Welcome to your winter newsletter
A note from our CEO
This winter newsletter marks the end of a turbulent year in education. We have had a staggering five education secretaries, a cost of living crisis and the ongoing impact of the pandemic. Nevertheless, our tutors, pupils, partner schools and staff have remained dedicated to our mission throughout. Last academic year, we supported 6,159 pupils, the highest in our history, and over 500 pupils benefitted from tutoring in both subjects.
The unfortunate result of the turmoil of the last year is that the work that we do is even more important. The attainment gap between pupils facing disadvantage and their peers is at a ten year high but tutoring can have a real impact on reducing this.
Knowing how positively tutoring can impact academic outcomes, we were thrilled to have launched additional virtual programmes this term. Expanding to harder to reach geographies is a crucial step in reducing the attainment gap nationwide. You can read more about this activity further down in the newsletter.
We recently analysed the GCSE results of the pupils we supported in 2021-22 and are proud to share a snapshot of those findings with you. A more in depth look at our impact in 2021-22 will be published in the new year. As we enter 2023, we look forward to continuing our work with the pupils who have already made a brilliant start to their time on this year's programmes, while we expand our reach into new areas of the country.
On behalf of our pupils and the team at Action Tutoring, thank you so much for your support of our work throughout 2022.
I hope you enjoy our newsletter and I wish you a wonderful winter break.
Susannah, CEO
Fantastic news from the Palace
We are thrilled to have been awarded one of 20 Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Volunteering Awards.
The award has been given in recognition of the work of our inspirational volunteer tutors and the impact that you have on the pupils that you support.
Our CEO, Susannah adds:
“We simply could not do what we do without you.
For over a decade we've been helping pupils facing disadvantage to progress academically, sadly the pandemic has deepened the issues that already existed for these young people and we are needed now more than ever before.
This award and recognition will help us to reach new audiences and encourage more people to come forward and volunteer their time to help change the future prospects of thousands of young people across the country."
This is a one-off award created to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee and twenty years of the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service (QAVS). His Majesty The King personally approved the awardees. You can read more about the award here.
The Big Give Christmas Challenge
We participated in the Big Give Christmas Challenge this winter and were delighted to have raised a total of £5,901, surpassing our target of £5,500! Thanks to our generous pledgers and charity Champion, the Monday Charitable Trust, our matched funding pot doubled our online donations from the campaign.
We are so grateful to everyone who donated to our cause during the Big
Give despite the current economic challenges.
Throughout the Big Give, Action Tutoring staff and tutors across the country took a moment to share why they support our charity and why our work is so important. In case you missed it, you can watch our staff #ThatsMyWhy video here.
If you’d like to make a contribution to our work, you can do so here.
Read more about our fundraising
We have just published our Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31st August 2022. The report reflects on our fundraising activities, the funders that support our work - some who have done so for a number of years, and goes into detail about our future plans.
You can find the report here.
Keeping diversity and inclusion at the top of the agenda
As part of our increased focus on diversity and inclusion within the charity, we have introduced new session templates to be used in our virtual classroom, Vedamo.
The new resources feature cream-coloured backgrounds, icons for instructions instead of written phrases or sentences, and colour coded answer boxes for each pupil.
These tools will help all learners, including those with dyslexia, and will help to minimise visual stress for those who might otherwise experience this.
We also have a fantastic neurodivergence resource on our online learning platform, Looop, for tutors to explore. It provides support, tips and activities to help tutors understand how to approach different learning needs.
Sharing our insights and experience with others to unlock more potential
In November, we attended two summits aimed at improving the outcomes and prospects of pupils, especially those facing disadvantage.
We partnered with the Centre for Education and Youth, White Rose Maths, Third Space Learning, and The Tutor Trust to hold the first National Tutoring Summit. The summit brought together school leaders, tutoring providers, and researchers of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP).
Our CEO, Susannah, and Deputy CEO, Jen, led two workshops to share best practices and case studies on successfully aligning tutoring content with the school curriculum and building successful partnerships with schools. Thanks to Simrat Mavi and Lucy Walker-Collins, senior leaders at our partner schools, for sharing how transformational our partnerships with their schools have been for pupils who receive tutoring support from us.
