week. That was almost eight years ago, so I imagine that they cost at least another £10 to £15, which would make it quite challenging for any person to afford that individually—it could cost over £200 a month, depending on how many sessions someone was having. Although there are people out there who will be able to afford that—that is fine, and those are the sacrifices we make—there are those who simply will not be able to. Giving consideration to those families should be made a priority, and that is the first of my requests in this debate.

We all want our young children to grow up and excel at school, and to have the best opportunities possible, and providing extra one-to-one tutoring sessions is an excellent way to ensure they do. I see that through the staff in my office and what they have told me, and we heard it in the introduction from the hon. Member for Twickenham, who explained why tutoring is important, and others have added to that message and will add to it in a minute.

I urge the Minister to engage with the devolved nations to ensure that we can all play a role in improving educational outcomes for young people in this great United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Isn’t it great that we have that Union? Isn’t it great that we can share these ideas? Isn’t it great that we can do that for our children?

Sadly, the city has languished under a disastrous private finance initiative deal. This is not meant to be a party political dig, but it was administered under the last Labour Government back in 2000. There are 88 schools trapped in a PFI contract run by the council and are seeing huge inflationary increases in their costs. It is predicted that up to £100,000 in additional funding will potentially have to be found for the annual contributions that need to be made, leaving us scrambling. I collared the Minister in the voting Lobby last night to demand more funding, and that goes to the heart of the point. I appreciate that the Government will point to pupil premium funding, which is a superb initiative, but I agree with the Chair of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who the hon. Member for Twickenham quoted: the reality is that the money simply will not be there.

There are huge inflationary increases in food and equipment costs, and with teachers’ salaries going up, which the Government have covered in part but not in full. There are also additional costs in Stoke-on-Trent, where we have those increased PFI contributions. Those inflationary pressures, again, driven by covid and Vladimir Putin’s illegal and immoral war in Ukraine, mean that schools are having to use every penny that they can find. They will not be able to continue the important tutoring scheme out of their own existing budgets because of the pressures that they are facing right now.

Stoke-on-Trent is exactly the area where that kind of intervention is absolutely necessary. I share the concern that at the end of this academic year, we will potentially see the end of the national tutoring programme as it is funded currently through additional Government support. I implore the Minister, and I will do everything I can with him, to lobby Treasury colleagues to demand that the scheme continues.

I will say this about the Prime Minister. Back in summer 2022, I supported my right hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) during the Conservative party leadership contest—it feels a long time ago, I know—because he had mentored me for a long time. I had a sense of loyalty to that, and I believe him to be a very good man. However, after he dropped out, I met all the leading contenders, including the current Prime Minister. When I sat down in the room with him for the first time and had a conversation about non-Treasury matters, seeing the fire behind his eyes when he talked about education was inspiring. It is so important, and it is something that sadly I had not heard enough of since the Blair years of “Education, education, education”, although I fear that that was more slogan and gimmick than actual delivery. Still, most importantly, at least it was on the forefront of the education agenda at that time.

The school-led approach is a much better system. Why? Teachers know who those pupils are. They know their backgrounds and their learning and support needs; they know their parents and have a relationship with them. Teachers are and have always been willing to stay behind after school. If we give teachers the opportunity to have a little more money in their pocket, bearing in mind they probably work double the hours they are actually paid for—I certainly used to do 60 hours a week as a bare minimum while on the frontline as a head of year—that could have a huge and positive impact for them. It could also have a positive impact on the many fantastic smaller focused third sector organisations that, again, have existed for a long time.

I hope we never see a repeat of Randstad, because that was an utter disaster. I was pleased to see that the Government were nimble on their feet and followed a school-led approach; giving that money to the schools directly had a positive impact. I saw that in my albeit very brief time as Minister for School Standards between September and October 2022. During that time, I went on a number of visits to schools in the Black Country that were using that funding. I spoke with the pupils themselves, who said that without the programme, they would not have had the confidence to put up their hand in class to ask teachers questions when they did not understand what was being taught to them.

The national tutoring programme has given pupils confidence—sixth-formers interacting with year 7 and 8 pupils who are new to the school, to build that sense of collective responsibility and help one another. The older pupils learn important leadership skills, using their lived experience to impart the knowledge they have learned from their excellent and outstanding teachers. It all goes to show the power of the scheme. I do hope we will see that.

In February 2023, the National Audit Office said that in the 2021-22 academic year, only 47% of the pupils accessing the scheme were disadvantaged. Like myself, the hon. Member for Twickenham and many other Members present will be worried by that. The national tutoring programme was designed for disadvantaged pupils; it should not be supplementing the tutoring of children whose parents could afford private tuition if needed. While I want to ensure that every child has the opportunity, we need to find out from the Minister— I hope we will hear this today—what the Government have done since that report to really drive up the number of disadvantaged pupils to hopefully reach the 65% target that was initially given to Randstad as part of the contract. That is exactly the type of figure that we would like to see. I agree with Lee Elliot Major, the professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, that it would be

“a national travesty if we fail to embed tutoring”

into our core schooling day in, day out. We therefore have that responsibility.

