Towards a national student-tutoring service

How we developed the Exeter tutoring model – a possible blueprint for service learning in universities. By Anne-Marie Sim

Service learning

I first saw the words ‘town versus gown’ on a blackboard outside the town hall advertising a boxing match when I was at university. A friend explained the concept: ‘town’ meant people from the town but not connected to the university; ‘gown’ typically denoted the students. Until then, I hadn’t really thought about the town versus gown divide – which was stark – but as my friend spoke it struck me that there was a whole set of people who lived parallel lives in the same place – the set that filled the high street on Saturday afternoons when the students disappeared. I’d like to say I made an effort to find out more about the people living these parallel lives, but I did no such thing. Amidst everything going on at university, I soon forgot about the towns-people.

That was twenty years ago, but in many places not so much has changed. Many students still spend three or more years in a place and leave with few meaningful connections to the people living beside them. Universities bring many benefits to a place, both directly and through the businesses and other organisations linked to them, providing a wide array of jobs including higher skilled roles. Yet currently they aren’t doing enough to break down the divides between their ivory towers of learning and the communities surrounding them. This is why we’re excited by the idea of ‘service learning’ – community-based work/learning placements embedded into the curriculum of every student. And in particular, of our tutoring programme being one of a menu of service-learning options.

Service learning isn’t an untried phenomenon. In the US, at least 27 institutions are recognised as having a service learning offer (2024 Colleges with Great Service Learning Programs | US News Best Colleges). Back in the UK, service learning exists in patchwork form. At Exeter University for example, an option for third year law students is the Access to Justice module where students provide pro bono legal support and advice to members of the public accessing a community-based clinic, under supervision from legal professionals. The module is the only one within that degree programme providing ‘real-world’ experience and is consistently over-subscribed.

University led tutoring

Our tutoring programme is in a similar vein. Undergraduate students from any discipline taking the Learning for Teaching module – a ‘taster’ in teaching for those potentially interested in teaching as a career – can do our tutoring placement. They earn 30 credits towards their degree in return. Every week for nine weeks, the students go into a local secondary school to each tutor two or three Year 8 pupils in foundational literacy. Before the tutoring, they also observe afternoon lessons, and write up the experience afterwards in a weekly reflective log. The placement is an integral part of the module (which also consists of a seminar series and essays), with the reflective log contributing a percentage towards students’ marks.

In our imagined world of service learning, these experiences would be the norm not the exception. Every student across the country would do a community-based placement like our tutoring placement as a core part of their degree. Students would choose from a number of options to suit their interests.

So, how do we get to this imagined world? The reality is that it takes time, effort and goodwill from many partners and collaborators. We think there are four phases.

Phase one

In phase one, we ran a very small but wonderfully successful pilot, documented in our report (UoE-UPPF-Tutoring_Report.pdf (exeter.ac.uk)). Our journey started in the autumn of 2021, whilst in the midst of writing a report about the parlous state of social mobility in the South-West peninsula. One of the recommendations we were considering proposing in the report was a university-led tutoring service to support under-resourced pupils who weren’t reaching expected standards. We didn’t just want this to be a report without action, and so even before the report was published we began having conversations about whether we could trial something in Exeter.

Our first stop was the Ted Wragg Trust, a multi-academy trust with schools in Exeter and Plymouth. Lindsay Skinner, Director of Education at the trust (but then head teacher at St James School in Exeter), felt that the central issue with existing tutoring models was the variability in quality that came from tutors needing to create their own content and rely on their own variable learning experiences to inform their pedagogy. She was confident that she could produce a literacy course covering content and pedagogy that any undergraduate could deliver, whether or not they were currently able to write well. Over the summer of 2021, she created Crafting Accurate Sentences – a nine-week programme specifying all of the learning and exercises pupils would need to do to write in accurate sentences, together with tutor training materials that includes five hours of video content.

Around the same time as we started speaking with Lindsay, we also approached colleagues in the University. We took a proposal to the University’s academic board and we also started conversations with the School of Education. Anita Wood, Learning for Teaching module lead, was naturally concerned about ensuring a top quality, positive experience for pupils and students alike. Universities have a duty of care to their students and others, as well as reputations to uphold. It is this that makes them the right bodies to take forward the mantle of tutoring given some of the lost trust in tutoring sparked by some of the failures of the National Tutoring Programme. Through conversations with Anita, which included caution and critique, we developed the placement into a 50-hour package rich in student training and learning. Without a doubt, these conversations made for a much better programme than we could otherwise have hoped for.

