Written evidence submitted by Get Further
Get Further is pleased to submit evidence to this inquiry. Although schools are mentioned in the title, we have assumed that the whole of the 16-18 sector is included in the scope of this inquiry, given that the participation age in education is up to 18, and that the Covid-19 catch-up offer extended to this age group.
When school closures first happened in March 2020, the majority of teachers reduced lesson time for Year 11s - with many opting to not teach Year 11 at all when GCSEs were cancelled.[i] From that point on and over the next two years, young people who were allocated low grades[ii] for GCSE English and maths for exams they did not take, typically ended up retaking these qualifications in further education. These students were disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds. They often had just weeks to prepare for exams, after substantial gaps in their education, as colleges and sixth forms cycled in and out of lockdowns.
In 2020, Get Further was at the forefront of calls for ensuring that disadvantaged 16-19-year-olds were not forgotten from the recovery plan for education. We believe that the UK was world-leading with regards to the pace at which it put in place funding, including the 16-19 Tuition Fund, to ensure that disadvantaged young people were able to access catch-up tuition to support them to address lost-learning. While there have been challenges in the implementation of the National Tutoring Programme, we believe that there is now an opportunity for England to have a positive legacy from across the suite of tutoring policies and embed access to tuition for children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the education system long-term. This would right a historic wrong that families on low incomes priced out of this type of support for their children, not only enabling education recovery, but playing a key role in narrowing our country’s long-standing attainment gap.
About Get Further
One in three students leave school each year without a pass in GCSE English and maths - this rises to over one in two for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Without GCSEs in English and maths, these young people are significantly more likely to drop out of education and are locked out of key professions, apprenticeships, and university courses.
Get Further exists to change this. Our charity has an award-winning tuition programme that helps students from disadvantaged backgrounds to pass GCSEs or Functional Skills qualifications in English or maths. We place highly qualified, specialist English and maths tutors in further education, who deliver a bespoke curriculum that builds confidence and skills in these core subjects. We partner with further education colleges, sixth forms and independent training providers across England.
Small group tuition is proven to be the most effective intervention for improving outcomes, fast.[iii] Students on our programme are more likely to move up at least 1 grade between the start and end of the course – with results twice the national average.
Our charity was founded in 2018. As of March 2020, we were supporting 165 young people through tuition in our second year of programme delivery. Following the onset of Covid-19, we scaled our reach significantly – more than quadrupling the number of students in one year to 761 – to ensure that we played our part in supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to catch up on lost learning. This year, we will match 1,500 students to top tutors, and next year, we are aiming to increase this to 2,500 students. We have data from the most recent summer exams at a scale that establishes a positive, statistically significant, impact and are disseminating this to policymakers, as an example of the benefits the 16-19 Tuition Fund has had for young people up and down the country.
Covid-19 impact on education
Lost learning
The Covid-19 pandemic left schools and colleges cycling in and out of multiple lockdowns. Many education settings offered some form of online education, although there was significant variation between settings and many young people still had large periods of time without any support in place. While much of the research to date has focused on schools and have not included Further Education (FE) colleges, the challenges and consequences for 16-18 education settings were and remain similar. Ofsted has reported that in the FE and sixth form sector, the disruption to GCSEs experienced by the newest intake of learners has “adversely affected behaviours and attitudes” and that providers have noted that many learners had lower levels of knowledge and skills.[iv]
Moreover, the research that explores the impact of school closures on years 10 and 11 strongly suggest that these young people will have moved into the further education sector with significant gaps in their learning. For example, the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) study has shown that 42% of year 11 students missed at least 11 days of school during the 2020-21 academic year (the second year of the pandemic) – over half of which missed over 20 days of school. Young people from families with a lower occupational status were more likely to miss school.[v]
At Get Further, we developed an online tuition programme and quadrupled our reach, to ensure more disadvantaged young people still had a regular hour of English and maths education each week, with a dedicated tutor. Nevertheless, and despite all the efforts of those working in education, the impact of the pandemic on education is still being felt today. While it tends to not get as much attention in education policy or in the media, nowhere is this being felt more keenly than in the Further Education sector.
