Public First ran opinion research to understand parental opinions on tutoring, as part of wider research into the impact of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) and the 16-19 Tuition Fund.

Key findings include parents are overwhelmingly in favour of tutoring, with 77% of parents supporting an increase in tutoring provision, and 73% who think that the government should pay for tutoring for pupils from low income backgrounds – a view shared by parents across all socio-economic groups. Parents were supportive of the benefits of tutoring, with with 74% citing that it helped children who are falling behind to catch up among the benefits of increasing provision, and 53% stating that it helped recover learning lost during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Parents of children who had experienced tutoring highlighted a range of wider benefits, including addressing many of the most significant challenges across the education system currently. These included 85% of parents saying tutoring had positively impact their child’s confidence, 68% saying it had improved attendance, 78% saying it had improved their child’s relationships with their classroom teachers, and 64% saying it had improved their child’s relationships with other children.

Only 50% of parents whose children received tutoring said they would definitely or likely have paid for tutoring if it had not been provided by the school, and among all parents a majority (64%) cited cost as a barrier for accessing more tutoring for their child. Indeed, cost was the greatest barrier identified by parents. This was nuanced by socioeconomic status, with the parents in higher socio-economic grades (ABC1) nearly twice as likely to say they would pay for tutoring (62%) than those in the lower social grades (C2DE) (35%).

The full report can be found here.

The full polling tables can be found here.