Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that academic mentors are in schools by the end of the year.

The National Tutoring Programme will support some of our most disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils to catch up on missed learning. The academic mentors strand, delivered by Teach First, will support schools in the most disadvantaged areas to recruit high quality academic mentors and train and place them as members of school staff, to support pupils with one-to-one or small group tutoring.

Teach First are working to scale up the provision of mentors, whilst remaining strongly focussed on quality and accessibility. Academic mentors will go through a thorough selection process, bespoke training and are subject to safeguarding procedures.

The process of training mentors and matching them to schools is well underway, and we expect our first group of mentors to be in schools by November. We expect all mentors to be appointed by February 2021.