After graduating from Oxford three years ago, 24-year-old George found a job he rather liked. It didn’t require vocational training, which was lucky as he had no desire to make a life’s work of it, though he did find it enriching at times. There was no career structure but it paid the bills. The clincher was that the well-spoken English graduate only had to work three hours a day and rarely had to leave home before 3pm. As part of his job he saw the inside of some luxurious homes in Kensington, west London. Once he got paid to stay in a Swiss chalet and, after his three hours’ work was done each day, he was free to ski and drink hot chocolate in cafés.
George was working as a tutor, teaching primary school children English and maths. Some of his jobs were terrible; like the 11-year-old who barricaded himself into his room. But most of his charges were rewarding. He remembers one boy in particular: “His mum had gone and his relationship with his dad was terrible. I saw the boy for four hours a week. Mostly you’re employed for a target – to get children through exams,” he says. But this was different: “I got him really into reading. He was enthralled.”
George has put tutoring on hold for the moment. Not for lack of opportunities; the workload was interfering with his ambition to write a novel. The past few months would actually have been his busiest season, with tutors laying on cramming sessions for children preparing for the autumn’s entrance tests for grammar schools and this month’s entrance tests for private secondary schools.
For a variety of reasons, chief among them parental anxiety, the increasingly frenzied competition for places at grammar schools and academically selective private schools has caused what Lynne Ferguson, a private tutor with 25 years’ experience, describes as “an explosion” in demand for tutors’ services. There seems to be no shortage of people willing to pay tutors £30 to £50 an hour, and in London sometimes more than £100, for after-school coaching. While many professions suffer during the downturn, the private tuition industry is booming. Indeed, as Ferguson explains with teacher-like clarity: “Now every other child has been tutored so if yours hasn’t, then they are at a disadvantage.” Sue Fieldman, education adviser at the Good Schools Guide, the education consultancy, agrees: “It only takes one parent to start it off, and then it’s a lemming situation. Good tutors are chock-a-block.”
Yet for a business in such good health, it is surprisingly secretive: “It’s the profession that no one wants to talk about,” quips Fieldman. A Hertfordshire-based father of two state school-educated children, aged 11 and seven, one of whom has had tutoring for the past six months, explains why: “Most parents are reluctant to admit to using a tutor – it either means your child needs remedial attention or that you’re trying to steal a march on the others.” Generally, schools don’t like to admit their pupils see tutors either – it undermines academic credibility if exam results have been boosted by outside help. Moreover, those tutors who are in demand achieve extra cachet if their names are not widely known.
PRIME NUMBERS
‘It’s a bit sad but I found I was enjoying maths’
According to an Institute of Education study, maths is the most popular subject for extra lessons, and the Association of Tutors, a professional body based in Northamptonshire, has estimated that it accounts for around 40 per cent of all private tuition. With latest official figures revealing that nearly one-quarter of 11-year-olds in state primary schools are still failing to reach the expected standard for their age in maths, this is perhaps unsurprising.
It’s not a new problem though. As several parents in Judith Ireson’s Institute of Education research admitted, mothers and fathers often feel woefully ill-equipped to help with maths homework or coursework because it was their own worst subject when they were at school. In addition to this many find the modern curriculum and teaching methods unrecognisable.
The study also showed maths was the only subject where a few of the tutored children actually asked for more help themselves and where there was a small but significant increase in test scores, although only for boys.
This is significant because maths scores can make all the difference to a candidate’s selection by some secondary schools: “In borderline cases, a good maths result seems to give that edge,” advises Susan Hamlyn, a London tutor, “and certainly schools value that ability in maths as a likely measure of potential.”
Alex Wilson, 16 years old and preparing for GCSEs at a Tyneside private school, has already felt the benefits of an hour a week’s tuition in the subject. He speaks warmly about his tutor’s relaxed and humorous approach to making the maths problems less daunting, confessing he was dubious at first about the extra work involved.
But he feels the one-on-one tuition “helps drive things home” and has improved his marks as well as his confidence.
“Rob [the tutor] knows me and my mate Sam so he’ll make up maths questions with things about me and Sam in them and then we have to try and work out the probability. We don’t get that at school. Things have become a lot easier – I’m always thinking of things I don’t understand and want to ask about later – it’s a bit sad but I found I was quite enjoying my maths exam recently.”
