With perspectives from Gary Green, Head of Virtual School
Bohunt Education Trust is a pioneering multi-academy trust built on an ethos of ‘enjoy’, ‘respect’ and ‘achieve’. They are a close-knit and growing family of schools across the South of England, with 8 schools, including one of England’s 34 state boarding schools. BET focuses on providing every child, regardless of background, unparalleled opportunity and an outstanding education, creating game-changers.
“Covid was a big challenge for the Trust last year. Lockdown had a disproportionate effect on the most disadvantaged, particularly with regards to access to devices and bandwidth, increasing the challenges of children with more significant barriers.
We were quick to provide devices to every pupil in need across the Trust and had online platforms in place immediately to support remote learning. We also worked to spot learning gaps and adjust our approaches responsively. Through this process, we identified the need to provide further targeted support for some pupils, through online tutoring.”
“We had worked with MyTutor in one of our schools before and had seen the results of personalised tuition, and wanted to expand tutoring for both during and after school hours.”
“We implemented MyTutor across every school with a blend of 1:1 and 3:1 tutoring. The amount of tutoring support was proportional to the size of each school and the number of disadvantaged pupils.
Each school appointed a Tutoring Lead, and the Leads came together in a core group to share best practice and to explore implementation methods. We looked at delivering tutoring in school compared to out of school, and how to build it into the curriculum. Then we provided tight guidance on appropriate pupil profiles who the tutoring should be targeting, making very clear that the programme was intended to support hard-to- reach pupils, rather than high motivation children with smaller gaps.
The weekly attendance reports and evaluation allowed us to keep an eye on participation and adapt our approaches to maintain high levels of engagement. There was a lot of adaptation, particularly early on.”
“MyTutor has been highly adaptive in terms of when and how we provide tuition. They’ve been complete partners – different schools have different needs and different pupil profiles and MyTutor worked with all of them, working very swiftly to adapt. I was also keen to explore the peer effect. The tutors are within a few years of our pupils, and there is a lot of research to back up peer mentoring as a potential motivator.
Fundamentally, MyTutor have been superb partners throughout this; we knew that from working with City Academy Norwich. We had a very good experience with them being solutions-focused, very supportive to the schools, adapting their approach to meet our needs, and very keen to innovate with us - it's been very much a "we".
MyTutor did a number of things, such as launching bespoke sessions through summer school for us. There were tutors and graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds running sessions who shared their own stories with our kids, delivering inspirational talks to our pupils that really made a difference."
“It was about MyTutor’s ability to influence things at scale, and the systems and support for that, but also a genuine commitment to thinking outside the box and looking at their own roadmap and working with us about what else they could do to support what else we’re trying to achieve”
“The tutoring has provided a significant capacity to support pupils with the greatest gaps within a broader suite of approaches, so while it’s just one intervention, it’s a very good intervention. We saw success stories across every school. Most notably, we found that where attendance is higher, success is greater.
Looking at the average progress made across schools in our first year, pupils who attended MyTutor lessons made at least 3x the progress of a control group."