Support and stretch in the same classroom: tutoring, flexible groups and a proposal for Spain

Democracia 21's launch speech asks for an education with more support for those who fall behind and more room for those who can go further. We looked at what that means at the level of the system in our piece on PISA, Spain and Estonia: Spain is fairly equal, short of top performers, and relies on grade repetition. This piece goes down to the classroom, where the question becomes very practical. A teacher with 25 pupils has three who are lost in fractions and two who finished the worksheet ten minutes ago. What works for both groups?

What tutoring does

The best summary of the evidence comes from England's Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which grades school interventions by impact, cost and strength of evidence. Its tutoring guide puts it plainly: pupils can make up to five months of additional progress in a year with one-to-one tuition and up to four months in small groups. The group size matters. Once groups grow beyond six or seven pupils, the guide notes, effectiveness drops noticeably. Small groups cost far less than one-to-one and keep most of the effect, which is why most programmes use groups of two to four.

Spain has its own evidence, and it is good. In 2021 a team led from EsadeEcPol, with Lucas Gortazar, Claudia Hupkau and Antonio Roldán, ran a randomised trial in Madrid and Barcelona: 356 secondary pupils from 18 schools in very disadvantaged neighbourhoods, half of them assigned to online maths tutoring in pairs, three hours a week for eight weeks, with attention to emotional wellbeing. The trial registry describes the design. The results, published by EsadeEcPol in 2023, were large: 0.26 standard deviations on standardised maths tests and 0.48 on end-of-year maths grades.

Then came the harder test. A 2026 discussion paper from the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance, by Calle, Gortazar, Hernández-de-Benito, Hupkau, Molina-Millán and Roldán Mones, reports what happened when regional education authorities ran the programme themselves, with interim public-school teachers as tutors. Grades rose by 0.15 standard deviations and test scores by 0.11, about a third of the pilot's effect. That is still a solid gain for a short programme, and the honest lesson is that scale costs some of the effect, so every scale-up should be measured.

What grouping does

The other half of the question is how to stretch the able without leaving the rest behind. The EEF toolkit is clear about fixed streams. Setting and streaming, putting pupils into permanent groups by attainment, shows no average gain and a small negative impact on lower-achieving pupils. Within-class attainment grouping, where the teacher forms groups inside the class for particular tasks, adds around two months on very weak evidence, with a warning about long-term effects on the attitudes of the lowest achievers when those groups harden.

The pattern is consistent: grouping helps when it is flexible and temporary, and hurts when it becomes a label. That fits the Spanish structure. Eurydice notes that ESO runs from 12 to 16 as a common stage, and lists flexible grouping, splitting groups and optional subjects among the measures the regions can regulate. The tools are already in the law.

Spain is also poor at spotting its strongest pupils. Ministry statistics for 2022–23 count 51,396 pupils identified with high intellectual ability, about 0.6% of all pupils, and only 35.2% of them girls. Identification depends on an assessment by guidance services, so many able pupils, especially girls and those from poorer homes, never get the label or the stretch that comes with it.

A tutoring entitlement for both ends

The left is right that every pupil who falls behind has a right to public help early, inside the common school, before the gap becomes a repeated year. The market-liberal tradition is right that able pupils should be allowed to go faster, and that schools should be judged on results and left free to choose methods. Amartya Sen's capability approach sharpens both points: what matters is what each pupil can actually do by the end of the year, at either end of the class.

What fits neither camp is to use the same tool for both. Spain's PROA+ programme already funds more than 3,600 schools with €420 million, including €105 million a year from the European Social Fund, to raise the results of the pupils with the most difficulties and to reduce early leaving and excessive repetition, and it has been extended to 2028. It can carry a tutoring entitlement with three rules.

First, small groups of two to four, during school hours, for any pupil who falls behind in reading or maths on the school's own assessment, from primary onwards. Second, the same small groups for pupils who are ahead: extension work in maths, science or languages, the chance to take a subject a year early, and access decided by attainment on the school's tests, so a girl from a poor neighbourhood does not need a psychologist's report to get harder problems. Third, the groups are redrawn by subject every term. A pupil can be in catch-up for maths and extension for English, and nobody stays in a group because of last year's label.

Then test it the way Karl Popper would want, one piece at a time. The Spanish team has already shown how: random assignment where places are short, the region's own teachers as tutors, results compared with a control group. Each region that joins should publish its effect after a year. If the scaled programme keeps a third of the pilot's effect, it is worth paying for; if a region's version keeps less, the design needs fixing before it grows.