Best Online Tutoring Strategies To Ensure Students Make Excellent Progress And School Leaders See The Results They Deserve

The requirements to provide the best online tutoring to students in schools can be quite different from those given to students at home. Factors like scheduling within the school day, ensuring students attend, and making sure you choose those students who will get the most out of it become far more relevant.

You’re also contending with limited school budgets and the fact that tutoring is still considered by some to be expensive, hard to organise and with inconsistent results.

In this article we’ll show you the impact that online tutoring in primary and secondary schools can have and, now the NTP funding period is over, outline the best online tutoring strategies to make sure that your school tutoring programme achieves the impact you are looking for, with very little impact on teachers’ workload and in a cost-effective, scalable manner.

At Third Space Learning, we’ve been delivering high-quality online tutoring services to schools for 10+ years. We’ve been working across thousands of schools, teaching personalised maths one-to-one lessons designed to plug gaps and improve academic performance.

One to one tuition, closely linked to the curriculum or syllabus, has been proven to provide an additional 5 months’ progress according to the Education Endowment Foundation’s teaching and learning toolkit. Students taking part in Third Space Learning online maths tuition make up to double the expected progress. In an independent trial using Rising Stars PUMA assessments, students made on average 28 weeks’ progress in 14 weeks.

Supporting pupils most affected by the attainment gap

Anyone working in schools will be aware of the attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their more privileged peers. Despite considerable efforts, disadvantaged students are still likely to fall behind right from their earliest years in education. This builds considerable academic setbacks for them in later years.

The COVID-19 pandemic hugely impacted the educational attainment gap, creating even greater disproportion between disadvantaged learners and their peers. Young people severely missed out on educational opportunities due to school closures and became deprived of the in-person, high-quality learning they once had access to. Learners particularly struggled to catch up in core subjects such as maths and English.

Studies on the impact of COVID-19 on the attainment gap have outlined that the value of learning loss was around two months for some students, but for many, it was much worse than that. 

According to a report by ‘A Space at Maths’, some year 6 pupil premium students were falling up to seven months behind in maths. 

To rapidly deal with such a wide gap, you need an intensive and very targeted intervention. Tutoring has been shown to narrow the gap by giving students exactly what they need, and focusing especially on any lost learning.

“We looked into Third Space Learning to see how it could help us address not only the learning loss due to the pandemic, but the huge loss of motivation our pupils had in maths.”

 – St Giles’ Primary School

Online tutoring is the proven best solution

According to the recent Education Endowment Foundation report, a well-designed tutoring programme will help to close the attainment gap in your school. Tutoring for disadvantaged pupils is therefore an essential tool if we want to prevent them from falling behind their peers even more.

Different tutoring routes, such as school-led tutoring and external tutoring providers, have shown positive impacts on student outcomes.

But even when you know this as a school leader, it can seem daunting to know how to set it up and to compare the advantages and potential drawbacks of different forms of tutoring in schools, particularly when you are trying to weigh up the costs against the likely impact. 

Not only are you looking at one to one tuition or small group tutoring, but you also have the option now of face to face or online tutoring if you need to reach several students at once, or for greatest cost effectiveness and results, ai tutoring.

While one to one tutoring is almost universally acknowledged to be the most effective method of teaching, due to the intensely personal nature of each lesson, some schools can only afford 1 to 3 or 1 to 7 if it’s in-person tutoring. 

This is why many organisations, including Third Space Learning, offer online tutoring to schools rather than face-to-face tuition. For us, this means we can offer individualised one to one attention to lots of your students simultaneously, at a cost previously only doable for schools in small groups when the tutoring was face-to-face. 

“Please tell your tutors they make a real difference. Our maths SATs results were our best ever. 100% of our Third Space Learners met the expected standard and some achieved GDS. It’s huge value for money. We love it, it is brilliant. Thank you!”

– St Augustine’s Catholic Primary School, Surrey

Despite the perceived challenges, one to one tutoring delivered in school, by school-appointed tutors, is still the most effective way to make rapid progress of pupil attainment.

According to the National Tutoring Programme from the EEF, these are the key principles of the best online tutoring programmes: 

• Select the right pupils for the intervention and schedule sessions effectively.
• Align tutoring with curriculum and assessment.
• Create a sustainable tutoring model that you can return to year after year.

For more details and to ensure you get the best out of your online tutoring programme, these are the 12 strategies for success we’ve identified.

