The national tutoring programme (NTP) should have been a transformative opportunity to help low-income families access additional support like their wealthier peers. Instead, it became a cautionary tale of implementation gone wrong. As Labour rolls out its breakfast clubs programme, there are lessons to learn.
A new report by The New Britain Project shines a light on the story of what went wrong and makes some-straight-to-the-point recommendations to ensure those missteps do not happen again.
At The Brilliant Club, our experience of providing tutoring with our 1,000-strong PhD researcher workforce mirrors the report’s findings. Despite good intentions and positive initial results, subsequent procurement choices, budget pressures and declining school leader confidence ultimately led to disappointment.
It’s no secret that accessing the programme became increasingly challenging for schools, at a time when they were also balancing many moving parts around the pandemic, staffing absences and changes to assessments. The scheme concluded with regret all round, a stark reminder of how good policy can falter in delivery.
Meanwhile, Schools Week readers will vividly remember the horror stories of poor-quality free school meals provision during the pandemic. None of us want to see a repeat.
I’m struck by how unique today’s report is and how rarely we take this approach of using one national roll-out experience to inform and shape another for better outcomes. Surely, we should strive to ensure wins are replicated and mistakes are not.
Like the case studies in Crewe and King’s Blunders of Government, the report helps ensure we learn from past implementation failures. Breakfast clubs might seem like a simple concept on paper, but making sure they are done well could mean the difference between them being valued by parents, children and communities versus another outsourced cookie-cutter initiative.
During the ‘Opportunity Area’ years, I remember adapting a procurement process to ensure local groups could bid and compete for funding alongside major national organisations. Out of this was born one our highest-impact initiatives.
We must ensure wins are replicated and mistakes are not
Run by a collective of local mothers and led by a grandmother called Maureen, the group delivered lessons on wheels alongside food packages during lockdown to overcome digital exclusion. Maureen and her team knew what was needed and they made it happen, because they lived in the community, understood the challenge and knew the best way to tackle it.
Had they had to compete in a highly-bureaucratic, complex procurement process, they would have lacked the resources to secure funding.
This local connection matters for breakfast clubs. In Bradford, only 43 per cent of year 8 to 10 pupils eat breakfast regularly according to Born in Bradford research. While reaching 100 per cent is crucial, how we get there matters just as much.
The best version of a breakfast club is warm and welcoming, stigma-free and run by local cooperatives or social enterprises that reinvest in their communities while providing flexible employment for those with caring responsibilities.
Imagine the food being high-quality and delicious. Imagine how children and young people will feel heading into a day of learning with their bellies full. When it comes to breakfast clubs, it’s important to think about what this could look like and how we can open this up to the Maureens of the world as well as big national organisations.
This vision is achievable if implementation prioritises quality over cost-cutting and builds on existing good practice from organisations like Magic Breakfast. We won’t get there if we have a procurement process that prioritises low cost over all else and ignores local context.
With child poverty at record levels, breakfast clubs are more necessary than ever – but they’re just one part of the comprehensive strategy needed to address family poverty that pressures schools and impacts children’s futures. Breakfast is important, but so is every other meal.
Success requires learning from the NTP’s mistakes while embracing local expertise and maintaining focus on the broader goal: supporting communities and ensuring no child starts their school day hungry.
Read the full report, ‘Hitting the target, missing the point’ here