By piggybacking off the Learning for Teaching module, we got a pilot up and running within a year. We ran the pilot in autumn term 2022 with fantastic indicative outcomes: pupils completing the tutoring doubled their scores in a post-course writing assessment created by Lindsay. Meanwhile, survey results together with anecdotal evidence showed additional benefits to the placement, including the undergraduates gaining a real understanding of whether or not teaching was for them. Two of the six students involved signed up to PGCEs straight away.

Phase two

Phase two has involved further collaboration. Having discussed the programme at external fora, we were approached by Charlotte True, Manager at Next Steps South West (NSSW), the Uni Connect partner for Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. Fortuitously, the Office for Students had just made attainment-raising in schools a key element of the Uni Connect remit; she liked what she’d heard about the programme and was keen to get involved and support the programme’s growth.

NSSW ran a small pilot with University of Plymouth students tutoring pupils at Marine Academy Plymouth in spring/summer 2023. The model is slightly different, involving paid student ambassadors rather than those on a credit-bearing placement. This pilot showed two things – that the Crafting Accurate Sentences programme was highly promising (teachers, pupils and students liked it), but that we needed to work on various aspects of the programme’s delivery. Just to give one example – we’d said the programme was for pupils struggling with writing in accurate sentences, but the Plymouth pilot showed that pupils needed to be at a certain baseline level; whilst underperforming, they couldn’t be those struggling to write at all. The issue was that up until this point, a large amount of tacit knowledge was lodged in the heads of Lindsay and me. Lindsay had written the course and delivered it in her own school, so of course knew implicitly which pupils would benefit from tutoring support.

Over the summer of 2023, Charlotte began signing up other Uni Connect and university partners interested in delivering the tutoring programme. With the help of the University’s legal team, we drew up collaborative agreements between Lindsay, NSSW and ourselves, and terms for other delivery partners – that the tutoring programme shouldn’t be altered, that it should always be delivered free of charge to pupils and schools, and so on.

With the new partners on board for the academic year 2023/24, the plan is to deliver tutoring to around 700 pupils in the South West and North East – a medium-sized scale-up*. Key to the success of this scale-up is refining and codifying the programme – ensuring a clearly thought-through and (where possible) validated process for every element of the programme’s delivery and evaluation. Charlotte has been instrumental in driving this work forward, organising workshops with all of the partners to discuss items from assessment marking to attendance strategies. As we know from all of the evidence about pupil interventions, it is more often than not how you deliver something that matters more to outcomes than what you’re delivering.

Future phases

What comes after this phase? As ever, there are multiple routes we are pursuing. Learning for Teaching will continue to offer the tutoring placement in Exeter and Penryn, although we aim to hand over delivery to the faculty (whilst continuing to evaluate the programme centrally). We hope our Uni Connect and university partners will continue to deliver tutoring and that further partners will join – this is dependent on their future funding by the Office for Students. We are collectively looking at how we might work with FE colleges to trial the tutoring with student tutors there – if this is successful, it paves the way for much better geographic coverage of schools. At the same time, we are keen to ensure that the embedding of tutoring within the curriculum grows to create our vision of a sustainable service-learning model. The North East Uni Connect partnership is supportive of us engaging their university partners with this model, and in doing so we hope to develop a toolkit to support any university to easily set up a credit-bearing tutoring placement.

If the above is phase three, phase four is about delivering on the service-learning vision: expanding the tutoring placement at Exeter to be an option that a major sub-section of the student body undertakes; and taking the toolkit to universities nationwide. As universities seek to fulfil their civic responsibilities, this tutoring model is what we’ve called a win-win-win approach. It’s good for schools and pupils, good for students, and good for universities and the role they need to play within the communities in which they’re based.

* Partners for 2023/24 are Next Steps South West, the University of Plymouth, North East Uni Connect Partnership and GROWS.

We are grateful to the Cobalt Trust, the university’s Policy Support Fund, Tim Wilkinson, UPP Foundation and Fiona Forbes for their support, which has funded University of Exeter researcher time for this work.