Schools Week reported that as of July 2023, there was a £240 million underspend in the tutoring programme over the 2021-22 and the 2022-23 academic year. Can I ask the Minister whether that money was reinvested back into the national tutoring programme to help to cover schools’ costs, which are obviously rising in year in, year out, and to deal with the tutoring programme? That was something I requested within the Department while I was a Minister: for any underspend to go into the next academic year to give schools more cover and give them longer to get the programme up and running, build more trust with pupils and put things in place. That is important as well.

My final contribution is simple. If the Government do not want to go ahead with the national tutoring programme in its current form, I personally believe there is only one other way we can go forward. As any other hon. Member would, I will shamelessly plug my own research paper, which I did with Onward back in November 2020. It calls for not only an extended school day, which I have long supported, but a shortening of the school holidays over the course of an academic year—reducing the summer holiday from six weeks to four.

I support that for two reasons. First, childcare is extremely expensive; it is even more expensive now than when I wrote that report. It was estimated that that change would save the average family £133 a week based on costs associated back in November 2020, which will obviously have massively increased since then. I appreciate that the Government have done a lot in the childcare space with the new scheme providing 15 hours of free childcare as of April. I must confess that my own child, who is two years old, will benefit from it, and we have started the process of getting our code to give to our childcare provider.

The second and most important reason is that from research I have conducted, I understand that it takes around seven weeks for a disadvantaged pupil at the start of a new academic year to finally surpass where they were at the end of the previous academic year. That is seven weeks of lost learning, during which time disadvantaged pupils are unable to accelerate at the same pace as their better-off peers, which is simply unfair. Reducing that holiday to four weeks—I am happy to have a two-week October half term, which would be better for pupils and teachers in terms of rest and wellbeing, as well as trying to spread the cost of the school holidays throughout the year more fairly—would give those younger people a better opportunity.

There are other ideas in the pipeline. I have a research paper that I will happily send the Minister to have a look at and tell me what he thinks. Ultimately, I think it is the right thing. I appreciate that multi-academy trusts can do that of their own volition, and some do, but it should be driven nationally as well.

As I said, education is the absolute bedrock to levelling up. It is the bedrock to making sure that life chances can be achieved. I have no fiscal rules when it comes to education, because I believe that if we shove all the money there, we will have better outcomes on health and work, fewer people needing to use the welfare state, better home ownership, better wages, and less poverty in our country. Education is at the epicentre of achieving that, and we should therefore be pouring money into the sector. That 92% of my schools are now rated “good” or “outstanding”, compared with around 60% in 2010, and 75% of my kids are now reaching the necessary levels in phonics, compared with 53% when we inherited government back in 2010, shows that we have got it right, and that all the changes and hard work can go on to build something more.

I am so passionate about making sure that we get education right. It is essential that the people I serve—my masters and mistresses back in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke; my Lord Sugars who will hire or fire me when the general election comes later this year—have every opportunity to make sure that their children can have the opportunities and ability to access the high-skilled, high-wage jobs I am bringing to my local area to improve their life outcomes. Stoke-on-Trent’s achievement of the levelling-up agenda is driven through the education sector.

Please, Minister: we have to keep this tutoring programme on the tracks. If we do not, an extended school day and shorter school holidays are the alternative, in my opinion.

I saw the impact on my own children. My youngest had only just started school when he found himself back at home being taught by two parents who had no teaching experience, two other children to try to teach and support, and two full-time jobs that they had to undertake from home. It was an incredibly challenging time for families everywhere, and in far too many households, particularly where less support was available, children paid a very heavy price. Kevan Collins was therefore commissioned by the Government to set out a long-term recovery plan for our children, but the Prime Minister, who was then Chancellor, opted out: he was simply not willing to make that investment in other people’s children. Our country continues to pay a very heavy price for the decision he took then, and it will for some time to come.

The National Audit Office reported last year:

“Disruption to schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic led to lost learning for many pupils, particularly disadvantaged children.”

It also reported:

“Left unaddressed, lost learning may lead to increased disadvantage and significant missing future earnings for those affected.”

As a key measure to address that, the Government introduced the national tutoring programme, which was initially provided through tuition partners. As hon. Members have noted, there were many missteps, from a very low uptake at the start to schools struggling to find the tutors they needed to deliver the support, but as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) highlighted, once the Government introduced the school-led tutoring element in September 2021, there was some success and take-up was higher.

Evidence gathered by the National Foundation for Educational Research showed that increasing the number of tuition hours

“led to better outcomes in maths and English.”

Crucially, however, the foundation noted:

“Less than half of pupils selected for tutoring were from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

As the match-funding requirements kicked in and Government funding went from 75% to 50%, schools that were trying to make the scheme work and that needed it the most found it ever more difficult to deliver. This year, many schools, especially those in the poorest areas, have used up almost all of their pupil premium and recovery premium funding to pay for tutors, leaving them little to pay for other interventions such as enrichment or training. Indeed, the benefits of the scheme risked being undermined by the way it was delivered because it was poorly targeted, so lots of children who needed the support the most were not able to benefit from it.

Tutoring was not mentioned in the Budget earlier this month, so it seems that the national tutoring programme is coming to an end. Just a few months ago, the then Schools Minister, the right hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), stated:

“The Department has committed that, from the 2023/24 academic year, tutoring will have been embedded across schools in England.”

However, without a specific budget for tuition, it is assumed that schools will need to use their main budgets to fund that support.