Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and today we are going to be talking about the government's

national tutoring program, the scheme which is designed to help children catch up at school

after Covid has had such a disruptive effect on education and where the money is actually going to be

going to, spoiler alert, not actually going directly to the children or even the schools themselves.

And later in the program we will be talking to Frances Wien and Ian Heslop about Robert Maxwell.

Robert Maxwell for those of you who are not familiar with him is one of the eye's greatest ever

enemies. He was a businessman, MP, Charlotteson, fraudster and crook who died in 1991 and has since

been having a remarkable comeback. There is a new book, a new podcast, a new everything about him.

He is back in the news and so I sat down with Frances and Ian to have a little chat about the

eye's memories of Mr. Maxwell. But first, education, education, education. The national tutoring

program is the government's flagship scheme designed to offer post lockdown catch up tutoring

to children who need it. Obviously thousands of children across the country have had their

education severely disrupted by Covid-19 and by learning from home. The money that's being put

into it sounds very impressive, £350 million. But as ever with this government there are questions

over exactly how that money is being distributed, who it's going to and how the whole scheme

is being managed. Jane McKenzie is privatised, education correspondent, among many other things,

and I had a chat with her about just how the scheme is being run and what it's aiming to achieve.

Here's Jane. So the tutoring program is aimed to help those kids who've been particularly affected

by lack of access to teaching and get them sort of caught up on the concepts and information

they've missed out on. On one level, that all sounds terribly positive. It's a good thing to be

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