Nesta is a founding partner of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), part of the government’s response to help students catch up after the COVID-19 pandemic led to months of nationwide school closures from March 2020. The NTP aims to support children and young people who have been affected by making high-quality tutoring affordable and available to schools and students across England.

Nesta will be providing grant funding to develop online tutoring provision and delivering capacity-building support to increase the quality of tutoring throughout the NTP. We’ll be announcing the Tuition Partners we award grant funding to in early December. These grants will support online tutoring organisations to develop the quality, accessibility and impact of their digital provision.

Nesta, in collaboration with Impetus, is supporting the NTP Tuition Partners with a programme of capacity-building support to help them deliver tutoring with quality, focusing on developing their provision and increasing the impact they have on disadvantaged students.

The Tuition Partners delivering the NTP range from smaller providers to more established organisations, and are a mix of charities, local authorities and commercial companies. They bring the experience of delivering tutoring across subjects, age groups and regions.

The capacity-building programme will be tailored to Partners’ ambitions, and will provide support and challenge to ensure their tutoring meets the diverse needs of disadvantaged students. This could include helping them to better understand the needs of different groups of students, develop their tutor training programmes or scale their impact measurement systems.

Making the most of the rich and varied expertise of those delivering tutoring to schools and students will be a key element of the capacity-building programme. We know tuition providers have different relationships and experiences with schools and students, and by sharing this knowledge and insight widely within the NTP, we can highlight best practice, share innovative solutions to common issues and facilitate the Tuition Partners to support each other.

We believe that improving the quality and scale of tuition through the NTP, supporting organisations to better understand their impact and make changes to improve their provision, will lead to more effective and adaptive support for disadvantaged students.

There is still much uncertainty about how the pandemic will continue to affect schools and students, and supporting the Tuition Partners to deliver high-quality tutoring is one way to help those students most affected, regardless of where they live and learn.

We will be working with the Tuition Partners until July 2021, so do check back for updates along the way.