Tutoring Work for Teachers After the NTP (2026)

For four years, a large number of teachers had an unfamiliar experience: being paid extra, by their own school, to do small-group and one-to-one tuition with their own pupils. The National Tutoring Programme normalised something the English state system had never really done at scale, and then it stopped. If you were doing school-led tutoring in 2023/24, the money disappeared underneath you and nobody explained where it went.

This page explains what happened, precisely and with sources, because the question "is there still tutoring funding" gets an astonishing range of confident wrong answers. It then does the more useful thing: sets out where paid tutoring work for teachers actually exists in 2026, what the market data says it pays, and what a realistic second income from it looks like alongside a full-time job. If you need the rules on whether you are permitted to tutor at all, our private tutoring rules guide covers that; for the money side, see tax on tutoring income for teachers.

What the NTP was, and what it actually did

The National Tutoring Programme launched in November 2020 as the flagship element of the English education recovery response to the pandemic. Its premise was straightforward and well supported by evidence: small-group and one-to-one tuition is one of the more reliably effective interventions available to schools, and the pupils who lost most during closures were disproportionately those least able to buy it privately.

Over its life the programme ran through several delivery routes. Tuition Partners were approved external providers that schools could buy in, subsidised at 70% in 2021/22, falling to 60% and then 25%. Academic Mentors were salaried, school-based staff. And School-Led Tutoring gave schools a ring-fenced grant to source their own provision — which, crucially for teachers, expressly permitted schools to use their own existing staff.

The scale was genuinely substantial. The Department for Education estimates around 6.17 million tutoring courses were provided across the life of the programme, including roughly 2.2 million in 2021/22, 2.1 million in 2022/23 and 1.5 million in the final year. The declining trajectory across those three years tracks the declining subsidy rate almost exactly, which is itself the clearest evidence of what happened when the money was withdrawn.

How it ended, and when

There was no dramatic announcement, which is part of why the ending is still misunderstood. The NTP was wound down on a published schedule, and the final grant conditions document said so in terms.

The grant funding conditions for the 2023 to 2024 academic year stated plainly that "academic year 2023 to 2024 is the final year of the programme and NTP funding will not be awarded beyond this academic year." In that final year the subsidy had fallen to 50% of tutoring costs, capped at £9 per pupil per hour for mainstream schools against a maximum hourly rate of £18, with schools funding the remaining half from pupil premium, recovery premium or their core budget. Funding could only be spent on the staff costs of delivering tuition — not on diagnostic tools, room hire, equipment, laptops, transport or stationery.

Delivery ran to August 2024. The GOV.UK page carrying the grant conditions was formally withdrawn on 15 October 2025, with the withdrawal notice reading simply: "The National Tutoring programme has now closed." That withdrawal is the administrative full stop, and it is the thing to point at when someone tells you funding might still be available.

School-Led Tutoring and the PPA rule that protected you

It is worth pausing on the School-Led Tutoring strand, because it is the one that directly employed classroom teachers and because its guidance contained a protection that teachers should still know about.

Under School-Led Tutoring, eligible state-funded schools received a ring-fenced grant to fund locally sourced tutoring for disadvantaged pupils. The Department's guidance was explicit that this "could include using existing staff such as teachers and teaching assistants or external tutoring resources such as private tutors or returning teachers", on the reasoning that it gave schools "the flexibility to use tutors with whom they are familiar."

Then came the protection. In a short paragraph headed simply "Teachers", the guidance stated:

"Schools may consider using staff teachers to deliver tuition to pupils. However, this should not affect their Planning, Preparation and Assessment (PPA) time. Schools should continue to meet their obligations to teachers as detailed in the School teachers' pay and conditions document."

That sentence did real work. It established that tuition delivered by a school's own teachers was additional to the core role, not a reallocation of protected non-contact time — which is precisely the corner that a budget-pressed timetabler would otherwise be tempted to cut. The guidance also set a competence bar: teachers without QTS and with less than two years' experience in the relevant subject and phase could not deliver tuition until they had completed the programme's training course.

The TLR3 clause that survived in the STPCD

Here is a detail that almost nobody has noticed, and that matters if your school still wants to pay you for tutoring work. The money went. The pay mechanism did not.

We searched the full text of the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2025 for the word "tutoring". It appears exactly three times, and all three are in the guidance on TLR3 payments. Paragraph 54 of the guidance provides that a TLR3 is a fixed-term award which may be made "only for clearly time-limited school improvement projects, one-off externally driven responsibilities, or where teachers are undertaking planning, preparation, coordination of, or delivery of tutoring to provide catch-up support to pupils on learning lost to the pandemic, and where that tutoring work is taking place outside of normal directed hours but during the school day."

The same paragraph then does something unusual. TLR3s are normally not repeatable — the guidance says relevant bodies "should not award consecutive TLR3s for the same responsibility" — but it immediately carves out an exception: "unless that responsibility relates to tutoring, as set out above."

