18:27 EST, 10 December 2013
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03:45 EST, 11 December 2013
Watching the sunset from the panoramic terrace of a luxury villa in Ibiza, glass of fine wine in hand, Davina Langdale allowed herself a moment of quiet satisfaction.
And little wonder: ahead of her lay a convivial dinner, laid on by her hosts, before lunch the following day at one of the island’s finer restaurants.
You might commonly associate such a lifestyle with a City banker, yet 35-year-old Davina is a tutor, flown out to Ibiza by a group of British families to hothouse their ten-year-old children.
Nor is this a one-off: since she started tutoring five years ago, Davina has become every bit as accustomed to working on the deck of a yacht moored off the coast of Monaco as she has to teaching in the immaculate drawing rooms of London’s more expensive postcodes.
Davina is just one of a new breed of ‘supertutors’ — an elite group of 20 and 30-something graduates who, fuelled by the desperate competition for school places and the anxieties of both middle-class and wealthy parents, can earn hundreds of pounds a day and enjoy extraordinary perks. Some are so sought after they are booked up to two years in advance.
Among their clients are junior school children with parents desperate to get them into top public schools, and teenagers struggling with their GCSEs and A-levels seeking a place at a top university.
Last month, a spotlight was shone into this world when it emerged that a 20-year-old student at Cambridge University was offering a private tutor £48,000 for a 16-week assignment to help him re-take the first year of his Natural Sciences course.
The contract equates to £100 an hour — fees usually commanded only by top lawyers and private doctors.
Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow and her rock star husband Chris Martin are said to have advertised for a private tutor for their children Moses and Apple.
They reportedly offered £62,000 a year for someone with a knowledge of Japanese, tennis and chess.
Yet none of this is much of a surprise to the new breed of tutors, many of whom embarked on private teaching work as a stop-gap only to find it turning into a lucrative career. Davina, a zoology and art school graduate, started tutoring five years ago while she wrote a novel.
Today she tutors a minimum of 17 hours a week, which can rise to 30 in the school holidays. ‘There is never a dull moment,’ she says. ‘The old-fashioned image of tutoring tends to be Jane Eyre-style governesses in a dusty attic. But it’s very far from that these days.
‘I work in extremely nice houses in the best parts of London. I’ve been in beautiful places and been around beautiful things and I am paid well for it. My job feels like a privilege.’
And little wonder, with clients such as the London-based family with the yacht moored off Monaco.
‘I stayed in a luxurious cabin usually inhabited by a member of the family, and each night I had supper with them — five courses prepared by their on-board chef,’ she says.
‘When the family went back to London for 24 hours I was left on board with seven members of crew to wait on me. It was rather lovely.’
At tutor agency Bright Young Things, co-founder Woody Webster says it is not uncommon to find entire classes of pupils in some London postcodes all having private tuition.
‘We all know the competition to get into the most popular schools — both private and grammar — is ten times more competitive than it was even a decade ago,’ says Woody.
‘What do you pay your plumber — £70 an hour? So why wouldn’t you think about paying a tutor £100 pounds an hour?’
One of Bright Young Things’ ‘star’ tutors is Phineas Pett, 29, a London-based French and German graduate who started tutoring in his mid-20s to pay his way through drama school but who has now made it his living — a career that has taken him from Europe to New York and the Far East.
‘I’ve never had to market myself,’ he says. ‘If you’re good you work on referrals. I got three French tutoring requests in a single morning because one mum had mentioned me at a dinner party.
‘But it’s not all the enormously rich — many of them are normal middle-class families who see it as an investment. A lot of mums are really proud to employ a tutor, but equally a lot say “please don’t tell anyone”.
‘Some mothers are actually friends with each other but they don’t know they share me, which is quite funny.’
On one occasion, Phineas rang the doorbell of a grand home in North London only to be ushered to the back entrance by the lady of the house.
‘She had guests and she was mortified by the idea that they would know their kids had a tutor. It was like we were having an affair,’ he recalls.
Others are more open: Phineas recently returned from a ten-day all-expenses-paid trip to Kazakhstan to tutor a nine-year-old for the Eton entrance exam, dining with the family and their guests in their palatial drawing room.
