The Daily Mail on ‘Super Tutors’

On average, tutors registered with The Tutor Pages charge something between £15 and £45 per hour. These are reasonable rates – from both the tutor’s perspective and the parent/ student’s – and are rates chosen by the tutors themselves. They are clearly the kind of rates that the market dictates.

In one of the most ludicrous articles on private tuition I’ve yet seen, the Daily Mail discusses ‘super-tutors’ who charge ‘up to £300 an hour’. The article’s conflation of the ‘very particular indeed’ with the ‘industry in general’ might actually be amusing if it didn’t make a nonsense of most people’s experiences of private tuition. It is clearly designed to titillate the readership.

If you don’t wish to read the article in full, here are some extracts which I’ll leave you to cringe over:

“tutors exist in a world in which clients have so much money, their fees are almost irrelevant. Indeed, the more these parents are charged, the happier they are.”

“Highly qualified Oxbridge graduates are turning their backs on banking and deciding to become tutors instead as they discover they can name their own price.”

“For as everyone from Kazakh billionaires to Oscar-winning actors knows, if you want a tutor to brag about, they have to be British.”

“Clearly, every tutor hopes to be taken up by a super-rich family, such as one governess […] who was chaperoning Middle Eastern princesses.“

Finally, would it be the Daily Mail if there wasn’t something salacious?:

“An awful lot of mothers hire the tutor for themselves, not the children at all, and have affairs with them in the holidays while their husbands are working.”