A widening attainment gap at GCSE and for 16-19-year-olds
In December 2022, the Education Policy Institute published new analysis revealing that that while most student groups saw higher grades under teacher assessed grades during the pandemic, not all groups benefited equally. Disadvantaged young people, in both key stage 4 and in the 16-19 phase, fell further behind in 2021.[vi] As a result, the 16-19 disadvantage gap widened in both 2020 and 2021 under teacher assessed grades, having been relatively stable in the previous two years. The widening of the gap for 16-19-year-olds in 2021 was significant, even when adjusting for qualification type. This means that it cannot be explained entirely by the fact that disadvantaged students were less likely to take the qualifications with greater grade increases under teacher assessed grades, such as A levels.
The widening attainment gap at both GCSE and for 16-19-year-olds is extremely concerning: already we know that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to achieve 5 passes at GCSE, including in English and maths, at age 16. Without GCSEs in English and maths, these young people are significantly more likely to drop out of education and are locked out of key professions, apprenticeships, and university courses.[vii] Moreover, having low English and maths qualifications is the biggest single factor in becoming NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training).[viii]
POLICIES TO ADDRESS LOST LEARNING
Why tutoring?
Research has established one-to-one and small group tuition as one of the most effective interventions in education. The Education Endowment Foundation suggests that tuition can add as much as five months’ progress – and the effects are particularly strong for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Moreover, the evidence of the effectiveness of tuition is not limited to the UK. A recent systematic review of global randomised field trials of tutoring programmes found that they yield consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes, with an overall pooled effect size estimate of 0.37 standard deviations. Overall, the authors of the review summarised that tutoring ranks among the most widespread, versatile, and potentially transformative instruments within today’s educational toolkit, with 80% of the 96 tuition studies included in the report yielding statistically significant effects.[ix]
The strength of the evidence base was one of the main reasons that the Government put tutoring at the heart of its education recovery strategy.
The National Tutoring Programme and the 16-19 Tuition Fund
When Covid-19 closed schools and colleges, the Government launched a nationwide offer of tuition as its flagship response to support children and young people to recover lost learning. These policies / funding streams included:
While some schools had previously used their Pupil Premium funding to buy in targeted tuition interventions prior to the introduction of these policies, it had never been attempted at scale across the country. Moreover, 16-19 students are not eligible for Pupil Premium funding, so the 16-19 Tuition Fund is a particularly innovative policy for that phase of the education system.
Under the 16-19 Tuition Fund, education settings can opt-in to receive an allocation per instance of every student on their roll who is missing GCSE English or maths, either:
The actual tuition does not need to be for GCSE English or maths. Instead, providers have flexibility to use the funding to support the delivery of small group tuition for students aged 16 to 19 in English, maths and other subjects that have been disrupted, including vocational and/or academic learning. Priority should be given to students who have not achieved a grade 4 in maths and/or English in the first instance, but subsequently, tuition can be provided to those missing a grade 5 in these subjects.
Initially, the additional funding was only announced for one year. But amid ongoing lockdowns and school and college closures, the fund was extended until August 2024. At first, the allocation was £150 per instance for full-time students (i.e. students missing both GCSE English and maths at grade 4 or above would be funded to the value of £300). However, this was reduced in 2021-22 to £100 per instance for full-time students.[x] Note, the funding was pro-rated for part-time students.
Despite challenges associated with the National Tutoring Programme, there has been great practice up and down the country via the tutoring policies, including through schools-led tutoring, the 16-19 tuition fund, and partnerships between schools and colleges and tuition providers. Now, there is a window to seize on this great practice and ensure this policy has a positive long-term legacy.
Get Further’s impact
Our charity is committed to measuring and demonstrating the impact of our programmes. We have three key success measures:
We have analysed the data from our tuition programmes delivered in the last full academic year (21-22), and when summer exams were reinstated for the first time following the pandemic. We delivered tuition to 1,330 young people that year, across 19 partners in the further education sector, and received final attainment data from most of our partner colleges and sixth forms (representing 733 students – a sample size large enough to give us confidence in the analysis).
Of the students receiving at least 12 Get Further tuition sessions in 21-22, the maths GCSE pass rate (35.7%) was more than double the national pass rate (15.3%) and the English GCSE pass rate (37.8%) was almost 50% higher than national pass rate (25.7%). For students who attend 12 or more Get Further tuition sessions, the mean grade progression was 7x and 6.5x higher than the national averages for maths and English. 9 in 10 students said they feel more confident in English / maths since receiving tuition through Get Further.
We continue to focus on those students who need our help most. Of the cohort last year, 74% met at least one disadvantage indicator[xi], 29% consider themselves to have a special educational need or disability and 1 in 3 students have English as an additional language.
