The billions promised by the government for catch-up tuition sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but on an individual basis it’s barely enough to cover a few hours of one-to-one tuition per student. When you consider that any catch-up funding needs to be spread across multiple subjects, it’s clear that making any sort of impact on lost learning is going to be a challenge. Tassomai founder Murray Morrison believes that edtech can help schools meet the catch-up tuition challenge and get the maximum impact from their budgets, and his ‘micro-tuition’ experiment proves that this approach can work.

There are several fundamental weaknesses in the private tuition model that work against schools or students getting a good return on their investment of time and money.

The first issue is diagnosis: from a school leader’s perspective, determining which students most need support or might most benefit from extra tuition is a huge challenge… and a constantly moving target as students’ attainment is constantly changing. 

The second issue is planning and reporting: from the tutor’s perspective, knowing where any given student needs help to be focused is a huge challenge and inevitably leads to redundancies and wasting precious time. Measuring any meaningful impact from the lesson - whether it led to improvements, or whether outcomes from that lesson can feed back into the child’s schooling are prohibitive (and I suspect will be entirely overlooked).

The solution to mitigating these risks must fall to better deployment and implementation of education technology, both to support learning and embed knowledge, and for giving the necessary diagnostic information to support any additional tuition that takes place and measure its effect.

The key to catch-up tutoring is to use it as little as possible

My viewpoint, as the founder of an edtech company and co-founder of the Edtech Evidence Group, must appear ludicrously biased, but the truth is that I built Tassomai with the explicit intention of reducing the need for extra tuition and for making sure the tuition that does happen is efficient, targeted and effective.

For the duration of this academic year, we’ve been piloting a new approach with thousands of students. To support users of our online learning program, and to test the feasibility of a highly targeted, micro-tuition model, I’ve personally delivered over 500 one-to-one free tuition sessions this year for children around the UK.

Foremost in our approach is that students themselves do the work to learn through structured, tailored retrieval practice on our app. Not only does this expose where their gaps are, but also naturally fills in many of these knowledge gaps in a way that sticks far better than learning delivered by a tutor.

Teachers use our data to see where students are struggling and plan their own revision teaching accordingly - again, far more efficient than expensive tuition. If, finally, students do book free tuition time with me, I’m able to see instantly where the problems lie and help them to fix those little issues. In a ten minute micro-tuition session, with the insight that Tassomai gives me through data-visualisation tools like the Tree, I can do more to help a student than I suspect I could manage in forty minutes without. However, I find myself far more frequently showing students how to use Tassomai to help themselves rather than rely on a tutor.

Help students to help themselves

This highlights a vital principle in all this that I think the government is missing. Where students may have fallen behind, what they need is rarely the application of expensive, inefficient and potentially ineffective tutoring. Instead, giving the support to help themselves not only makes a bigger difference in the short term, but makes them far more self-sufficient in the long run… and that’s how you get pupils to catch up.