Partnerships secured with Morrisons Foundation and University of Bradford

 

We are delighted to announce the launch of ‘Tutor Trust Bradford’ for the new academic year, in partnership with the University of Bradford and Morrisons Foundation.  Bradford will be Tutor Trust’s fourth major city in the North of England, and in particular will build on our successful, six-year track record in neighbouring Leeds. 

We are keen to hear from schools in Bradford who would like to use our tutors.  Thanks to heavy government subsidies, during 2021/22 schools will be able to access high-quality tutoring at very low cost, either through the National Tutoring Programme or through the ‘school-led tutoring’ scheme.  

 

Why Bradford?

Bradford is the sixth largest city in England and one of the most diverse, and it is also Britain’s youngest city in terms of the size of its school-age population.  We are excited about bringing our mission of ‘transforming lives through tutoring’ to Bradford.  

A range of national reports – including from the Social Mobility Commission and the Children’s Commissioner – show that Bradford is a priority city for extra educational support and this is needed more than ever because of the impact of the pandemic on the most disadvantaged young people.  Bradford also remains one of the Government’s priority ‘Opportunity Areas’.

During 2020/21, we delivered purely online work with Bradford schools as a pilot, serving 375 pupils across ten primary and secondary schools.  Now, we will start face-to-face tutoring with pupils in Bradford schools, which is what they say they really want and need. 

We are hugely grateful to Morrisons Foundation for providing the funding we need to launch Tutor Trust in Bradford, where the company is headquartered.  One of the Foundation’s Trustees, Guy Mason, commented: 

"The pandemic has undoubtedly made it harder to bridge the attainment gap and we want to do all we can to support young people in the Foundation's home of Bradford. We are delighted to partner with Tutor Trust, who have an impressive track record of transforming young lives through tutoring. This donation promises to deliver a positive impact on pupils across the City in core subject areas. We're confident it will prove to have long-lasting benefits across Bradford."

We are grateful to Anne-Marie Canning MBE, Independent Chair of the Opportunity Area Board, and the OA team for their advice and support so far and we look forward to working with them even more closely.

We are also grateful to the Leader and Chief Executive of Bradford City Council, Cllr Susan Hinchcliffe and Kersten England respectively, for their early enthusiasm for Tutor Trust, and to Louise Banahene MBE, Head of Educational Engagement at the University of Leeds, for introducing us to them.  

 

Who will do the tutoring?

Starting in September, we aim to recruit around 50 new tutors from the University of Bradford to do face-to-face tutoring in Bradford schools; as always at Tutor Trust, these tutors will be paid for their work. 

We know that the talented students on campus will be a fantastic source of great tutors who are also good role models.  Equally, we are confident that our Bradford tutors will find the experience rewarding and a source of new skills and self-confidence.  Our aim is to recruit greater numbers of tutors in future years, as we expand our network of partner schools and demand for our high-quality services grows.

Prof Alastair Goldman, Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences and Chair of the University’s Collaborative Outreach Group, had this to say:

“I am delighted to welcome Tutor Trust to Bradford, and really look forward to developing our partnership with them.  The University is committed to improving the lifetime chances of the residents of Bradford, we know that better education leads to better jobs and better jobs make for healthier and longer lives.  Our outreach community in the University is always looking for new partners, increasing our reach to support Bradford’s young community to successfully invest in their own future. We are really grateful to the Morrisons Foundation for supporting this venture and really look forward to its rollout.”

Why should schools partner with Tutor Trust?

Tutor Trust is a proudly Northern education charity with a mission to ‘transform lives through tutoring’.  We work exclusively with state schools and our focus is mostly on helping disadvantaged pupils and vulnerable learners to fulfil their potential.  

We are excited about providing children and young people in Bradford with high-quality, bespoke academic tutoring in Maths, English and Science; the three core subjects they need to master in order to have good chances and choices in life.

Founded in Manchester in 2011, we have a very strong evidence base for the quality and impact of our work across the North of England.  Tutor Trust is unique in being the only tutoring organisation in the country – either charitable or commercial – with proven, positive results from a large-scale randomised control trial with the Education Endowment Foundation; this rigorous and independent evaluation showed disadvantaged pupils making an additional 3 months of progress in Maths from just 12 hours of our tutoring. 

We are an elite ‘Promising Project’ of the Education Endowment Foundation (and the only one based in the North of England).  When he was the CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, Sir Kevan Collins – who went on to be the Government’s ‘Education Recovery Commissioner’ – said this about Tutor Trust:

“The evidence is clear that high-quality tutoring can boost the attainment of disadvantaged pupils and is a good use of schools' pupil premium funding. The EEF has designated Tutor Trust one of our Promising Projects because they demonstrated positive and cost-effective impact when we put them through the tough test of a randomised controlled trial. We're happy to recommend them to schools and to support their growth plan in the North of England.”

 

What are the next steps?

We plan to use the autumn term to recruit, train and DBS-check the tutors and to agree the details of the tutoring programmes with our partner schools.  We aim for tutoring sessions to begin with pupils in January 2022, at the start of the Spring term; if we can start tutoring before then, we will.

If your school is interested in a partnership with Tutor Trust, please contact Sharon Sadler, our School Partnerships Manager for Leeds-Bradford: [email protected]