12 strategies to make sure your students receive the best online tutoring available

1. Define your outcome

Define what each tutoring session aims to achieve. Is it academic, behavioural, or social/emotional? It’s also important to consider the subject. In core subjects such as maths, gaps that fail to be addressed can be an issue. Therefore, considering the subject is imperative, as students will need a solid understanding of the foundational concepts to access other topics.

The goal of the tutoring sessions is also important. Is it to improve confidence, to develop metacognition, or to improve or work towards exams such as SATsGCSE maths? 

Clear goals help tutors stay focused and ensure that students understand the purpose of their sessions.

Finally, how will you measure the goal? Will you use pre- or post-intervention methods? Here at Third Space Learning, we have defined programmes both for general catch-up and exam revision. We use assessments before and after sessions to regularly monitor the progress of each session over time. 

Read more: How Will Ofsted Inspect Your Tutoring?

2. Staff workload

School-led tutoring is likely to result in more workload than tuition partners, who should be able to manage more of the administrative, recruitment, and quality assurance aspects of tutoring for school. It’s important to be mindful of the staff workload around tutoring though. Therefore, choose interventions that save time, otherwise, it will not be cost-effective.

For example, Barclay Academy outlined the impact our tutoring had for students working towards their GCSE exams:

“Once we decided to go for it with Year 11 too, I sat in on the sessions. It immediately gave me the confidence that the students were working on the right things in the right way as I could hear them explaining their methodology to their tutors. That interaction between the student and the tutor is really positive for our students.”

– Barclay Academy.

3. Resources

Ensure that you have the necessary room space and physical resources needed for the tutoring sessions to assist with students’ learning. Make a list of the resources you need and ensure your technology is set up correctly.

At Third Space Learning, up to 15 pupils can receive personalised online one to one maths tutoring from their own dedicated tutor in the same one-hour time slot. We recommend 15 as, in our experience, group sizes of more than 15 may get a little noisy or might not be feasible with school IT systems. For schools that wish to support more than 15 pupils, we recommend splitting these across multiple time slots.

If you opt for online tutoring and AI tutoring, there may be additional considerations, such as Wi-Fi, computers, laptops, tablets, and headsets. For example, Third Space Learning’s online lessons take place on laptops, desktops, or iPads. We send out our high-quality gaming headsets to schools free of charge to help with the process.

It’s also important you know how to resource it. While the DfE has set an average of £18 per pupil per hour for tutoring, many providers’ prices are only that low for small group sessions. One to one tutoring is more likely to cost more, with many providers charging closer to £60 per pupil per hour for this kind of tutoring. 

In-person or face-to-face tutoring is often more expensive than online tuition or online lessons. Many providers who offer both charge more for in-person sessions. Third Space Learning’s online tuition offers an affordable route for schools. It is 56% cheaper than the average cost of the Department of Education-approved one-to-one tutoring. 

4. Check the curriculum and the lessons

Don’t just assume there will be direct progression or alignment with your own schemes of work. Ensure that there are explicit links between the tutoring sessions to students’ normal school lessons and the national curriculum within each of the key stages. This way students can revise topics covered in class in more detail. Or use their prior knowledge to access new topics. 

Here at Third Space Learning, we have a specifically created curriculum of lessons. All are designed by former teachers and maths experts who follow a structured approach to help build and develop conceptual understanding.

5. Choose a programme built on evidence-informed approaches

Every successful tutoring program should have, at the core, a scientific, evidence-based curriculum, and instructional practices. Take ample time to vet any new tool, approach, or online program before implementation to ensure it’s backed by strong research. At Third Space Learning, we’ve been working with schools for ten years. This means we can analyse data from the 2 million+ sessions we’ve had to understand what works best for you.

Read more: The 5 Best Online Tutoring Websites For UK Schools

6. Target the right pupils 

 Schools need to prioritise pupils eligible for pupil premium, supporting those who have fallen furthest behind. These should be identified through in-school formative and summative assessments and gap analysis. It is important to look at those who are achieving and those who need extra support.

Ensure groups are also filtered such as SEND, pupil premium, those who achieved greater depth at the end of EYFS or KS1, gender, or those whose learning has been most negatively impacted by school closures.