That carve-out was written for the NTP era, and it is still sitting in the operative pay document. Its practical significance in 2026 is this: a school that wants to pay a teacher for tutoring delivered outside directed hours has a nationally recognised, repeatable mechanism to do it with, and does not need to invent an arrangement. What it needs is the budget. Anyone negotiating for paid tutoring work in their own school should know the clause exists.

Two honest caveats before anyone gets their hopes up. TLR3s are not subject to safeguarding, so the payment stops dead when the fixed term ends, with no protected sum afterwards. And the pro-rata principle does not apply to TLR3s — a part-time teacher receives the full annual value rather than a reduced one, which is unusually favourable and worth knowing. The current TLR3 range runs from £727 to £3,600 a year, with a fixed term of less than a year valued proportionately to that annual figure. Our TLR payments guide and TLR calculator cover how the three tiers work.

What replaced it: nothing, in cash

This section is short because there is not much to report, and the shortness is the finding.

No ring-fenced tutoring grant has replaced the NTP. There is no successor scheme with an allocation per pupil-premium pupil, no national tuition partner framework, no subsidy rate. Schools that continue to run tutoring do so from pupil premium, recovery premium where it still applies, or their general budget, competing against every other pressure on that budget. The decision has been fully devolved back to individual schools, which is exactly the condition under which provision becomes patchy and unequal.

That is not a criticism so much as a description. It does, though, mean that the honest answer to "where do I find school-funded tutoring work now" is: only where your own school or trust has chosen to prioritise it, and you will find that out by asking your senior leadership rather than by looking for a national scheme.

AI tutoring and the schools white paper

The nearest thing to a policy successor is not a tutoring programme at all. It is a technology procurement, and it is worth understanding accurately rather than through headlines.

The Every Child Achieving and Thriving schools white paper, published earlier in 2026, sets out a path to halving the gap between outcomes for poorer children and their peers. In April 2026 the Department for Education and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology jointly invited edtech companies and AI labs to bid to build safe, personalised AI tutoring tools building on that white paper.

Read that table carefully and the point becomes obvious: the money goes to software companies, and the scale is a few million pounds of development funding rather than the hundreds of millions that flowed through the NTP to pay for human tuition. It is not a source of paid work for teachers, and it should not be described as an NTP replacement in the sense teachers care about.

Meanwhile, the private market grew

While funded in-school tutoring was being wound down, the parent-funded market was doing the opposite. The Sutton Trust's Private Tutoring 2026 research, published in February 2026, is the authoritative source here and its findings are striking.

Twenty-nine per cent of secondary school pupils in England and Wales have had private tutoring at some point. That is the highest figure in a series running twenty years, up from 18% when the data collection began and from 27% in 2019. It is not a marginal increase in a stable market; it is a long-run structural shift in what a substantial minority of families now consider normal.

The regional picture is sharper still. In London, 45% of pupils had received private tutoring, against 27% across the rest of England. The socioeconomic split is real but narrower than the regional one: 30% of better-off pupils against 23% of the worst-off. That second pairing deserves a moment's thought, because it cuts against the assumption that tutoring is purely an affluent phenomenon — nearly a quarter of the poorest pupils have had it, which suggests a great many families are finding the money somewhere.

And the in-school picture moved the other way. Twenty per cent of pupils had received one-to-one or small group tutoring in their school, down from 22% in 2023. Separate polling of teachers in 2025 indicated that 58% of schools had reduced their tutoring offer compared with the previous year.

The two-tier picture in one place

The implication for an individual teacher is uncomfortable but clear. The tutoring work that was funded to reach the pupils who most needed it has largely gone. The tutoring work that pays you well is funded by the families most able to pay. Those are not the same children, and a market with a record 29% participation and a shrinking in-school offer is, by construction, widening the gap that the NTP was created to close.

Nothing about that makes it wrong for an individual teacher to tutor privately. It does make a case for being clear-eyed about what the market is, and it is one reason some teachers deliberately reserve a proportion of their tutoring hours for reduced or no fee, or work through charitable programmes such as those run by tutoring charities that place volunteers with disadvantaged pupils.

Where the paid tutoring work actually is now

With the national scheme gone, paid tutoring work for a serving teacher comes from five places. They differ substantially in pay, reliability and admin burden.

• Direct private clients. Parents who find you by word of mouth or local recommendation. The highest rate, because there is no commission, and the most reliable once established — families tend to stay for a whole exam course. The slowest to build, and you carry all the admin, vetting and payment chasing.
• Tutoring platforms and marketplaces. Online matching services that find pupils and handle payment for a commission, typically anywhere from around 15% to over 30% of what the parent pays. Much the fastest way to get your first pupils, and the easiest to fit around a full-time job because the sessions are online. Read the terms on taking families off-platform before you sign.
• Traditional tutoring agencies. More curated, usually in-person, often higher headline rates, frequently focused on entrance exams, independent school entry and A level. Higher expectations around your track record and often a formal interview and vetting process.
• Your own school, via TLR3 or an internally funded programme. Still possible under the STPCD mechanism above, but entirely dependent on your school choosing to spend its own money. Worth asking about directly, particularly in a school with a strong pupil premium strategy.
• Charitable and subsidised programmes. Several tutoring charities continue to place tutors with disadvantaged pupils, some paid, some volunteer. Rates are lower than the private market by design, and the pupils are the ones the NTP was built for.

