Parents are paying costly private tutors in a desperate bid to get their sons and daughters into top schools and universities
At a godchild’s birthday party I find myself seated next to a chatty six-year-old boy from an Anglo-Turkish family, London-born, privately educated, fizzing with confidence. What does he want to be when he grows up? A doctor, he replies, adding that he will need to attend a good university after a top school. His birthday party next January is being deferred for an extra-special “Getting into Westminster” celebration later in the year. “He will too,” confides another mother when I report this impressive conversation. “He’s bright and they’re tutoring him in everything.”
The rise of home tuition sounds like it should be a story about monstrous parents and overburdened kids. Instead, it is full of fear, anxiety and parents who are admirably determined that their children won’t miss out. For sure, there are some horrors, not just the families who put birthday parties on hold. There are the kids who attend Kumon maths classes at two years old. There was the mother who cancelled her family’s summer holiday so her daughter could be tutored and tested every single balmy day for entrance to St Paul’s. Quite unsmilingly, she describes her eight-year-old son as “a nightmare… just terrible, all he wants to do is play”.
