The Department for Education has announced funding to help pupils catch up over the summer break. Several aspects have been mentioned, especially a government-funded tutoring scheme. You may find the links below enlightening.

Catch-up plans for each pupil or all pupils?

According to the TES:

However, if you look at Hansard, what the Prime Minister actually said was something different. He was asked:

To which the PM replied:

So what’s the difference? The TES reports the PM as saying that teachers should draw up catch-up plans for each pupil by the start of the summer break. That is simply impossible for most teachers. Even if they know what each pupil has been doing and not doing while schools have been closed, drawing up detailed plans for each of them, which I understand to mean individually, would take longer than the time available in most cases.

However, drawing up catch-up plans for all pupils should be easier. For example, schools could draw up two or three generic plans, and then use their knowledge of the pupils, perhaps aided by online questionnaires, to slot them into the right catch-up program for them. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is potentially workable.

OK, so call me a pedant, but to my mind there is a clear distinction between “each” and “all”.

Some informative links on the funded tutorial scheme

The National Tutoring Programme FAQ — from the Education Endowment Foundation.

The impact of personal tuition — from the Education Endowment Foundation.

A quick guide for schools — from Third Space Learning, who have a commercial interest, but the guide seems pretty good so don’t let that deter you from looking at it.

My comments

I’m afraid I don’t feel I’ve had enough time or “mental space” to look into this sufficiently to give a very reasoned or reasonable response apart from some misgivings, but for what they’re worth, here are my thoughts:

• I think that if the right tutors are with the right pupils for the right period of time, this could be quite useful. However, in my experience, the benefits of a short, sharp catch-up tends to be ephemeral. Pupils need sustained support over time, and a supportive structure at home.

• One of the ideas is that schools provide bolt-on sessions at the start and end of the school day. Apart from the question of who is going to supervise those sessions, there is also the issues that (a) kids need their sleep and (b) many pupils have other commitments, like attending religion school or looking after other family members at the before and after school. I may have missed it, but I haven’t seen those sort of issues addressed by the Education Secretary et al.

• One of the ideas is to use graduates as tutors. I’d like to say that’s better than nothing, but I have my doubts.

• Unfortunately, in my experience government-led schemes often sound great in theory but leave much to be desired in practice, a situation I summed up in this cartoon:

I really do try not to be cynical, but I fear George Bernard Shaw was correct when he wrote that, given an amiable view of a situation and a cynical one, the latter is more likely to be true.

Nevertheless, something needs to be done to address the consequences of schools being closed, and this seems to be an ambitious scheme, put together in a remarkably short time, and generously-funded. Hopefully, it will prove to be enormously beneficial to a large number of pupils.