Closing the gap after 16: Why GCSE resit students need more than a second chance

Post-16 resit pass rates for GCSE English and maths remain stubbornly low. And too often, the students who need the most support are the ones least likely to get it. In this episode, we sit down with Richard Caulfield, Senior Policy Manager at GM Colleges, who has a deep understanding of the challenges facing further education providers across Greater Manchester and the policy landscape that shapes post-16 provision.

Richard talks openly about what colleges are up against. The Pupil Premium stops at 16, the National Tutoring Programme has ended, and the disadvantage gap continues to widen after students leave secondary school. We look at the findings of a brand-new independent evaluation by NFER, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, which tested the Tutor Trust's one-to-one tutoring model with resit students across 20 post-16 settings in the North of England. The results were promising, with pass rates sitting significantly above the national average. But the pilot also surfaced some important lessons. Richard shares his perspective on what it actually takes to make tutoring work in a college setting, why engaging post-16 students requires a fundamentally different approach, and how settings can start to move from managing the problem to genuinely solving it.

Read more about the report here: Tutor Trust Post-16 Tutoring Pilot | The Tutor Trust

Watch Tutor Trust’s Programme Director, Mark Wyss, in conversation with Elis, a post‑16 student who received tutoring support to resit his GCSE maths. Elis shares his experience, the challenges he faced, and how tutoring helped him to pass his maths GCSE. This conversation highlights the value of tutoring to help support with academic attainment and engagement in learning. https://youtu.be/C6c9RK_zGDw?si=jIiep0oroIWaIoCL

 

 

Music from: Audio Library  https://youtu.be/JpoEFiAJdxo

'And So it Begins' by 'Artificial Music' (Creative Commons) https://soundcloud.com/artificial-music