One Month Apart: 1:1 vs Small-Group Tuition's Budget Gap

This is the education commute. Both voices on this show are synthesized. The judgment isn't. So picture this, right? You're sitting there at your desk. Oh, yeah. Probably after the end of a very, very long school day. Exactly. Yeah. The corridors are, like, finally quiet. And you were just staring at your intervention budget for the upcoming term. A very familiar feeling. Right. And it is, as always, you know, the totally limited pot of money. Always is. Always. And you're facing this classic just really high stakes dilemma that absolutely anyone managing school resources or, you know, running academic interventions knows all too well.

Yeah, it's the ultimate tug of war. It really is. Because on one side of the ledger, you've got one to one tuition. And I mean, we tend to view that as the ultimate gold standard in education. Right, for sure. The absolute ideal scenario for a struggling learner. Exactly. But and it's a huge, but it eats through your budget. incredibly fast. Carefyingly fast, yeah. So the question is, like, do you fiercely ring -fence that money? Do you defend that budget line to the death just to protect those bespoke individual sessions?

Right, or? Or, exactly, on the other side of the ledger, do you look at small group tuition? Because there's this very tempting whisper, right? Oh yeah, a whisper in the ear of... basically every intervention laid. And it says you can get nearly the exact same result for a fraction of the cost. Just by pulling a few extra pupils together into a group. Exactly. So that tension between the ideal scenario and the harsh budgetary reality, that is exactly what we are unpacking on today's commute. And to do that, we are doing a deep dive into the source material provided by the Education Endowment Foundation.

Right. Specifically, we're looking at their toolkit. because it directly compares these two exact strands of intervention, you know, one -to -one tuition and small group tuition. Which is perfect because the mission for us today is just so crucial. I mean, we aren't going to argue this from a place of like feel or what intuitively sounds like best practice when you're sitting in a staff meeting. No, no intuition today. The goal here is to get past those assumptions. We want to look at the hard data on dosage, delivery, cost and the actual measurable impact of both of these approaches.

Exactly. We're looking strictly at the data to see if that massive one -to -one budget is actually worth defending, or if the small group route really is the silver bullet for a stretched budget. We need to know what actually works. Yeah, and to get to the bottom of that, I mean, we just have to lay down the baseline data right out of the gate. Hit me with it. So the foundations toolkit provides very specific average impact figures for both of these approaches. And they base these figures on their respective really extensive evidence bases.

Let's get those exact figures on the table so we know what we're actually working with here. Right. So here's what the toolkit states. One -to -one tuition plus five months from 123 studies, small group tuition plus four months from 62 studies. Right. So those two figures, they form the fundamental comparison we have to grapple with today. Plus five months versus plus four months. There is just a massive, incredibly obvious tension right there in those numbers. I mean, we are talking about a one -month gap in progress.

Just one month? That's it. One single month of additional academic progress separates the two approaches. on average. And I don't know, when you hear it laid out like that, it sounds incredibly marginal. It does sound marginal. And I think that one month gap becomes even more significant and frankly just a lot more stressful for a school leader when we actually bring the cost data into the picture. Oh, absolutely. The budget changes everything. Because the toolkit categorizes small group tuition as low cost. Right. And when you think about the mechanics of it, the bulk of the cost for a small group is basically just the staff salary for the person running it and maybe some physical resources or printed booklets.

Yeah, but you're spreading that baseline cost across several pupils at the exact same time. Exactly. But then you have one -to -one tuition, which is categorized by the toolkit as moderate cost. But, and this is a big but, but it explicitly notes that it can be expensive. Especially when it's being delivered by qualified teachers, right? Yes, precisely. I mean, can be expensive is putting it very mildly for most school budgets. Totally. When you factor in, like, the opportunity cost of pulling a teacher out of a regular classroom or having to pay them an hourly rate for after -school sessions, I mean, the costs just skyrocket.

Yeah, and to ground this in a very real number from the source data, we can look at the National Tutoring Program. Oh, good, yeah. Specifically looking at their subsidized rate, which is dated from 2020 -21. A 15 -hour block of one -to -one tuition costs somewhere between 167 pounds and 180 pounds per pupil. Wow. OK, so 167 to 180 pounds per pupil. Right. So just to summarize the ledger here, we have small groups, which are significantly cheaper per pupil, giving us plus four months of progress.

Yeah. And then we have one -to -one, which is inherently just so much more expensive, costing up to 180 pounds for just a 15 -hour block, giving us plus five months. That is the reality of the ledger. Yeah. Now I want to put a massive guardrail right here in this conversation. OK, what is it? Because, you know, human nature and certainly the nature of any leader who is just staring at a budget spreadsheet trying to make the numbers balance is to immediately try to do the math on that difference.

