NTP (2022/23) is covered in the ‘2022/23 Academic Year’ release in this publication series.
Overview and Data
In the 2022/23 academic year, all National Tutoring Programme (NTP) funding was given directly to schools to spend on any of the three NTP routes: School-Led Tutoring, Tuition Partners or Academic Mentors. Funding was allocated based on the number of pupil premium (PP) students in the school and covered every PP pupil.
This year, the underlying data used to publish these statistics were collected through the School Census. State-funded schools are required to provide the Department for Education (DfE) with a School Census return (using a DfE-designed survey instrument) covering a wide range of information on individual pupils once every school term.
Data on NTP delivery was collected through two pupil level data items:
- whether the pupil had received tutoring through any of the three NTP routes and
- how many cumulative hours of tutoring (to the closest 0.5 hours) the pupil had received up to the day of the census.
Data on courses started and school participation in this release are based on the summer 2023 census, which covers the school year from 1st September 2022 up to and including 18th May 2023.
Statistics on pupil characteristics are based on the spring 2023 school census which covers the academic year up to the 19th January 2023 (see below for more details).
Starts on Courses by Pupils
To estimate the number of starts on courses by pupils we first aggregate the hours of tutoring received by each pupil. If a pupil received up to 16 hours of tutoring, we consider them to have started one course, above this we consider them to have started two courses. This is in line with NTP guidance to schools suggesting a course should be between 12 and 15 hours, with an additional margin of one hour above 15 hours to avoid counting marginal cases.
Not all courses delivered to pupils were 15 hours long. Individual pupils may undertake more than one course.
We have removed a small number of pupils as they had been given less than half an hour of tutoring, which we did not consider to be a ‘start’.
A small number of schools who had reported delivering more than three times their allocated courses or hours were also identified in the data before statistics were produced. The figures in these schools were instead replaced using the remaining national average relative to allocation.
School Participation
School participation percentages are estimated by dividing the total number of schools that reported delivering NTP by the number of schools (as defined in ‘Other Notes’) with pupils between the ages of 5 and 16.
It is important to note that a small number of these schools (<1%) have been given no funding for NTP, however we have kept these schools in the denominator to allow for easy comparison to NTP figures from previous years when these schools would have been eligible for Tuition Partners funding.
Pupil Characteristics
Some pupil characteristics variables are only updated once a year in the spring census while others are collected every term. These pupil characteristic variables are held in the Department for Education’s Pupil Database Repository (PDR) and therefore there is a lag of several months between the closure of the census and the variables in the census being matched and updated to the PDR.
The current publication uses pupil characteristics and NTP data based on the spring 2023 School Census which schools return in January. This data was used to calculate the breakdown of pupils tutored on NTP by each characteristic.
Please note that the previous pupil characteristics publication from April 2023 used pupil characteristics information from the spring 2022 School Census matched to the pupil level information on NTP from the autumn 2022 census.
At pupil level, pupils with less than half an hour of tutoring recorded were removed from the analysis as outliers. At school level, schools are treated in line with the ‘Starts on Courses by Pupils’ data (see above). The percentage of tutoring provided to each pupil group was calculated after removing these outliers.
Pupil characteristic definitions:
- Eligibility for free school meals (FSM) during the previous six years: at each census the school records whether a pupil is in receipt of free school meals on the day of the census. Pupil records across census are matched after the spring census each year to create a longitudinal record of FSM eligibility over six years.
- Gender: is self-declared by a parent/guardian or the pupil and is recorded as either female or male.
- Special Educational Needs Provision: this is recorded by the school and includes pupils with special educational needs support or those with Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans.
- Ethnicity: is self-declared by a parent/guardian or the pupil. The specific ethnicities collected in the census are grouped into six major groups: Any Other Ethnic Group, Asian, Black, Mixed, Unclassified and White. The unclassified group includes pupils where the information was not returned to the school or where the information was refused.