Moreover, our charity is starting to provide a pathway between tutoring and teaching in Further Education. When surveyed, 82% of our tutor pool in 21-22 expressed an interest in a career teaching in the FE sector. We are exploring how we can support and signpost our tutor pool more actively to help our FE partners to resolve English and maths teacher recruitment issues in the sector.
Ongoing challenges for fe and 16-18 education
Increasing student numbers and real-terms cuts
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS ) has confirmed that the number of 16- and 17-year-olds is rapidly rising, due to the population boom moving through education system. Meanwhile, most colleges and sixth forms across the country are facing squeezed budgets due to the rise in cost of living, inflation, and wages. Moreover, as set out above, the impact of the pandemic remains significant, with disadvantaged young people falling further behind their peers in both key stage 4 and in 16-19 education. Despite this, 16-18 education settings did not receive any additional funding in the most recent Autumn Statement (November 2022). As a result, real-terms cuts across the post-16 education sector range from 8–17%.[xii]
A reduction in tuition funding
Simultaneously, since its introduction, the funding allocated per student under the 16-19 tuition fund has fallen from £150 to £100 per instance. £100 per student does not cover a full term of tuition – and this has meant that colleges, which have disproportionately disadvantaged intakes, have had to be increasingly limited in how they target the additional tutoring support.
Loosening of small group sizes
Moreover, the original requirement for tutoring to be delivered in small groups of up to 3 students and no more than 5, was amended for 2021-22 to small groups of up to 5 students, and in exceptional circumstances, up to 7 students. With squeezed budgets in FE, this may have opened the way for tutoring to be delivered in much larger groups. The ‘rule of thumb’ from the EEF evidence on the most effective group size for tuition is the smaller, the better. One-to-one tuition is the most effective, and group sizes of 2-3 are seen as able to maintain most of the positive effect, while providing good value for money. The EEF is explicit that positive effects of tuition have all but disappeared when group sizes get larger than 6.[xiii]
Securing a long-term legacy
The 16-19 Tuition Fund is already demonstrating that when given the means, it is never too late to close gaps in attainment and build the literacy and numeracy skills and confidence of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have fallen behind their peers. However, the tutoring policies and funding are currently only confirmed until August 2024. Not only is the fallout of Covid-19 on education going to be felt beyond this date, but these policies are only just starting to right a historic wrong that saw families on low incomes priced out of being able to afford this support for their children when they fell behind.
We strongly believe that there is the opportunity to build on these policies to secure a long-term legacy for tutoring in the education system. But colleges and schools will start making budget decisions from February 2024 for the 2024-25 academic year. Therefore, it is vital that the Government commits to extending the tutoring policies and funding this year (2023) to give adequate time for the sector and partner organisations and non-profits, to recruit enough tutors to be able to meet the scale of the need.
Recommendations
Tutoring policies and funding have the potential to help close the national attainment gap. To realise this potential, we recommend that the Government:
The Government should build on the tutoring policies to date and commit to embedding access to tuition as a permanent feature of our education system for every child or young person from a disadvantaged background at risk of falling behind. This policy should be available at every phase in state education, from primary through to post-16 education, to ensure that all children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds can receive tailored support to catch up at every transition, should they fall behind.
references
[i] Teacher Tapp, (April 2020), ‘How are teachers coping with lockdown?’
[ii] A grade 3 at GCSE or below
[iii] EEF (2021), ‘One to one tuition’ and ‘Small group tuition’
[iv] Ofsted (April 2022), ‘Strong signs of recovery across education, but challenges remain’
[v] COSMO Study (October 2022), ‘Briefing No. 2 - Education recovery and catch up’
[vi] EPI (December 2022), ‘Covid-19 and disadvantage gaps in England 2021’
[vii] CfVER (April 2018), ‘Entry Through the Narrow Door: The Costs of Just Failing High Stakes Exams’
[viii] Impetus PEF (2014), ‘Out of Sight’
[ix] Brookings Institute (October 2020), ‘Tutoring: A time-tested solution to an unprecedented pandemic’
[x] DfE (March 2022), ‘16 to 19 funding: 16 to 19 tuition fund’
[xi] Disadvantage indicators include eligibility for free school meals when at school, or in receipt of benefits if aged 18+, or live in the bottom third of IDACI postcode deciles.
[xii] IFS (December 2022), ‘Further Education and Skills’
[xiii] EEF (2021), ‘Small group tuition’
February 2023