When ministers have faced difficulty during the pandemic, their response has been to send money to the private sector to deliver a solution. That approach struck gold with vaccines – but elsewhere the failures piled up. Test and trace, for instance, has been described by a former permanent secretary to the Treasury as “the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time”.

When it became obvious that millions of children were going to be affected by weeks and months out of the classroom, the government again turned to the private sector for its national tutoring programme (NTP) for England.

The programme announced by Boris Johnson in June in effect outsources the management and delivery of its key catch-up policy: private organisations offering one-to-one or small group tuition to disadvantaged pupils, paid out of government funds.

While some of the private providers involved are not-for-profit, others are profit-making. One of the problems with establishing a massive national tutoring programme is that there really aren’t that many qualified people available, and that if you want to employ graduates to tutor, you need to pay graduate salaries, especially in subjects such as maths.

The result, as revealed by the Guardian, has been private providers recruiting overseas and paying tutors far below what they would need to pay their peers in the UK.

The problem is not the recruitment of overseas tutors, which may be required because of shortages. The real issue is the reliance on private provision to solve a problem that the state school system and its teachers are having to address. Instead, the government seems intent on embedding private tuition into English education.

So far ministers have committed £1.7bn to boost learning in a generation of children hit hard by the pandemic, which pales in comparison with the billions spent on test and trace and the “chumocracy” of Covid contracts. And that is part of the problem, as the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, admitted to headteachers: the £1.7bn, including £200m for summer schools for disadvantaged pupils, “only scratches the surface”.

Yet there is less to the NTP than meets the eye. It receives £350m in direct government funding, now to be spread across two years, not one as initially promised. Future management of the NTP has been put out for tender by the Department for Education, with the winner to “establish a panel of tuition providers, and associated tutors, to deliver targeted tutoring services offered to all disadvantaged pupils” for £62m, with a further £120m to come from catch-up funds provided to schools.

But during this period the number of children to be offered the expected 15 hours of tuition is also expected to rise. Ministers have in effect created a growing pool of subsidised demand for private tuition, stretching for years into the future, while making it more expensive for schools to access.

While one great success amid the pandemic has been vaccine procurement, the delivery is down to the NHS, thanks to its network of specialised professionals and years of experience in administering mass vaccination programmes. There is a lesson to be learned for the national tutoring programme here: schools and teachers would be able to administer catch-up medicine more effectively if they were given all the funding without the private strings attached.