Call the Doctor… our tutorials are being treated like a TARDIS

For some providers, tutorials and enrichment sit in a neat little box in the corner of a study programme. A timetabled hour. A checklist. Something that fits around “the real curriculum”.

The reality is different. Open the door and you find a TARDIS-like interior: a vast, expanding universe of expectations, responsibilities and competing priorities. It is somehow expected to be far bigger on the inside than the timetable space it occupies.

Safeguarding, British values, Prevent, independent living skills, employability, enrichment, wellbeing, digital skills, behaviour, attitudes and soft skills. Each new priority arrives like a new regeneration but rarely replaces what went before, and materialises in the tutorial system which quietly absorbs everything else.

I am no student services expert, but it does not add up. The list of expectations continues to grow, yet the time, space and funding available to deliver them remains stubbornly finite.

Tutorials are treated as elastic – stretched to deal with every emerging risk, crisis or policy shift, as if they exist outside the normal laws of time and space.

If there were any doubt about their importance, Ofsted has made its position clear. The latest inspection framework places inclusion, personal development and learner support firmly at the heart of judgments. The curriculum and assessment review recognised the importance of skills development beyond the qualification, and the need to free up sufficient learner hours to develop them properly.

Recently, I have attended events run by the FE Tutorial Network and the National Association for Managers of Student Services (NAMSS). This was a world I had not ventured into before. What I found was a community of professionals who were dedicated, expert and fiercely committed to their learners.

They are doing an extraordinary job. But it was equally clear that the demands being placed on them are becoming extremely challenging, despite their ingenuity and goodwill.

An effective tutorial and enrichment programme requires contextualisation by geography, industry and learner level. Layer on the post-Covid mental health crisis, the increasing complexity of SEND needs and the reality that learners arrive with vastly different life, school and work experiences, and it becomes obvious why no two learners share the same starting point or follow the same path through the system. Tutorial teams are constantly recalibrating the controls while the ship is already in flight.

Alongside this sits a debate as old as FE itself: should tutorials and enrichment be delivered by specialist staff, or by curriculum teachers? Tutorial specialists may lack subject context, while curriculum staff may lack confidence in areas such as the manosphere. Many teachers are excellent at employability, but not everyone is equipped to deal with the darker corners of the internet.

Can anyone realistically be an expert across such a broad and evolving mix of requirements?

The Skills Network has over 200 online tutorial and enrichment resources. Realistically, every learner could benefit from at least half of them. That represents more than 200 hours of expert-led content – an impossible demand within a traditional timetable.

Part of the solution lies in rethinking delivery. An individualised blend of online provision, combined with face-to-face support, can enable a flipped learning approach. Used well, this can free up scarce tutor time for what really matters: personalised, human support for learners who need it most.

Government may expect providers to deliver an ever-expanding range of support on around £5,000 per learner, but, as my finance director likes to say, “I want Villa to win the Champions League – that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, especially under financial fair play rules”.

Perhaps over the next 12 months, more policymakers might consider putting their out-of-office on and attending a few of these events themselves – not to announce new initiatives, but simply to listen.

With Sir Martyn “Davros” Oliver and his inspection Daleks, ministers and their Cybermen, and the Weeping Angels of regulation waiting to strike when you blink, FE can feel permanently under siege. Our tutorial teams are the Doctors of this system, piloting their TARDIS through impossible terrain.