Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Berridge on 10 November (HL9605), how many tutors under the National Tutor Programme were supporting schools (1) at the start of November, and (2) at the start of December.

The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) will provide additional, targeted support to disadvantaged pupils who need the most help to catch-up. Through the programme, schools will be able to access high quality, subsidised tuition from approved Tuition Partners and our most disadvantaged schools will be supported to employ in-house Academic Mentors to provide tuition to their pupils.

The NTP went live on 2 November and schools are now able to access tuition to support disadvantaged pupils that needed the most help to catch-up. Our delivery partner for the Tuition Partners pillar, the Education Endowment Foundation, has approved 33 Tuition Partners who will offer high-quality, subsidised tuition to schools. The partners can be found here: https://nationaltutoring.org.uk/ntp-tuition-partners/ntp-approved-tuition-partners. For this academic year, in total, it is estimated that through the Tuition Partners, approximately 15,000 tutors will support the scheme offering tuition to around 250,000 pupils.

In addition to this, the first 188 Academic Mentors have now been placed in schools from November. In total we will place 1,000 Academic Mentors, with the further cohorts starting in schools in January and February 2021.