7. Personalise the tuition

High-quality tutoring should always take a personalised approach. At the end of each session, pupils should be able to answer questions independently, giving feedback on how they found the session. These can help us continuously update each pupil’s personalised learning journey. Our tutors can personalise lessons for your students at all stages of the journey. Using assessment for learning, they’re able to gauge pupil understanding and adjust the pitch and pace accordingly.

“A great service… for children who not only love the personalised nature of the sessions, but also make clear progress.”

– The Aylesbury Vale Academy

8. Use diagnostic assessment

Leveraging data is the key to understanding where your students are struggling.

9. Remove barriers to attendance and engagement

We focus on which pupils we’re reaching, the experience for schools, and how the tuition fits into the reality they face. We’re able to support students who may have missed out on core learning opportunities due to attendance. 

The majority of the pupils we’ve supported are eligible for Pupil Premium. This ensures that we’re directly reaching those pupils who need it most and helping to make high-quality tuition more accessible for children who may not have the same opportunities as their peers.

“The children have grown in confidence and are thoroughly enjoying Third Space Learning. They have made such a lot of progress since the intervention, it really has been money well spent!”

– Newstead Primary School

10. Get stakeholder buy-in

Buy-in from key stakeholders, such as parents and teachers, was reported to be low during the NTP, especially in certain parts of England such as the North East. Teachers and senior leaders will need to ensure that buy-in happens so that stakeholders can see the bigger picture.

Both teachers and parents play a huge part in the process. Having their direct support can strengthen tutoring and its success. Ensure that tutors, teachers, and parents are in regular communication so that everyone is on the same page. Foster a positive culture by sharing students’ successes and progress through each step of the process.

11. Monitor your students’ progression and the impact of tutoring

To ensure that tutoring archives the desired motive, continuously monitor the progression of your students over time. This is so you know the impact tutoring has had on your students, or if there are still barriers to address. 

Ensure you set regular time aside to review your students at least once every half term. Alternatively, choose a provider that makes monitoring progress easy. Sitting in on tutoring sessions now and again and having regular discussions with students will help you gauge the impact of the tuition.

12. Make adjustments

It is important to be adaptive to tutoring. As each student is different, sometimes it’s not an all-size-fits-one approach. Ensure that you plan, do, and review, so that changes can be made for tutoring to have the desired impact. 

What changes could you make if the impact is low? Ensure that you have regular discussions with each student to see if they are feeling more confident after each session. You may even wish to consider swapping students around if you find that some students may benefit more than others.

Collaboration and communication

Collaboration and communication are vital for the success of any tutoring program. Building strong relationships with tutors, teachers, and parents ensures that students receive comprehensive and coordinated support.

For effective collaboration and communication, consider the following strategies:

• Develop a shared understanding: Ensure that all stakeholders have a clear understanding of the tutoring program’s goals and objectives. This shared vision helps create a cohesive and supportive learning environment.
• Regular feedback: Receiving regular feedback on student progress from tutors helps ensure everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals.
• Open communication with parents: Keep parents and guardians informed about their child’s progress. Regular updates and feedback can help parents support their child’s learning at home.
• Share best practices and resources: Encourage tutors and teachers to share their experiences and resources. This collaborative approach can lead to improved teaching strategies and better outcomes for students.

Prioritising collaboration and communication means schools can create a supportive and inclusive learning environment, and promote academic success and well-being.

Evaluating and improving tutoring in schools

Ongoing evaluation and improvement are essential to ensuring that students receive high-quality academic support. Schools should use data and feedback to continuously refine their tutoring programs.

Consider the following strategies for evaluating and improving tutoring provision:

• Collect and analyse data: Regularly collect data on student progress and attainment. Analyse this data to identify trends and areas for improvement.
• Gather feedback: Feedback from students, parents, and tutors can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the tutoring program and highlight areas for enhancement.
• Conduct regular reviews: Schedule regular reviews of the tutoring program to assess its effectiveness and impact. Use these reviews to make informed decisions about necessary adjustments.
• Identify areas for improvement: Based on data and feedback, identify specific areas where the tutoring program can be improved. Develop strategies to address these areas and implement changes as needed.
• Ongoing training and support: Ensure that the tutors used in your educational setting receive continuous training and support. This helps them stay updated on best practices and enhances their ability to deliver high-quality tutoring.

In summary, if you’re serious about implementing the best online tutoring programme you need to go with an expert, school-focused tutoring organisation. Contact us at Third Space Learning if you wish to know more about our high-quality, school-centred tuition experience.