How much would you pay to boost your child’s grades? If you’re one of the 2.5 million parents in Britain who hire private tutors, the data suggests about £40 an hour. But for a wealthy elite locked in an arms race to secure their offspring the best education money can buy, the answer is: whatever it takes.
Enter the super-tutors – top professionals operating at the peak of a secretive industry running alongside mainstream schooling. The very best can earn six-figure salaries from families who consider these sums loose change.
A recent job advert on an elite tutoring agency’s website offered a glimpse into this weird world. The role: a full-time tutor for a promising young architecture undergraduate. The salary: £288,000 a year.
The figure made headlines, as did the requirement in the original listing, later changed, that the ideal candidate should be “fit and healthy” and from “a socially appropriate background”.
They must also be a qualified architect, who would act as “a mentor and a guide, helping the student navigate the nuances of her architectural education.”
Over his 23-year career as a super-tutor, Mark Maclaine has dealt with hundreds of families willing to offer large sums to candidates with very specific sets of skills. “I’ve been on private jumbo jets set out like apartments, yachts with helipads,” he says. “Some of these kids have eight tutors and three nannies. It’s insane.”
His clients have included bankers, tech entrepreneurs, royal families and rock stars – a mix of new money and old. “There was this proper East London lad who had won the lottery. He said he wanted to give his children everything he hadn’t had himself. These people want to do the best for their kids, and are able to pay for it.”
However, Maclaine, who founded the Tutorfair Foundation, said tutoring can become a crutch as for many uber-wealthy offspring, private tuition and mentorship lasts throughout their school careers and they find it hard to cope when that support is withdrawn.
“A lot of students have been massively over-tutored, from prep school all the way to university, when suddenly it stops,” he explains. “These kids have developed a sort of ‘learned helplessness’, and they end up needing support at university too.”
But if that’s what the family thinks their son or daughter needs, he adds, that’s what they get.
For the tutors, landing a job with an “ultra-high net worth” client can mean being parachuted into jet-setting lifestyles for months at a time. The architecture tutoring job, for instance, will be based wherever the undergraduate chooses to study: London, Cardiff, Newcastle, or Lugano in Switzerland.
One of Maclaine’s pupils was a physics undergraduate at a “top London university”, whose Geneva-based family had made money in finance. “I spent the winter with their son in Verbier,” he says. “We had a housekeeper and cook and spent a lot of the time skiing. It was a really fun job.”
Nathaniel McCullagh, founder of Simply Learning Tuition, has done “everything from deer-stalking to skiing to yachts and helicopters” over his 26-year career in high-end tuition.