Oh, yeah. The temptation is huge. The temptation is to say, well, if one -to -one costs this much more per head, but only gives me one extra month of progress at the end of the year, then it simply isn't worth double or triple the cost. Right, trying to invent a ratio. Exactly, like inventing some cost effectiveness ratio on the fly. But we have to be absolutely clear here. The toolkit does not provide a cost -effectiveness ratio comparing the two directly. No, it doesn't. It just doesn't exist in the data.

And we have to respect that boundary. Like, we are going to leave the tension of that one -month gap exactly as it is. We aren't going to do any unsupported arithmetic on the commute today, and we certainly aren't going to assign an official, you know, worth it value to that extra month of progress. No, that's not our job. Right. The one -month gap is the honest finding from the evidence base. And it's framed against a very real, very painful difference in financial cost. So keeping that tension in mind, I actually want to push back on something that I think plagues a lot of schools.

What's that? Well, there is this assumed superiority that just comes automatically with the label one -to -one. Oh, absolutely. We just naturally think it's better because it's bespoke, right? But let me use an analogy here. Go for it. Let's say I decide to get fit and I go out and I buy a ridiculously expensive premium gym membership. Okay, I see where this is going. I'm talking about the kind of place with like the fluffy white towels, the eucalyptus steam room, the organic smoothie bar, the works.

Sounds nice. It is nice. But just paying for that premium membership, just having that fancy little card in my wallet, doesn't actually make me fit if I only show up to the gym once a month for 10 minutes. Yeah, exactly. The membership alone doesn't do the heavy lifting. Right. So does a school automatically get that plus five months of average progress just by attaching the premium label one -to -one to a session? Wow. I mean, if I pull a kid out of maths, sit them in a room with a tutor for an hour every other week.

Does the magic just happen because the ratio is one to one? The short answer is no. The magic absolutely does not just happen. And the data backs up your suspicion entirely on this. Oh, does it? Yeah. The evidence for one -to -one tuition highlights that it has a very specific optimal dosage. Okay. It's not merely about the format of having one adult and one child in a room. It's about how and how often it is delivered. Let's unpack that dosage then because I really think this is where the wheels fall off for a lot of intervention plans.

Yeah. What exactly is the optimum dosage according to the toolkit? So the data points to short, regular sessions. Short and regular. Right. Specifically, about 30 minutes per session. OK, 30 minutes. That makes sense. But here's the thing. These need to happen three to five times a week over a set period of up to 10 weeks. Wow. Let me just repeat that for anyone listening who is currently trying to write a timetable. Yeah, it's intense. Three to five times a week, every single week, for up to 10 weeks.

That is the intensity of the optimum dosage. That is a massive reality check. I mean, timetabling a single pupil to be at a regular class or to give up their lunch break or to stay after school for 30 minutes three to five times a week, that is a logistical mountain to climb. It's incredibly difficult. And I mean, if you think about the why behind those numbers, it makes total pedagogical sense, right? Oh, completely. Because A 30 -minute session respects the cognitive load of a struggling learner.

You aren't exhausting them with some marathon hour -long session where they just zone out after 20 minutes. Yeah, to keep it focused. Right. And doing it three to five times a week builds actual momentum. It relies on spaced repetition and habit building rather than, like, cramming. But logistically. Most schools are going to really struggle to deliver it at that intensity. If you are only managing to pull a pupil for one 45 -minute session a week, because that's all your timetable allows, well, you aren't hitting the optimum dosage the evidence is describing.

And failing to hit that dosage is exactly where that one -to -one label becomes a track. A total track. You think you're delivering the gold standard, but you're actually delivering a diluted version of it. Yeah. And it gets even more complicated when we look closely at another major variable that the data highlights. Oh, what's that? Who is actually running the session. I mean, you said it yourself. The format doesn't do the teaching. An empty room with one desk doesn't teach fractions. The person in the room matters immensely.

So what does the toolkit say about the delivery staff? Well, it notes that one -to -one tuition is most effective when it is delivered by experienced, specifically trained teachers. Which, again, routes us right back to that moderate to expensive cost category. Very quickly, yes. Because using your most experienced teachers for one -to -one interventions is incredibly heavy on the budget and it pulls your best practitioners away from whole class instruction. But the toolkit does name alternatives, doesn't it? Because the reality on the ground in most schools is that it's very often teaching assistants who are deployed to run these interventions.

