Partner as a school
We work with primary and secondary state schools across England to deliver heavily subsidised, high-quality tutoring for disadvantaged pupils in Years 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11, in English and maths.
Established in 2011, we have developed an effective, low-cost tutoring model with proven impact.
Partner as a schoolHow do your programmes work?
10-20 tutoring sessions
We aim to deliver two programmes of 10-20 sessions across the academic year.
18-20 pupils
Each programme provides small group tuition for 18-20 pupils.
In-person or online
Thanks to our online model, we can work with schools across England.
One hour
Sessions can run before, during or shortly after the school day, Monday to Friday.
Quality assured
Our Programme Coordinators oversee delivery, ensuring minimal additional workload for schools.
Once a partnership is confirmed, we can have a programme up and running at your schools within six weeks. Click here to read more about how our programmes work.
Why should we be considering external tutoring?
Who is it for?
Where do you work?
We can work with schools across all regions in England – location isn’t a barrier for us thanks to our online model. If you’re a state school anywhere in England, you can get in touch to see if we can work with you.
We seek to work with schools where the percentage of pupils eligible for Pupil Premium funding is above the national average (22%), ensuring our tutoring can be accessed where it’s needed most. If your school doesn’t quite fall into this category, we still welcome your enquiry.
What’s the time and cost commitment for my school?
You’ll select which pupils take part, then your dedicated Programme Coordinator will be in touch once details are confirmed. Next, they will come into school to run baseline assessments with the pupils, sharing the gaps in learning with both the school and our tutors – then we’re ready to start!
Once up and running, we will provide weekly feedback on attendance and engagement. We will also run a progress assessment later in the programme and share a school report with you.
We understand the current pressures on school budgets, so we fundraise to heavily subsidise the cost of our programmes, meaning schools pay just 30% of all costs. This works out at around £10 per pupil per session – significantly cheaper than private tutoring.
We tailor costs for your school’s unique situation. Once we receive your school enquiry form, one of our friendly Heads of Programmes will be in touch to provide you with an exact quote.
Can you evidence it works?
We invest strongly in evaluating the impact of our programmes, collecting baseline and progress assessment data, across all schools, in addition to the SATs and GCSE results of pupils we support. You can read our full 2022-23 report here.
In 2023, after ten or more sessions with Action Tutoring, disadvantaged pupils were more likely to achieve the expected standards than other disadvantaged pupils across the country — by 7 percentage points in reading and 14 percentage points in maths.
Action Tutoring’s pupils in 2023 were nearly 13 percentage points more likely to pass maths GCSE than other disadvantaged pupils nationally. After attending at least 10 tutoring sessions, 65% of disadvantaged pupils passed their maths GCSE compared to 52% of other disadvantaged pupils nationally.
Action Tutoring ran a smaller Year 11 English programme in 2022–23, with 75 disadvantaged pupils attending ten or more tutoring sessions. While these pupils appear to have achieved a similar pass rate as previous years, Action Tutoring judged the sample to be too small to carry out robust comparative analysis with the national pass rate.
Action Tutoring continues to evaluate its Year 11 English programme throughout the academic year.
“Action Tutoring is a fantastic addition to the bespoke support we are able to offer our students. We have had several years of successful outcomes for students and are delighted to be embarking on another year.”
Jo Cooper, Deputy Headteacher, Bramcote College in Nottingham
What areas of the curriculum do you cover?
Action Tutoring’s curriculum is designed to ensure comprehensive SATs and GCSE preparation for pupils. Our specialist Curriculum Leads for English and maths are fundamental to this, bringing a wealth of knowledge from their experiences as Lead Practitioners in schools.
You can view our current Curriculum Guides for schools below:
How can I send details of your programme to my senior leadership team?
You can download and forward our School Guides:
What’s Action Tutoring’s approach to safeguarding?
We work closely with schools to ensure our programmes are delivered safely. All staff and volunteers have an up-to-date enhanced DBS check. They also receive training in safeguarding and child protection before starting on the tutoring programme.
In November 2022, Action Tutoring successfully passed a thorough safeguarding audit. It met all the necessary requirements including:
- Safeguarding is an intrinsic part of organisational values and culture and is promoted through all organisational messaging.
- All personnel within the organisation reflect consistent safeguarding messaging.
- There is clarity of safeguarding messaging between all stakeholder groups engaged with the Tuition Partner (Action Tutoring).
