Closing England's Maths Attainment Gap through One-to-One Tutoring – Global Solutions

Abstract

In the aftermath of COVID-related school closures in the UK, students lost two months of learning, but the loss among the 1.7 million disadvantaged students has been much larger at seven months. This disadvantaged gap is almost entirely driven by maths attainment. One-to-one tutoring is proven to be effective at helping students catch up, but private tutoring is most likely to be taken up by children from affluent households, further widening the disadvantaged gap in learning. This report discusses the feasibility of an innovative tutoring delivery model that uses the global graduate market to deliver tutoring at a scale that can solve this problem and a price that schools can afford. While the report discusses the overall opportunity that the emerging market economies of South- and South-East Asia provide, it also presents the Third Space Learning model in Sri Lanka as a case study to investigate the practicalities of the global online tutoring model.