The source does name alternatives, yeah. Teaching assistants, academic mentors, and tutors are all explicitly named as options. However, there is a very important condition attached to that. It states that teaching assistants are particularly beneficial when they are well -trained and supported. Well -trained and supported. Yeah. I mean, that is doing a massive amount of heavy lifting in that sentence. It really is. It implies a whole infrastructure behind the scenes. Like, you can't just hand a TA a photocopied worksheet five minutes before the session, point them to a quiet corner of the library with a pupil, and just expect to automatically hit that plus five months of progress.

Right. The magic doesn't just happen. No. The training and support, which means giving them time to prepare, time to liaise with the classroom teacher, and training on the specific pedagogical methods being used, all of that is integral to the effectiveness. So just summing this up, we have this gold standard intervention. one -to -one tuition. But to actually get the gold standard results, you need short, highly frequent sessions. And they ideally need to be run by experienced teachers or by TAs who are given significant time, training, and backing.

Exactly. And this sheer complexity in delivery is actually reflected in the evidence security rating for one -to -one tuition. Oh, really? Yeah, the toolkit rates the evidence security as moderate. Moderate? Wow, that actually surprises me. Yeah. Because earlier, you said this was based on 123 studies. You would think that sheer volume of research would make it highly secure. Why is it only moderate? Well, to understand that, we need to look at how the toolkit measures security. They use a visual scale of up to five padlocks to indicate how robust the evidence is.

One -to -one tuition actually lost two of those padlocks, bringing it down to a three padlock or moderate rating. Oh, wow. Why did it lose them? The reasons are really revealing. First, it was marked down due to non -independent evaluations. Wait, meaning the people evaluating the success of the program might have been the same people who, like, designed or sold it? That is the implication, yeah. So they were a bit too close to the project to be entirely objective. Right. When evaluations aren't independent, the risk of bias creeps in.

And then the second reason it lost a padlock is due to unexplained variation between the results. Unexplained variation, meaning that across those 123 studies, the results were just jumping around in ways the researchers couldn't neatly account for. Exactly. Sometimes a program worked brilliantly and a child made huge leaps, and sometimes it barely moved the needle. And the why behind that difference wasn't always perfectly clear from the data. That's wild. Yeah, so the plus five months is simply an average drawn across all that messy unexplained variation.

It is a mathematical middle ground, not a guaranteed outcome. Which honestly brings us to a very natural pivot in our discussion. Let's do it. Because if one -to -one requires such strict Often brutally difficult to resource fidelity like the three to five times a week dosage The highly trained staff the constant monitoring it makes small group tuition look even more attractive. It really does I mean if small groups are easier to timetable and vastly cheaper to run and they still give you plus four months on average What on earth is the catch?

Well, the catch with small group tuition is entirely about the ceiling of the group size. The ceiling. Right. There is a very strict limit on how you can construct these groups if you actually want them to be effective. OK. Let me confess a very relatable temptation here. We've all been there. Right. If you are managing interventions and you've got a small group running smoothly, say you've got four kids in a group for reading intervention and the TA is doing a great job. OK. Sounds good so far.

Then midway through the term, A new kid transfers into the school who is miles behind. Or another pupil suddenly bombs a mock exam. Oh, I see it coming. The temptation to look at that existing group and say, just pull up an extra chair, add a fifth, maybe a sixth or seventh child to the group is just overwhelming. It really is. Because it feels efficient. You're saving time. You're getting more kids the help they need on paper. And yielding to that temptation is exactly where the data drops the hammer.

Yeah. The toolkit is exceptionally clear on the optimal group size, the smaller the better, but the specific target range is two to five pupils. Two to five, I mean that is a very tight window to operate in. It is tight, but the crucial part of the evidence is what happens when you decide to ignore that window. What happens? The data explicitly states that once a group exceeds six or seven pupils, effectiveness drops off noticeably. Noticeably drops off. And if you think about the mechanics of why that happens, it makes perfect sense.

Oh, absolutely. In a 30 -minute session with three kids, every child gets a solid 10 minutes of direct focused attention from the adult. The adult can see exactly where each child is struggling, provide bespoke feedback, correct misconceptions in real time. But if you let that group creep up to seven or eight kids, you aren't doing small group tuition anymore. The dynamic fundamentally shifts. It totally changes. Kids who lack confidence can suddenly start hiding in the group again, just like they do in a main classroom. And the adult transitions from providing bespoke tutoring to basically just managing crowd control and delivering a mini lecture.

You've perfectly described hitting the ceiling of the intervention's effectiveness right there. You lose the focused attention that makes the small group format work in the first place. You've just created a slightly smaller normal class. And the plus four months of progress just evaporates. Exactly. That is a fascinating parallel, actually, because Both of these interventions have a fatal vulnerability. Right. One to one is highly vulnerable to poor gossage and untrained delivery. Small group is highly vulnerable to size creep. Exactly. And since we are comparing the two, we also have to look at the evidence security rating for small group tuition.

