The Government has removed the ringfencing of funds which gave struggling pupils in England the automatic right to one-to-one catch up tuition.

Michael Gove made the announcement as part of the government’s review of funding for schools.

Headteachers will now have to decide whether to sign up for the one-to-one tuition programmes, using money allocated to them from the national schools budget.

Despite sustained difficulties in finding enough qualified tutors, the one-to-one tuition programmes have been widely accepted as very effective in raising standards in reading and numeracy, as I discussed a year ago. 40 hours of one-to-one reading assistance has been shown to help improve the reading age of children by almost two years, and after 20 hours of coaching the average gain in numeracy is more than a year.

One-to-one tuition works – yet some headteachers will be forced to withdraw their support for these programmes because of budgetary constraints.

And as the BBC reported today, for political reasons headteachers will not even have access to all the facts they need to make their decision, since ‘Every Child a Chance Trust – which runs the Every Child a Reader and Every Child Counts schemes for 60,000 primary school pupils – has been asked to delay the publication of research which could persuade head teachers of the effectiveness of their programme’.

See the BBC News article for more details.