The Tutor Learning Program is a $250 million initiative that will assist Victorian government and non-government schools to support student learning following the period of remote and flexible learning. This funding will enable schools to recruit tutors to deliver additional targeted teaching support to students in a way that best suits our local circumstances.

This program requires the successful identification of students requiring tutoring support with a focus on literacy and numeracy. In order to identify students, teachers will use a variety of data.

The Department of Education has indicated that evidence suggests that 20% of students will have fallen behind during remote schooling.

Students who may require additional support include those:

- with low levels of English

- with home environments not conducive to remote and flexible learning

- already at risk of disengaging from school and

- who need educational and health and wellbeing supports at school but were unable

to access them at home.

The tutoring style will be small group based and use an evidence-based approach to differentiated teaching. We will need to determine the size of the tutoring cohort on the basis of the skills being targeted and the needs of the various students. The idea is for students to be tutored in short (30 or 45 min) regular sessions (between 3-to-5 times a week), over a sustained period (between 10-to-20 weeks).  We are presently planning our school’s approach, or combination of approaches, to tutoring that best fits our context and the needs of our students. We will use high quality, well trained tutors. Tutors will work under the direction of and in collaboration with the classroom teacher to implement evidence-based approaches that target the needs of the students within the group. In the coming weeks if your child has been identified as someone requiring tutoring support we will be in contact with you and give you further information on how this program will run.  If you think your child needs this program, I encourage you to talk directly to your child’s teacher.  It may be that our school data reinforces this idea or it may be that the school data doesn’t confirm this approach, either way it is positive to talk to the class teacher about this.