OK, let's look at it. Just like one to one, it is rated as moderate security or three padlocks based on those 62 studies. OK. But. There is a crucial caveat tied to this evidence base that we must explicitly flag for anyone relying on these numbers. What's the caveat? It's an evaluator conflict issue. Really? Yeah. The toolkit notes that evaluations run by organizations connected to the small group approach showed larger impacts. Wait, wait. So this is essentially grading your own homework. Basically, yeah. If an organization designed, funded, or heavily promoted a specific small group tutoring program, and then they were the ones who actually evaluated its success, the results magically looked better than when an independent body looked at it.

The data flags that this conflict of interest may artificially inflate the overall picture, those internally evaluated studies pulled the average up. Wow. Which means that the plus four months average impact might be slightly inflated. That is a massive piece of context for a school leader. I mean, so that plus four months isn't just a pair perfectly objective number handed down from on high. It's an average that might be slightly pulled up by evaluations where there was a vested interest in the program succeeding. It's a caveat you absolutely have to keep in the back of your mind when you are weighing that one month gap between the two approaches.

The one -to -one data had unexplained variation. The small group data has potential evaluator inflation. neither number is flawless. So if we pull all of this together and connect the dots for anyone listening who is actually sitting down today to make these budget decisions. Let's synthesize it. The real question you need to ask yourself isn't, which format wins? It's not a simple binary of one -to -one being good and small group being bad or vice versa. No, not at all. The real question is, can you actually deliver either of these interventions at the strict dosage and fidelity the evidence describes?

Fidelity over format. That is the ultimate trade -off we are looking at. Because if you look at the cold, hard reality of your school's resources and you realize you cannot deliver one -to -one at that optimum dosage -like, you simply cannot manage short frequent sessions three to five times a week, and you don't have the budget to deploy specifically trained teachers or highly supported TAs to run them, then blindly assigning that budget to one -to -one might be a massive mistake, even if the average impact number looks higher on a chart.

The data leads us directly to consider that exact scenario. If a school cannot resource the strict, frequent delivery required for one -to -one, then a well -run small group, kept strictly between two to five pupils, might actually outperform a badly run, poorly dosed one -to -one slot. That is such a powerful insight for a leader to take away. I mean, a well -executed silver standard will beat a poorly executed gold standard every single time. Every time. If you were just doing one -to -one in name only, pulling a kid once a week for 45 minutes with an unsupported TA, you aren't magically getting plus five months.

Yeah. You might actually be getting far less progress than you would from a tightly controlled, well -resourced small group of three kids meeting regularly. The evidence forces you to look at your actual delivery capacity, not just the attractive labels on the intervention timetable. Okay, we are coming up on the end of our commute, so let's distill everything we've unpacked down into the essentials. Let's do a rapid -fire summary of the three big takeaways for anyone walking through the school gates today. Alright, number one. There is only a one -month average gap between one -to -one and small group tuition.

And crucially, there is no official cost -effectiveness ratio in the toolkit to tell you if the vast difference in budget is justified. The tension between plus five months and plus four months is a judgment call that is entirely yours to manage. Perfect. Number two. One -to -one's headline figure of plus five months relies heavily on real dosage. We are talking about short, frequent sessions, three to five times a week for up to ten weeks, and train delivery. You absolutely do not get the progress just by applying the label and hoping for the best.

The optimal size is strictly two to five pupils. Once your group creeps past six or seven pupils, the bespoke nature of the intervention breaks down and the effectiveness drops off noticeably. Which leads directly to our immediate ask for you today. Yeah, action time. If you are listening to this on your way in, we have a specific same -day task for you to complete. Check your current small groups today. Go and look at the registers. First thing. If any single group has suffered from size creep and has crept past six pupils, do not wait until next term to fix it.

Split that group before the next session happens. Do whatever you have to do to get it back into that two to five range because right now, with seven or eight kids in a room, you are losing the impact you were paying for. And as you look at those registers and evaluate your interventions today, I want to leave you with one final provocative thought based on the evidence security data we discussed. Oh, I like this. We talked about the unexplained variation between results in the 123 one -to -one studies.

What that means in practical terms is that even with perfect dosage, and even with an unlimited budget and highly trained staff, the plus five months is simply an average. It is not a guarantee for every individual people sitting in front of you. It's an average, not a promise. Exactly. So the question you have to ask yourself as a leader is, how much variation is hiding behind the averages in your own school's data? That's a great point. If you look closely, are some of your pupils making massive leaps while others in the exact same one -to -one intervention are just flatlining?

And if so, do you know why? That is the crucial question to take with you into your first meeting today. Have a safe trip in. See you at the gates.