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I suspect others have worked this out before me, but I am utterly gobsmacked to have just discovered that @NTProgramme will only subsidise tuition which takes place in school. This creates a massive logistical challenge for schools and will make it very hard to manage.
We want tuition to take place online to avoid lots of different people coming into school and compromising safety restrictions. I had envisaged this happening at home where possible, reserving the school site for students who are vulnerable, lack technology or are not attending.
Been doing some rough working out of the implications of bringing it all on site. Suppose we provide 600 blocks of tuition in total. NTP only provides one set of tuition per student, so that's 600 different individuals. Say we do 300 next term and 300 in the summer.
If we do one session per week, after school hours to avoid taking students out of lessons, and divide that 300 over five school days equally. That's 60 students taking part in tuition after school every day. Each will require a machine equipped with a camera and a microphone.
Where am I supposed to find all the necessary kit? Where also am I supposed to put the students? I can't put different year groups together because of bubbles, plus each tuition session needs its own space or they will disturb each other with the noise of students answering.
Am I supposed to provide staff to supervise all these sessions around the site? Because that's exactly what teachers need to be doing right now! Are we paying staff to supervise? With what? I could use Catch-Up Premium, but only by reducing the amount of tuition we can afford.
Alternatively I could move the sessions into the school day. That means that students will be missing lessons in order to take part in them, which doesn't sit well with me. Plus where exactly am I supposed to put them? Funny enough, we don't have a whole suite of empty rooms!
So it feels like the system has been set up to force schools to use face-to-face tuition. And yet DfE guidance says, 'school leaders will want to consider how to minimise the number of visitors to the school.' This could easily be 20 visitors per day. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak/guidance-for-full-opening-schools
So after all of this I am left considering simply bypassing the NTP subsidy and engaging privately with tuition providers. We would need to increase the student:staff ratio to make it affordable, but none of the options is looking good right now. Where is the joined-up thinking?
