Every secondary school is expected to receive a minimum of £5,000 per pupil next year, and every primary school is expected to receive a minimum of £4,000 from 2021/22, per pupil.
This advancement of education funding should increase the opportunities for more young people to succeed. This additional funding hopes to ensure that all young people will get the best possible start; giving schools the powers they need to continue to raise standards and build an education system that enhances productivity and provides children with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.
This may come as welcome investment as recent statistics have shown that one third of schools in England are underfunded by more than £1 million. Arguably, one form of offsetting the vast costs of education and improving its efficiency is through tutoring.
James Grant, co-founder of MyTutor, the UK’s largest online tutoring service, and a rising leader in the EdTech sector, comments on this £14 billion cash boost and the continued need to find innovative ways to ensure efficient spending for education.
“This cash boost is certainly a step in the right direction for the education sector, as it ensures that children have the proper resources for their education. Underfunding has plagued schools in the UK for too long. Increased funding on this scale has been neglected for too long, and I can only hope that this has a drastic impact on results in schools, as well as alleviating the pressures on teachers.
For many in the education sector, our hope is for these investment discrepancies to have direct results on education as soon as possible. However, due to a lack of investment for so long, it may be unrealistic to expect immediate results. Therefore, one way schools can maximise the most out of their depleted budgets is to use innovative technologies to ensure that the use of budgeting is as efficient as possible. The rise of the EdTech sector is allowing teachers and tutors alike to do exactly that.
By utilising the pupil premium budget, schools can deploy online, one-to-one tutoring programmes that can address the specific needs of the pupil by giving them access to focused, tailored support – which is often difficult to provide in a class of 30. Online solutions like these give isolated schools in remote or rural areas access to a much broader pool of teaching talent not limited by geography, and have proven impact (for example, students using MyTutor last year made an average of a whole grade’s progress over 12 lessons).
Over the next five years, more and more low achieving schools will adopt EdTech solutions to help their pupil’s attainment and in turn, their own budget.”