In a new paper released today, research fellow Trisha Jha from think tank the Centre for Independent Studies has argued a case for why small-group tutoring sessions for struggling students are not shifting the needle on learning outcomes despite their ‘billion-dollar price tag’.

Jha told EducationHQ that it would be a mistake to throw more sizeable sums at tutoring initiatives without ensuring every school has the right supports and structures in place to implement the sessions effectively.

This cost for both students and the economy, if this is got wrong, is huge, she suggested.

“There’s a real impact on students, in the sense that they may or may not get the support they need.

“And there’s also a significant cost impact if agreements are struck and money is foist on these programs, without the right enabling factors being in place to ensure it’s successful,” Jha said.

Once posited as the solution to catch children who had fallen behind during the chaos of the pandemic, Jha says small-group tutoring is now increasingly seen as an answer to Australia’s achievement problem.

“NAPLAN shows that about a third of students are not meeting expectations across year levels and domains.

“And we also know that a very low proportion of students that, once they fall behind, actually catch up. So the structures that we have in place to support students that fall behind are really important to the educational futures of those students,” she adds.

Jha notes that Education Minister Jason Clare, for one, has concluded that “all of the evidence shows that [small-group tutoring is] a key part of helping children who fall behind here to catch up” and that it can “have a massive impact on a child’s education”.

Yet earlier this year, an evaluation report found NSW schools spent $250 million delivering the state’s ‘COVID Intensive’ tutoring program in 2022, but with no measurable impact on students’ academic achievement or attendance to show for it.

Similarly, in June, Victoria’s Auditor-General’s Office tabled a report detailing the lack of effectiveness blighting the state’s $1.2 billion tutoring scheme.

Jha flags that these findings do just represent an average and it would be remiss to forget the positive case studies that have played out in isolation.

“Some schools might have had really good structures in play, where those outcomes were really improved,” Jha says.

“So, these schools probably already had a lot of knowledge about how to deliver evidence-based practices in a small-group setting already, they’ve probably already had really good screening and diagnostic assessment tools in place.”

And herein lies the problem with schools delivering tutoring programs at scale without major reform.  

“[It’s] essentially just luck of the draw whether you happen to have the right people in place to understand and implement these sorts of structures effectively,” Jha says.

And given a third of students are not meeting proficiency standards, it is prohibitive – from a cost, scheduling and staffing perspective –for small-group tutoring to be the only means of ensuring all children stay up to speed, she adds.

Instead, small-group instruction should be seen as one component (Tier 2) of a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) model used by all schools, Jha says.

The model relies on nailing high-quality Tier 1 instruction to reduce the number of instructional casualties and those needing additional intervention.

“And we know from lots and lots of literature – and more and more government is coming on board with this – that the most effective way to lift the quality of classroom teaching is through consistent application of high quality explicit instruction,” Jha says.

The author and researcher breaks this down, starting with curriculum content.

“First of all, we need to ensure that content is being broken down into meaningful and accessible groups or chunks, it has been sequenced properly, so that material systematically builds on itself, [and] that students are being introduced to knowledge that they need to make sense of what comes next before they’re being asked to do something quite complex,” she explains.

At the classroom level, teacher-directed instruction (incorporating worked examples, Gradual Release of Responsibility, checking for understanding practices and lots of opportunities for students’ independent practice) ought to reign, she suggests.

“And then obviously, doing things like spaced practice and retrieval to ensure what they’ve learned and what they’ve been taught is being retained over a longer period of time.

“So, it is quite complex,” Jha says.

The fact is, many Australian schools lack key ingredients for proper MTSS application, she says.

These include:

  • Inconsistent quality of instruction at Tier 1;
  • Lack of access to screening and diagnostic tools to correctly identify student need;
  • Lack of access to evidence-based intervention programs;
  • Lack of access to effective progress monitoring tools.

Despite their clear enthusiasm for small-group tutoring, our policymakers should proceed with caution, and bear in mind that its effective and scaled implementation is “at best, difficult and at worst, completely impractical”, Jha says.

The main concern is that inequality across the system stands to be worsened in the long-run, she explains.

“The danger is, if we do embed a funding agreement that puts more money on the table for small-group tutoring in schools, it’s going to multiply the inequality, whereby schools that already have the capacity are able to take the money and run with it and implement really good programs.

“But there’s no guarantee, without a lot of work being done by state education departments in particular, that the benefits of that are actually going to flow through.”

Jha says that existing teacher shortfalls, and particularly in hard-to-staff areas, also stand to be exacerbated by tutoring schemes without targetted reform.

“So, the danger is that we provide a lot of money, it doesn’t get used where it is needed, and it potentially can magnify inequality.”