- The Guardian Monday 2 May 2022
(^16) National
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Use national
tutoring
programme,
Zahawi tells
schools
Smart pups:
study aims
to build a
better breed
of guide dog
Jessica Murray
The education secretary will write to
schools this week to urge them to use
the government’s fl agship national
tutoring programme (NTP), which
has been criticised for failing to help
disadvantaged pupils.
The Department for Education
(DfE) also announced it would pub-
lish data showing how each school is
using the programme, and that this
would be shared with Ofsted.
Robert Booth
Social aff airs correspondent
Researchers are hoping to unleash a
new generation of improved guide
dogs by studying the cognitive
behaviour of puppies.
The Guide Dogs for the Blind Asso-
ciation charity has launched a“ puppy
cognition” research project that will
analyse the responses of eight-week-
old canines to see which ones best
handle surprises, how they interact
with human voices and how they
react to difficult and sometimes
impossible problems.
The results will then be tracked as
the animals mature in an attempt to
work out what makes a good guide
dog, and the information will subse-
quently be used to improve breeding
programmes.
The charity is already swab-
bing dogs for DNA samples to help
improve the performance of future
guide dogs.
“What we’re looking at is how our
dogs are able to problem solve,” said Dr
Helen Whiteside , the chief scientifi c
offi cer at the £112m-a-year charity.
“From the breeding perspective
what we might be doing is looking
at which aspects of this are heritable
It said that during this academic
year, an estimated 40% of schools
are yet to off er any tutoring sessions
through the NTP, a key part of the
government’s £5bn post-pandemic
education recovery programme.
In a letter to schools, published
today, Nadhim Zahawi wrote: “Start-
ing this week, my department will
contact those schools yet to off er
tutoring support to discuss their
plans and off er further support to
ensure they can off er tutoring to their
pupils this term.
“As part of my desire to ensure
... so that we can make sure we’re
keeping those amazing traits that
are fantastic within our breeding
population.”
The puppies will participate in
six tasks, including an unsolvable
problem that will involve a closed
container with visible food inside
being placed in front of the m. The
dogs’ responses will be monitored
and after 30 seconds the box will be
opened.
An odour-discrimination activity
will see a puppy presented with two
tubes: one with food and one with-
out. The tubes are then switched to
see if the puppy can determine where
the food is.
A surprising events task will
involve three diff erent items appear-
ing in an assessment pen: a bin bag
containing crumpled paper, an
umbrella opening and a metal sheet.
The puppy’s reactions will then be
monitored.
Giving an example of where a
guide dog might need to solve a prob-
lem, Becky Hunt, a canine s cience
associate at the charity, said: “If
they’re walking down the street and
there’s a car parked on the road and
there’s not enough space for both of
them to fi t through, the dog has to
kind of solve that problem. Is it safe to
go around and walk around that car?”
Hunt added: “Essentially, we
want to improve our breeding pro-
gramme, we want to improve what
we do, we want to improve support-
ing our dogs.”
The Guide Dogs for the Blind Asso-
ciation aims to partner about 1,
dogs with people who need them to
assist with everyday life every year.
The charity stressed that the
activities were designed to be fun
and interesting, but if a puppy did
not want to engage or show ed any
signs of being uncomfortable, the
task would be stopped.
greater transparency of the impact
of the programme, I am planning to
publish data on each school’s tutor-
ing delivery at the end of the year
alongside the funding allocations
and numbers of pupils eligible for
the pupil premium.”
The tutoring programme has
previously been criticised as “dys-
functional”, with schools and
tuition providers reporting problems
accessing the scheme managed by
Randstad, a Dutch human resources
fi rm awarded £25.4m to run it. It
links schools with approved tuition
providers via a platform that many
schools have struggled to access.
More than a million tuition
courses have been started during the
2021/22 academic year, but only just
over 100,000 of these were started
through the Randstad route. Most
were through the schools-led tuition
route, where schools were awarded
funding to spend on tuition directly.
In March the government sev-
ered its contract with Randstad for
the forthcoming academic year, with
the DfE announcing schools would
instead receive direct funds.
▲ Researchers will seek to fi nd out what makes a good guide dog by analysing
how puppies respond to a series of tasks PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO