58% of schools have cut their tuition support since the NTP was defunded, and yet private demand has never been higher.

I've been chewing on a couple of numbers that don't look like they belong in the same sentence. Around 58% of schools have cut back the tutoring they offer since the National Tutoring Programme was defunded. And yet 29% of secondary pupils in England and Wales now receive private tutoring, the highest figure on record.

Read quickly, that looks like a contradiction, or a market in trouble. Funding pulled, access falling, and somehow more tutoring than ever. I've watched plenty of people land on "the tutoring market is collapsing", and I understand why. But I promise you it's the wrong conclusion. The market isn't shrinking. It's changing shape.

The contradiction that isn't one

Start with the demand, because it's the part people get wrong. According to the Sutton Trust's Private Tutoring 2026 report, 29% of secondary pupils now receive private tuition, up from about 27% in 2019 and just 18% two decades ago. This is a market that has grown steadily for twenty years and now sits at the highest level the Sutton Trust has ever recorded. It is not falling off a cliff.

That growth isn't spread evenly, mind you, and that tells its own story. In London, around 45% of pupils now receive some form of private tuition, against roughly 27% across the rest of England. Among the best-off families, it's about 30%, compared with 23% of those in financial hardship. The households paying privately aren't doing it for want of an alternative. They're doing it because they want a person who is accountable to them and genuinely invested in their child, and they will pay to secure exactly that.

What's changed is who pays, and why. The National Tutoring Programme subsidised tutoring for state-school pupils after the pandemic. When it was defunded in 2024, the National Education Union reported that close to six in ten schools scaled back what they offer.

Where the demand actually went

Here's the shift that matters, and it's one I'm watching play out in real time. Tutoring is colliding with mainstream education in a way it simply hasn't before.

When a council or a school can't meet the needs of a child with an Education, Health and Care Plan (an EHCP), or a child on an Education Otherwise Than At School (EOTAS) arrangement, or a case of Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA), they increasingly commission a tutoring organisation to deliver that education instead. That work used to sit right at the edges of what most agencies did. For a growing number of organisations, it's quietly becoming the centre of the business.

And this is a very different buyer to a parent booking an hour of maths on a Tuesday evening. It's a council with a statutory duty, a budget line, and a procurement process. That changes everything about what winning the work looks like.

Councils don't buy on price, they buy on paperwork

A council will not simply hand a vulnerable child to whoever is cheapest or nearest. They do their due diligence, and they go through your compliance top to bottom. Safer recruitment, safeguarding, DBS, references, policies, the full paper trail. They want to see it, and they want it to hold up when a procurement officer reads every single line.

This is the part I'd tattoo on the wall of every agency if they'd let me. The organisations that win the next five years won't be the ones with the flashiest website or the lowest day rate. They'll be the ones whose compliance survives someone reading every line of it. And honestly, I don't blame the councils one bit. If it were my child on that placement, I'd want exactly the same.

What this means for your agency?

So the headline stat, 58% of schools cutting back, isn't the story at all. It's the surface of a market moving from informal and parent-led toward formal, commissioned and audited. That is not a market to be afraid of. It's a market to be ready for, particularly given how unregulated tutoring currently is.

Being ready means treating your compliance as part of the product, not the admin you get to on a spare afternoon. It means an audit trail you can produce on request, not reconstruct in a panic the week a tender lands. It's exactly why we built TotalOnboarder: so that when the chance to win serious, sustained, meaningful work turns up, your paperwork is an asset rather than a liability.

The tutoring market isn't collapsing. It's growing up. The agencies that grow up with it, the ones who can stand in front of a procurement officer and show a clean, complete, instant compliance trail, are the ones who'll still be standing in five years. The rest will keep reading the headlines and wondering where the work went.