Margaret Beattie's granddaughter, Angel Weldon-Beattie, was one 412 students to participate in The Smith Family's catch up learning program.

The 20-week intensive program paired students in grades four to eight with qualified tutors for two or three 30-minute online sessions per week.

Ms Beattie said Angel, who was in year five, was more confident in mathematics and was asking more questions in class after doing the program.

"Focusing is difficult for her at times but having the individual, one-on-one help was really important for her because it was tailored to her needs," Ms Beattie said.

An evaluation of the program compared the students who did the tutoring programs to a control group and found that 67 per cent of participants made greater progress than expected in numeracy over the six months, 53 per cent showed extra gains in literacy and 44 per cent made greater than expected progress in both domains.

The Smith Family head of research and advocacy Anne Hampshire said disruptions to education in the pandemic years has exacerbated some pre-existing challenges in educational outcomes in Australia.

"Prior to COVID there was already a gap between more advantaged students and more disadvantaged students despite the best efforts of schools and governments and families and organisations," Ms Hampshire said.

"What we've seen through COVID is particularly for disadvantaged children, that's become even a bit of a bigger gap in some cases."

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The Smith Family ran a small pilot tutoring program in 2020 and 2021 with 80 students off the back of international research which suggested tutoring could improve educational outcomes.

The second pilot, which ran in 2022, reinforced some of the benefits of an in-home, online tutoring program for students who were already part of The Smith Family's learning for life program.

"What we've heard is that students enjoy it, parents really value it, and the tutors actually also love being involved in it because they can see pretty well immediate results," Ms Hampshire said.

"These are children who had been struggling in literacy and numeracy for a number of years."

She said the high completion rate of 83 per cent and high attendance rate of 86 per cent showed families valued the program and that it was engaging for students.

The NSW and Victorian governments did large-scale literacy and numeracy tutoring programs and South Australia offered numeracy tutoring in the wake of COVID-19.

The ACT government has not invested in any small group or one-on-one tutoring programs to help students catch up.

An Education Directorate spokesman said ACT students continued to perform well compared to other jurisdictions and that schools were well-resourced to address students' needs.

Ms Beattie said the catch-up tutoring program was a good early intervention considering they were still waiting for a learning assessment from a psychologist.

"We're Aboriginal and so education is really important to us in terms of closing the gap and schools can't always offer that one-on-one support because they've got so many students in the class," she said.

"So having something that is available for the kids at home and which is suited to their needs is great because they're not getting it in the schools."

Ms Hampshire said The Smith Family were seeking funding to run another trial for online tutoring for small groups to reach more students.

"We need great teachers doing great work in schools. On top of that, we need to think about how can we better support children who are most struggling and I appreciate all the departments of education are really focused on that."

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