Research School Network: NEW EEF guide: Making a difference with effective tutoring NEW EEF guide: Making a difference with effective tutoring

Today, we’ve published a new guide to support school leaders to implement tutoring effectively in their setting.

High-quality tuition presents a significant opportunity to make a long-term contribution to closing the socio-economic attainment gap in classrooms across the country. The best evidence tells us that this gap has only widened as a result of the pandemic.

Our Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows that if tuition is high-quality and aligned to classroom teaching, pupils can make up to five months additional progress. It can be particularly effective for socio-economically disadvantaged pupils too.

Schools have gone above and beyond to implement tuition successfully against the backdrop of disruption to staffing, budget constraints, logistics planning and pupil attendance. Our guide, which is based on the best available evidence, offers educators practical advice to support these efforts and make tutoring have a positive impact in their setting.

It focuses on three central principles:

1. Selecting pupils and scheduling sessions effectively.


How to identity those pupils who will benefit the most, as well as how frequent sessions should be and when they should take place.

2. Aligning tutoring with curriculum and assessment.


How to align tutoring with a pupils’ current curriculum, so that they can reinforce learning from tuition sessions in their classroom practice.

3. Creating a sustainable tutoring model.

How to monitor and evaluate the impact of tutoring so schools can track progress and refine their approach over time.

The guide also includes insights from school leaders about how tutoring has been put in place in their settings.

The challenge of the closing the socio-economic attainment gap means there is an urgent need to make sure that as many disadvantaged pupils as possible have access to tutoring through the National Tutoring Programme. We would like to see the government increase the current subsidy levels to 75 per cent, which would allow more schools to access tutoring for more of their socio-economically disadvantaged pupils.