For more information, visit our Safeguarding page (where you can find our full policy)
“Action Tutoring gives pupils a real chance to engage in real catch up interventions which might otherwise not be available to Pupil Premium pupils. [We’re] really grateful for the input. I feel the routine really helps pupils to progress. It`s a potential life changer!”
Steve Gittens, Executive Headteacher at Wallsend St. Peter’s in Newcastle
Still looking for the answer to your question? Read our FAQs
If you can’t find the answer to your question, you can get in touch at schoolenquiries@actiontutoring.org.uk.
Simply email schoolenquiries@actiontutoring.org.uk and one of our Head of Programmes will respond within 1-2 working days.
If your query is specific to an existing programme at your school, you can email or call your assigned Programme Coordinator.
Our sessions usually have a tutor to pupil ratio of no larger than 1:3, in a face-to-face or online setting.
On our face-to-face programmes, both pupils and tutors are in school for the sessions, with an Action Tutoring Programme Coordinator.
On our online programmes, tutors connect via our online platform. Depending on the location of the school, Programme Coordinators may oversee the programme in-person at the school, or virtually.
For Years 5 and 6, we support pupils who are working towards expected standards.
In secondary schools, we work with Year 7 pupils who didn’t reach expected standards in their SATs. For Years 10 and 11, we work with pupils working at grades 3-5.
The senior members of our Programme team set up the partnerships initially and check in throughout the year to ensure satisfaction with the delivery of tuition.
Each school is assigned a Programme Coordinator who is responsible for the day-to-day running of programmes and supports every session. They liaise with the school contact to provide updates and communicate any requests.
We work in conjunction with teachers at the school to identify pupils that will benefit most from our programme, but also in line with our criteria (disadvantaged pupils/pupils at risk of not meeting expected standards). Together with the teachers, we decide the best time to run sessions and the best way to manage the logistics, ensuring we gain their input on specific areas of need.
All of our tutors are volunteers. We believe in harnessing the potential of social power to ‘do good’ without financial reward. It is central to our mission. We have an inspiring pool of tutors who support us because they believe what we do and share our values.
Our tutors range in age (from 18 to 84) and in background: undergraduates, former teachers, corporate volunteers and retired professionals. We are incredibly proud of the diverse range of volunteers we engage, who bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the pupils they support.
All tutors must meet the criteria listed below, or have equivalent qualifications, training or work experience. We have refined this criteria over our years of operation and it is in line with other peer organisations.
- Educated to degree level, or to be studying for a degree.
- Achieved a B grade (or above) at A Level (or an equivalent qualification) in the subject they wish to tutor.
- Strong communication skills.
- Experience working with young people, or able to demonstrate that they would have the skills required.
- Empathetic towards the young people we support.
All tutors complete an online application form where they provide details of how they meet the subject knowledge and qualification criteria and any other relevant experience and motivations. Their application is carefully assessed by an Action Tutoring staff member. We interview applicants who are close to meeting the qualifications and ask a series of competency and subject-related questions to confirm their suitability.
Once accepted, tutors must then complete an Enhanced DBS check.
We’ve designed, developed and refined our tutor training process over the past 12 years. All successful tutor applicants are invited to attend ‘initial tutor training’. This is a two hour, live, small group training session than covers the following content:
- Who we are and why we exist as a charity.
- Our expectations of them as tutors and what they can expect from us.
- An exploration of the challenges faced by disadvantaged young people.
- Safeguarding, covering our policy and the use of scenario-based examples.
- An introduction to the curriculum and exam process.
- A guide of how to use our curriculum and workbooks to effectively plan sessions.
- How to manage different pupil behaviours.
- An overview of the next steps and opportunities for our online CPD modules.
Online tutors attend additional training to cover elements specific to online delivery including:
- Online-specific safeguarding considerations.
- How to adapt tutoring for online delivery.
- How to get started and make best use of our online tutoring platform (Vedamo).
We provide continuous training across the year and our Programme Coordinators and Training and Curriculum team carry out observations of our tutors and deliver feedback on an individual basis.
Pupils sit a baseline test initially, before they begin tutoring, and a progress assessment later in their programme, ensuring that tutoring focuses on the areas that they are struggling with. Programme Coordinators attend every session to monitor progress.
Baseline and progress assessment results are shared with schools. We request pupils’ ‘working at status’ before tutoring commences.
