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The Right Angle is an award-winning collaboration between Tutor Trust and TLC: Talk, Listen, Change, the award-winning relationships charity which helps support safe, healthy, happy relationships.

The Right Angle supports children in alternative provision, vulnerable children and Cared for Children, with a combination of tutoring and emotional wellbeing support. This unique approach addresses both the causes and symptoms of under-achievement, dealing holistically with the needs of the pupils referred through schools or virtual schools.  We continue to develop tailor-made packages for the young people we support to enable them to develop their confidence and academic ability in tandem.

And it has proven impact.

In the 2020/21 academic year, through our Scaling Impact Award winning status via our partnership with the Fair Education Alliance, we worked with ImpactEd to independently evaluate The Right Angle.

The Right Angle Summary Evaluation Report, from ImpactEd, shows that The Right Angle project has a positive effect on those who face some of the biggest barriers to education, through its combined offer of tutoring alongside counselling and other emotional wellbeing support.   

The report makes four key findings:  

• Key Finding 1: English and mathematics GCSE working-at grades and Learning by Questions scores were higher following the programme,  
• Key Finding 2: The relationship between the number of tutoring sessions attended and the academic progress made was unclear due to the limited data available,   
• Key Finding 3: Participants showed a significant increase in their emotional wellbeing,   
• Key Finding 4: Those who completed counselling made significantly greater progress in English than those who did not.

The pupils themselves report feeling more resilient and say that they feel more confident in other areas of their lives as well.

Full-Time Tutor Sarah Thrussell says there is something special about building those connections with students:

“For a lot of these students there are so many professionals and adults coming in and out of their lives, so being able to have that time to build the relationship, and then see that develop and confidence grow, that’s just a privilege.”

In the academic year 2021/2022, through The Right Angle, we supported 60 young people, in a range of settings, including through:

• Tameside Virtual School
• Rochdale Virtual School
• Oldham Virtual School
• Trafford Alternative Provision
• Pendlebury Centre
• Fairfield High School
• Crompton House School

 

The background

We established The Right Angle in 2018 as we believed that, by supporting the emotional wellbeing of this very vulnerable cohort of young people, we would enable them to maximise the benefits of tuition and unlock their potential. We found that offering a combination of tutoring sessions and counselling increased the impact and improved their outcomes.

Cared for Children or those in Alternative Provision have always faced enormous challenges**, and Tutor Trust, together with TLC, want to do all that we can to support them to achieve. 

The project was originally funded by the Department for Education as part of The Alternative Provision Innovation Fund in September 2018. Whilst the DfE funding ended in July 2020 (as had always been planned) the value and impact of our joint project continues to be recognised. Noe, thanks to generous funding from Porticus and the MariaMarina Foundation, we are able to continue our work alongside TLC in a partially-funded, highly-subsidised model.

In July 2020 we were awarded the Fair Education Alliance Scaling Award for The Right Angle. This is a prestigious national award, and we are one of only seven winners in the country. This award supports us to grow The Right Angle, understand our impact and, we hope, enable us to reach many more of the most vulnerable young people that we strive to support.

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*The Department for Education’s Final Project Report for The Right Angle, as part of the DfE’s Alternative Provision Innovation Fund.

**The attainment levels of Cared for Children and those in AP are consistently lower than those of their peers, according to the report published by The Centre for Social Justice (11th May 2020): ‘Warming the Cold Spots of Alternative Provision: A manifesto for system improvement’.