I don’t want quantity of hours regardless of who delivers it, I want structured, quality teaching - this isn’t something you can just stick them in front of a random volunteer or a an outsourced community group and it’ll be fine. How does that dovetail in to their school-based learning?
Instead of papering over it like this, they need to fundamentally review the expectations, assessments, and curriculum for the entire school cohort to accommodate and adjust for an entire year’s (if not longer) of stalled learning. Everyone has done their best, but this last year has been treading water at most if you look at it at macro level - the government needs to acknowledge that, rip up the rule book, and work with schools (not unions) to say ‘what now’.
Just putting kids in front of volunteers and in community groups for an extra couple of hours a day will not cut it.
And that’s before we get into the thousands and thousands of children with additional needs who will be even further disadvantaged, forgotten about, and left behind by that approach.
The government can spend billions on Nightingale hospitals for the NHS, billions on furlough, billions on vaccines, billions on food parcels, increases in benefits, re-training schemes, getting the Army to support infrastructure rollouts, and a multitude of other things (and rightly so) - why won’t they do the same for education workers, schools, and children? It’s solvable with lateral thinking, a willingness to invest, and an attitude from all involved of ‘what can we do’ instead of ‘can’t’. Sticking plasters and half arsed solutions is all I see. It’s shameful of them.