They called it the great catch-up. The government’s £1.12 billion National Tutoring Programme was meant to be the answer to children’s lost learning after Covid lockdowns closed the classroom doors.
Yet what followed offers a sobering lesson for the new government as it prepares to launch its own flagship education policy: a £365 million-a-year programme of universal breakfast clubs in England’s primary schools.
The National Tutoring Programme’s failures were as expensive as they were comprehensive. It fell short of its 6 million hours tutoring target. The disadvantaged pupils it was meant to help largely missed out, with less than half of the children receiving support coming from poorer backgrounds.
Delivery descended into chaos. MPs denounced the funding system as “spaghetti junction“. Tutoring groups branded the management by global outsourcing firm Randstad as “shambolic“.
When the programme ended in 2024, barely one in six school leaders said they would continue offering tutoring without government money. All this while the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils has grown to its widest since 2011.
Our analysis at The New Britain Project reveals a classic Whitehall story: noble ambitions meeting messy reality. The answer isn’t to abandon ambitious government interventions. It’s to build them properly from the ground up, ensuring that quality and impact are the real goals.
The politics of this are clear. Breakfast clubs could become a powerful symbol of effective government or a cautionary tale. The difference lies in their execution.
That’s why many in the sector will be welcoming the likely delay in roll-out, after concerns were raised that schools lacked capacity and the detail was not yet in place. These concerns are well-founded, given the lessons from the tutoring programme.
The tutoring programme’s first mistake was losing sight of its mission. What should have been about quality support for disadvantaged children became a numbers game – a bureaucratic sprint to tick the box of “6 million hours delivered”.
The solution lies not in Whitehall but in genuine partnership with schools
Labour’s breakfast clubs could easily fall into the same trap. While Bridget Phillipson has talked about attendance and childcare, she’s been noticeably quiet about what children will actually eat.
This matters. Our school food standards haven’t been updated since 2014 and we currently have no formal checks to ensure schools comply. Without clear standards oversight, Labour risks creating a postcode lottery of nutrition.
More damningly, after delivering almost 6 million hours of tutoring, we’re none the wiser about whether it actually made a difference. This was a missed opportunity for data capture at scale, with nearly every school in the country involved.
Evaluation in education is notoriously complex. Typically, the process takes a monolithic approach: vast amounts of time are required to gather evidence before outcomes are reflected upon. The result: a realisation, often years down the line, that nothing has materially improved.
Breakfast clubs need a different approach: an agile, data-driven model with real-time monitoring combined with longer-term impact studies. This would enable rapid course corrections and establish a proper evidence base for what works.
The procurement process was the NTP’s Achilles’ heel. When Randstad won the contract with a bid far below the government’s maximum offer, it marked the beginning of the end.
Breakfast clubs present an opportunity to work differently, particularly by involving local authority public health teams. This would bridge the gap between education and health outcomes while ensuring programmes meet local needs.
Labour’s manifesto promise of unique pupil IDs presents another promising tool to link data across health and education, allowing Labour to finally join the dots on child wellbeing – but only if properly funded and supported.
To understand why the NTP failed, the issue of additionality must also be understood. Government funding was meant to provide extra tutoring support on top of what schools already offered. Instead, as budgets tightened, schools used the money to prop up existing provision, paying current teachers rather than bringing in additional help.
The solution lies not in Whitehall but in genuine partnership with schools. Link funding to local deprivation levels, require transparency about spending, and crucially, give school leaders a voice in shaping what works for their communities.
After all, the best breakfast club policy is the one schools actually believe in.