Next week he takes off to a high-end skiing resort in Austria for six weeks to tutor the teenagers of a British expat family. ‘Generally the parents are lovely,’ he says. ‘Although they are usually more stressed than the children when it comes to exams’.
One of his favourite assignments was 18 months ago, when he was flown to the Bahamas for three weeks by a British-American family who wanted him to help prepare their 13-year-old son for the common entrance exam to Harrow School.
‘They put me up in a boutique hotel and when I wasn’t tutoring I was in the pool or on the golf course which was lovely,’ he says.
He was, however, tutoring for around six hours a day, and was paid a £300 daily rate for the time he was there — about average when he is away from home.
‘It sounds a lot but your day rate is to compensate for money not earned back at home,’ he says. ‘And there are tutors charging that per hour’.
That’s the hourly rate charged by Mark MacLaine — but it can rise to over £1,000.
Such sums are clearly no bar to demand — MacLaine, 33, is now booked for evenings and weekends until Easter 2016. ‘I do understand it’s ridiculous,’ he says. ‘But that is the market.’
Certainly it is the market if, like Mark, you tutor the children of foreign royalty, the Hollywood A-list and the insanely wealthy.
His work has seen him tutoring anywhere from the salon of a private plane to movie sets, while perks have included an all-expenses-paid trip to the Galapagos Islands.
At this level, competition is so fierce that MacLaine has had instances of parents trying to gazump one another.
‘When you hit £1,500 an hour and you’re still saying no then you realise it’s crazy,’ he smiles wryly. He only agrees, he insists, if they will also pay that sum to the agency he has recently established, Tutorfair, which provides free tuition to underprivileged children.
‘If you ask me why people pay such a lot of money I would say it is because I have a proven track record when it comes to getting good exam results,’ he says.
‘At the other end of the market it’s a case of some people just want to pay top rate — it is just what they are used to.
And their kids are important to them. If they have the money to spend why wouldn’t they spend it on their education?’
It’s a sentiment echoed by Adam Caller, founder of Tutors International, which was charged with securing the £48,000 tutor for the Cambridge undergraduate.
‘Someone asked me why on earth anyone would want to spend £48,000 on their children’s education? To which my reply was “who would want to spend £48,000 on a car?”
‘It seems like an extraordinary amount of money but it’s actually a very hard job, basically re-teaching almost half the Cambridge first year course in the space of just three months.’
It remains an enormous sum — but entirely typical for Tutors International, which handles hundreds of requests every year.
All their employees earn a minimum of £72,000 and one American family recently offered a £400,000 annual salary, plus accommodation, four return flights a year and use of a convertible, to help their 14-year-old son at their home in California.
‘Again it’s a lot of money but it was a full-on job, working every weekday evening, often till midnight, and a lot of weekends,’ Caller says. ‘It’s quite isolating too and there are only certain people who can cope with that.’
Such are the often exacting standards of parents that Will Orr-Ewing, founder of London-based Keystone tutors, thinks it is not dissimilar to that of hiring a doctor or a lawyer.
It’s one reason why he has started to put some of the 200 tutors on Keystone’s books — including Davina Langdale — on employee contracts, complete with pension and holidays.
‘I dislike the word “supertutor” and prefer the term “professional tutor”,’ he says.
‘What I want two years from now is for us to have a team that’s more like a small magic circle law firm — 30 or 40 high-end tutors who are committed and will be doing it for 20 years.
‘We’re borrowing a bit from New York — there the professional tutors are not as well paid as doctors but they are certainly held in equally high esteem.’
Lawrence Drew runs Owl Tutors, a London agency with what he likes to think is a unique selling point: unlike many other agencies the young men and women on his books are not just graduates but qualified teachers, some with many years teaching experience.
‘Who better to teach than someone who has been trained to do so?’ he says.
Not that the lack of a teaching qualification has stood in the way of the new elite breed of tutors.
As Davina Langdale puts it: ‘So many bright young people emerge from university expecting their working life to be interesting and varied, and so many are disappointed, so I feel very lucky — and not just because I was in Ibiza last weekend,’ she says.
‘If someone had explained to me when I was 20 what life as a professional tutor would be like I might well have gone into it earlier.’