The nature of the tutoring business is fragmented. Parents can choose between temporary, youthful and widely available tutors such as George, retired and serving teachers capitalising on their experience and agencies that offer to “match” pupils with a tutor from their databases. Some companies cover the whole country, and there is a particular focus on areas where competition for good school places is especially fierce. The levels of informality and discretion involved make figures hard to come by, but the Good Schools Guide estimates there may be as many as 1.5m private tutors working in the UK.
Some of these, at the top end of the market, may see themselves as the direct descendants of the Jane Eyre-like governesses who took care of the offspring of rich families in previous centuries. Tutors International, for example, specialises in providing live-in education staff for jet-setters and celebrities including Damien Hirst. But most agencies and individuals are cashing in on a vogue – only a few decades old – for getting that little bit of extra help to complement or compensate for schooling. Tony and Cherie Blair used teachers from nearby Westminster School for their son Euan while they lived in Downing Street. Geoff Hoon, the transport secretary, used Oxbridge Applications, a private company, to help his comprehensive-educated daughter with her university entrance. And it’s not just those with a high public profile taking the so-called “shadow education” route.
According to the only systematic study of private tuition in the UK, conducted in 2005 by researchers at the University of London’s Institute of Education, 27 per cent of families in the state system admit to having their child tutored at some point, but in some secondary schools the figure is as high as 65 per cent. Headteachers, tutoring companies and education consultancies believe the figures are higher because the IoE survey did not include children in private schools.
“Most of our students are in private schools already,” explains Julie Harrison of Harrison Allen tutors, a company based in south-west London that offers one-to-one help towards public exams and entrance tests as well as extra group classes at weekends. “It’s something about being prepared to pay for education. They value education.”
Fleet Tutors, a company that has 30 years’ experience and has matched over 28,000 clients with 6,900 private tutors across Britain, says the biggest change in demand is in coaching for the 11+ grammar school entrance test, up 35 per cent on 2007. Fleet also reports a doubling in demand for tutors to help seven- and eight-year-olds with private preparatory school entrance.
Fleet Tutors is strict about its vetting procedure for potential tutors, rejecting half its applicants, but others are not. Lynne Ferguson worries that the industry remains unregulated and “cowboy-led”. Anyone can set themselves up as a tutor, as numerous advertisements on Gumtree, the internet listing site, testify, and a Home Office scheme to have private tutors registered and vetted by the new Independent Safeguarding Authority has been put back until the autumn. “Parents should be wary,” says Mylène Curtis, Fleet’s dynamic managing director. “You are letting somebody into your home, and the web databases are a magnet for people who should not be working with children.”
Safety is not the only concern. Many tutors, such as George, have no teaching qualifications. The lack of qualifications horrifies Ferguson: “If you were going to get a man to fix your boiler you’d want them to be Corgi registered.” Not so for many parents hiring a tutor – partly because many of the most sought after are current or former teachers in the private school system, where historically there is no legal requirement for formal teaching training.
For some of the temporary tutors, professionalism and dedication have nothing to do with the matter. “They do it for the money,” observes Hannah, a 25-year-old theology graduate who teaches 12 students in north London. Hannah, who says money is not her primary motivation, discovered she enjoyed tutoring one-on-one seven years ago when a Korean neighbour asked her to coach her children in English. Though she has no formal teaching qualification, she has been doing it ever since. She describes the best bit of her job as “helping children get their natural smartness out”.
George agrees: “Tutors bring something different that teachers don’t supply ... like helping to build a child’s confidence.”
Rohail Ahmad, a 43-year-old former software programmer, who tutors maths and English to schoolchildren in Perivale, west London, says that the parental grapevine will decide a tutor’s worth: “If parents or students aren’t happy they vote with their feet.”
Some tutors are so in demand that it is they, rather than the parents, who do the vetting. Disgruntled parents complain of their child being rejected because the tutor fears their reputation for getting pupils into the top local schools will be affected. The Good Schools Guide points out that parents should accept this filtering: part of a good tutor’s job is to give advice to parents whose expectations of their son or daughter are out of line with what’s achievable. One north London primary school teacher favours a test before she takes on pupils and says she uses the results to steer a parent away from applying for a demanding school: “If the child is going to be in the bottom of the class I will persuade them to go elsewhere.”