What you can realistically charge in 2026

Rate data for tutoring is inherently messy — it comes from platform listings, tutor surveys and directory averages rather than from any official source — so treat the following as a well-triangulated range rather than a definitive scale. The consistent finding across 2026 sources is a median around £30 an hour across all tutors, with most falling between £30 and £50, and a clear premium for qualified teachers, for A level, and for London.

Two structural adjustments apply on top. Online tutoring typically commands around £5 to £10 an hour less than the equivalent in-person rate, because the tutor has no travel time and lower overheads — but that gap is usually smaller than the value of the travel time you save, so online work is frequently better per hour of your actual life. And shortage subjects behave as you would expect: maths, physics, chemistry and modern foreign languages at A level sit at the top of every range, and a serving A level physics teacher is close to the most sought-after profile in the market.

A realistic annual picture for a full-time teacher: three hours a week at £40, across the 39 weeks of the school year, is £4,680 of gross income. Four hours at £45 across the same period is £7,020. Both are meaningful sums against a teaching salary, and both are achievable without the work becoming a second job in any real sense. Our tax guide works through what you actually keep from figures in exactly that range — the short version is that a basic rate teacher keeps around 84% of gross on a £4,800 practice, which is better than most people expect.

Starting without quitting your job

The practical constraint on tutoring as a second income is not demand. It is that the hours available to you — weekday evenings and weekends in term time — are the same hours you currently use for marking, planning and recovering. The teachers who sustain tutoring for years, rather than burning out in a term, are almost always the ones who started deliberately small.

The honest risks of tutoring as a second income

Most guidance on this subject is written by people with an interest in you signing up to something. These are the things that actually go wrong.

• Workload compounding. Tutoring demand peaks in February to May, which is exactly when your own marking, mocks, controlled assessment and revision sessions peak. The two curves are perfectly correlated and there is no clever scheduling fix for that.
• Income that is not pensionable. Tutoring profit builds no Teachers' Pension. An hour of tutoring at £45 is worth less over a lifetime than an hour of the equivalent pensionable pay, because the TPS employer contribution is 28.68% of salary and you get none of it on tutoring income.
• No sick pay, no holiday pay, no notice. A family that stops after the mocks stops immediately. Income is seasonal, and it falls off a cliff in July.
• Tax administration you have never done before. Manageable, but the first-year payments on account can genuinely surprise a teacher with a larger practice — see our tax guide.
• Professional risk if you get the boundaries wrong. The 2026 prohibition case discussed elsewhere on this site is the extreme version, but the underlying exposure is real: private one-to-one work with children, outside your employer's safeguarding infrastructure, requires you to run your own.
• Opportunity cost against other routes. An NPQ, a TLR, or moving to the Upper Pay Range are all permanent, pensionable increases. Tutoring is not. It is better thought of as flexible income now, rather than as career progression.

The counterweight is real too. Tutoring is one of the very few ways to increase your income without taking on more accountability, more meetings or a leadership post you do not want. It is genuinely enjoyable teaching — one pupil, no behaviour management, visible progress, and the thing you trained to do without the apparatus around it. A lot of teachers report that it reminds them why they went into the job. That is not nothing, and it does not show up in a spreadsheet.

If your reason for exploring this is that your teaching salary no longer covers your outgoings, tutoring is a partial answer and worth doing — but it is worth reading our should I leave teaching and upper pay range guides alongside it, because a permanent, pensionable increase is worth several times a comparable amount of tutoring income over a career.

Sources and accuracy

The NTP material is taken from the Department for Education's published grant funding conditions for the 2023 to 2024 academic year, including its statement that 2023/24 was the final year and its withdrawal notice dated 15 October 2025, and from the Department's published National Tutoring Programme statistics for delivery volumes. The School-Led Tutoring quotations, including the PPA protection and the training requirement, are from the Department's updated School-Led Tutoring guidance. The TLR3 provisions are quoted from the guidance section of the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2025, which remains the operative document at the time of writing with the STPCD 2026 still in consultation.

The AI tutoring material is from the joint DfE and DSIT announcement published on GOV.UK on 16 April 2026 inviting edtech and AI companies to build AI tutoring tools, which itself references the Every Child Achieving and Thriving schools white paper published earlier in 2026. Participation statistics are from the Sutton Trust's Private Tutoring 2026 research, published in February 2026.

Two honest limitations. First, the hourly rate table is triangulated from several 2026 commercial tutoring rate surveys and directory analyses rather than from any official statistic — no government body publishes private tutoring rates, and the underlying samples are self-selecting. Treat the ranges as indicative of market shape, not as authoritative figures. Second, we have deliberately not speculated about the long-term effect of AI tutoring on the commercial market beyond noting which segment it targets, because there is no evidence base for a stronger claim yet and anyone offering one is guessing.

This page describes the position in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland ran their own recovery programmes on different terms, and the STPCD analysis applies to England only — Wales operates under the STPC(W)D, which our Wales pay scales page covers.