In June, the Department for Education announced its £1.4 billion recovery package to help schools catch up students’ learning after the knock-on effects of the pandemic. As this funding is a combination of different schemes, we wanted to summarise and demystify the structure!

Here’s how the catch-up recovery breaks down:

£433m – NTP Approved Tuition Partners scheme

The extended NTP's (National Tutoring Programme) Approved Tuition Partners scheme will offer 1:3 group tutoring in 15 hour blocks to provide value for money. However, 1:1 tutoring is available through the scheme in some instances, including for children with SEND.

Zen Educate is proud to be an Approved Tuition Partner of the NTP. All Zen Educate's NTP tutors are fully-vetted and Safeguarding trained, and either fully-qualified teachers or highly-experienced teaching assistants. You can find out more here.

£579m – NTP School-led Tutoring

This is a new, straight-to-schools funding scheme that can be claimed by all state-funded primary, middle and secondary schools, as well as special schools, special units in mainstream schools, alternative provisions, pupil referral units and hospital schools.

The scheme offers schools a “high degree of discretion” to support the pupils they believe are most in need. This means the money doesn’t have to be spent solely on children that qualify for Pupil Premium, and can instead be spent flexibly.

At first, the school-led tutoring grant will be 75% government subsidised, with schools expected to pay the other 25% – but the amount schools pay will gradually increase. Further information (including the grant conditions) is set to be released over the next few months.

For mainstream schools, this programme will provide £202.50 per pupil for 60% of those eligible for Pupil Premium. However for specialist schools, this figure is £528.75 per pupil for 60% of Pupil Premium students. This means that the formula for working out how much your school can claim is as follows (where 𝑥 = the amount of pupils in your school eligible for Pupil Premium):

Mainstream schools: (𝑥 x 0.6) x £202.50

Specialist schools: (𝑥 x 0.6) x £528.75

16-19 tuition fund and more

The 16-19 tutoring fund, which will mainly support colleges and further education institutions, accounts for £222m of the funding. Click here to find out more information about this programme.

Finally, the remaining ≈£200 million is allocated towards funding high-quality training for Early Years Practitioners and teachers to help children progress – you can find out more here.

Interested in learning more about spending funding effectively? Sign up with Zen Educate for a consultation or read a summary of our Designing an Effective Catch Up Curriculum webinar. We explored sensible approaches to supporting effective catch up and discussed how we can ensure all children’s needs are met.