National Tutoring Programme
UK government initiative to address learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic
The National Tutoring Programme was a UK Government scheme announced in June 2020 and launched in November that year forming part of a £1.7 billion catch-up fund to try to address learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. It outsourced the tutoring of school children to 33 organisations, most of them private companies. The scheme attracted criticism over cost, claimed inefficiency, and over the use of children as tutors.
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in the UK had periods of closure and some teaching was done purely online. The government allocated funds to help disadvantaged students aged 5 to 16 catch up their lost learning. Initially in 2020 a billion pounds were allocated, including 350 million for the National Tutoring Programme to spend for a year. Later announcements extended this to two years and pledged an additional 700 million, 200 million of which was for the NTP.
The scheme ran for four years, with the academic year 2023-24 being the final year for the programme and for a separate 16-19 Tuition Fund. The Department for Education (DfE) has signalled its intention to support tutoring in the long term, but the current form this will take is unknown.
Providers
The scheme published a list of approved providers, including private companies such as Pearson plc and Randstad Education as well as public bodies including the University of Sunderland, which trains and employs graduates to teach at school level. Of the 32 approved providers, 11 were non-profit entities.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “National Tutoring Programme” is uK government initiative to address learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through National, Tutoring and Programme, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q106047711. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Tutoring Programme” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.