At the end of last month, the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) announced it was going to recruit one-to-one tutors on a massive scale.

By October 2010, it is looking to recruit 100,000 tutors to provide extra one-on-one support for 600,000 pupils struggling in maths and English.

Tutors will be paid between £25 and £30 per hour for 10 lessons. It’s all part of a £138m government programme set out by Schools Secretary Ed Balls in the government’s latest White Paper, Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future.

Each Local Authoritywill be in charge of recruitment, and some may be offering training to would-be tutors. There has already been a useful booklet published for tutors interested in working in schools.

Currently, only tutors with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) or with other teaching qualifications in the HE or FE sectors are eligible to apply (they can do so here).

However, I’ve spoken with a contact at the TDA who’s suggested that graduates with good degrees in maths or English (or strongly related subjects such as Media Studies) may also become eligible in the future.

This is presumably due to the tutor recruitment problems first outlined in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers interim report on the government’s tutoring pilot in December last year. The interim report mentioned that the DCSF was

“Undertaking research into the private tuition market to further understand the scope and scale of this market and the potential it has to fulfil future tuition requirements.”

The TDA is currently considering running some pilot studies with tutors who have degrees but no formal teacher training. If this is you, then watch this space for further updates!