According to Judith Ireson, author of the Institute of Education study, tutors have become such a staple of modern education that many parents she interviewed felt hiring one was part of their parental duty. “I don’t really think it should be necessary,” said one. “But he needed that support for the 11+, which I don’t agree with anyway. You always try to do the best for your child, even if it’s against your principles.”
Dr Martin Stephen, high master of St Paul’s, the boys’ London day school with a fearsome academic reputation, is harsh on the parents coaching their kids for entry to his and other highly selective schools in London and the south-east, where tutoring is most widespread. “It is money extremely badly spent,” he says. “You can’t put an Aston Martin body on a Morris, the illusion isn’t going to last.”
Finding a tutor
● Use your network. Word of mouth is the most effective and most popular source of good tutors – but the names are often jealously guarded.
● If you want someone to come to your home and fit around your schedule, the top agencies will be able to match a tutor to your child: ask if you can meet a few they select.
● Make sure the agency vets all its tutors and does Criminal Records Bureau checks: some internet listings sites are just databases. Anyone can call themselves a tutor and advertise without qualifications or experience.
Source: Good Schools Guide
St Paul’s and some other leading private schools are trying to halt the tutoring epidemic, as they see it, by letting it be known they are downgrading the importance of entrance test results. It is a game of cat and mouse: some grammar schools now rely mainly on verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests rather than exams in academic subjects to distinguish the brightest candidates from the best rehearsed. “That is more difficult to coach for,” admits Susan Hamlyn, a tutor with 30 years’ experience preparing children in south-west London for the transition to secondary school. “In a sense it’s a fairer system.”
She is, however, scathing about the private secondary school heads who complain about coaching: “Schools will say you don’t need it for their exams. But all the private prep schools prepare people and if you come from a state primary, as do most of my pupils, you don’t have that advantage.”
For opponents of excessive tutoring, one big concern is stress: “In some cases tutoring is dangerously close to child abuse,” is how Stephen puts it. Harrison Allen, which estimates that about 60 per cent of its London-based business is private school entrance tests, has witnessed parents entering 10-year-olds for up to six or seven exams rather than the usual one or two.
Ireson says studies of countries where tuition is the norm – Japan, for example, where it is estimated that half of all school-age children are enrolled in juku, or cramming schools – have highlighted other problems. “Schools can find that most of the class have worked ahead of the teacher or been taught different methods.” As one tutor points out: “If you feel your child is bored at school because they are ahead of others, how is a tutor, pushing them further ahead, going to make them happier?”
Indeed, George has had to tell parents – “gently” – that their children are under too much pressure. “It can be inhumane to make kids have two to three hours’ schooling on top of their normal day,” he says.
Chloë Palfreman, managing director of Oxbridge Applications, which helps sixth-formers prepare for university interviews and entrance tests, defends parents, saying “[they] have a desire to look out for the best interests of their child – they might not have had this [educational] background themselves and might not be equipped to help them.” Moreover, she points out: “For a 17-year-old to have someone who isn’t your parent take an interest in you can be important.”
Boosting a child’s confidence is felt by tutors, parents and children alike to be the most important aspect of extra tuition. As one headmistress of a state sixth-form college in north-west England admits: “I think our students would succeed without the extra tuition. But I don’t think it’s a waste of money if it gives them confidence. Private tuition makes a student believe they can do something and succeed.” Ferguson agrees: “You can adapt the lesson as you see the cogs turning in their brain. One-on-one has to make an enormous difference.”
11-year-old Yash goes to Rohail Ahmad in west London for maths tuition. He asked his parents for help because he was finding fractions and percentages difficult. “Teachers didn’t really explain it clearly and I wasn’t doing very well at school so I asked my mum and dad if I could go to a tutor.” He is pleased with his improvement: “Now I find maths easy. I like multiplying and getting to work with numbers.” He recommends having tuition to his friends: “It helps you to get better knowledge.”
Some names have been changed