We also joined over 400 stakeholders from member organisations of the Fair Education Alliance (FEA) at their annual summit. There were panel discussions on how the three themes from the new FEA Report card: Poverty, Place and Power, can be tackled by charities in the sector. Our Acting Programme Director, Emma Hooper, shared insights on our focus areas over the last year. These included expansion to hard-to-reach areas and scaling our impact by providing tutoring support to more disadvantaged young people.
Action Tutoring, coming to a school near you
Covid-19 and the school closures that followed created significant challenges for all pupils across the country. With schools suspended and pupils losing learning time, Action Tutoring gained a huge amount of experience in managing sessions remotely when pupils were based at home. This presented us with a new opportunity to support more pupils across the country through virtual programmes
A virtual programme is an online programme where the pupils are at school during tutoring sessions while the Action Tutoring Programme Coordinator manages the logistics remotely and link teachers support pupils in the classroom. This is different from our online programmes, where our Programme Coordinators are in school supporting pupils with the help of link teachers.
Virtual programmes allow us to reach disadvantaged pupils outside of our city hubs. We currently have plans to run 31 virtual programmes, many of which are already underway. The schools are located in Portsmouth, Rotherham, Luton, Corby, Southall, Southsea, Walsall, Dagenham, Chesterfield, Reading and Bromley. We are looking forward to seeing this number rise to around 40 in 15 schools.
We want to ensure that virtual programmes become a key part of our delivery model for tutoring because it allows us to reach pupils that need our support in regions where programmes like ours are less available. We would be really grateful if you could help us spread the word to schools outside of our city hubs who would benefit from our programme and let them know that we can now reach them. Get in touch here.
The results are in
Formal SATs and GCSE examinations took place this summer for the first time since 2019, after two years of disruption caused by the pandemic.
While the pandemic has negatively affected all children, disadvantaged children have had their learning hit the hardest. The percentage of Year 6 children achieving expected standards in all of reading, writing and maths in 2022 was 59% — a drop of 6% compared to 2019.
Our analysis shows that Year 6 pupils supported by Action Tutoring were more likely to achieve the expected standards than other disadvantaged pupils across the country — by 8 percentage points in maths and 8 in reading.
Of those Year 11 Action Tutoring pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium, who attended at least ten tutoring sessions in their subject: 72% achieved grade 4 or above in maths and 61% achieved grade 4 or above in English, despite being identified as at risk of not achieving a passing grade when they began. We are incredibly proud of the impact that we achieved in 2021-22
We caught up Sienna, who received tuition in maths in 2020-21, on results day and here is what she had to say about her experience on the programme:
"I liked tutoring, it helped me a lot. You get more time to focus on what you don't understand, compared to in a classroom where if they’ve moved on they’ve moved on. Tutoring gave me hope and a better chance of passing. I feel so happy. I want to study sociology or psychology at A-Level."
Sienna achieved a grade 4 in maths.
Support our film at the Charity Film Awards 2023
We’ve been nominated for the Charity Film Awards 2023 - the BAFTAs of charities!
Our pupil film, which was launched at our 10th anniversary event, titled ‘Changing the Future’ made the cut. First round of voting is open from now until 10th January, 2023.
Charity films that get higher votes will make it to the final shortlist for the awards. It takes just a minute to register your vote here and it will help us increase our chances of being in the final shortlist. Thank you for your support.
Spread the word
We spoke to tutors at the start of December to get a sense of their experiences on programmes so far.
Paul, a maths tutor in London said:
"It’s one of the best parts of my week, because I know it makes a difference. I feel more connected to my local community. I have a drawing and note one of my pupils made for me on my fridge, because it makes me happy to know it made a difference for them."
Not only does this feedback help us improve the volunteering experience for tutors - it also helps us to get more dedicated tutors on board to reach more pupils.
Have you had a great experience during a session? Sharing this with family and friends can be a great way of spreading the word. Click on the link below to find out about other ways to support us with this.
We wish you a very restful winter break
