What’s the cost of hiring a private tutor in the UK?

The private tuition industry in the UK attracts the most brilliantly preposterous news stories, partly (I would argue) because there’s so little reliable information about it in the public domain.

Take the recent Telegraph article claiming that middle class parents are being ‘priced out’ of the market by the super rich. Apparently, ‘[t]he cost for an average tutor has doubled in four years to around £40 an hour, but those who can guarantee results can charge many times more’. As a result (according to ‘tutoring firms’ with a shameless eye for publicity) salaries of between £50k and £80k are now ‘commonplace’.

In the light of this, it was refreshing to read a new report by First Tutors, one of the UK’s most successful online tuition agencies. Their brief introduction to the industry calculates the average cost per hour of tuition, basing it on solid data from the tens of thousands of tutors on their books. According to them, the average cost of private tuition across all regions of the UK is £21.55 per hour, with surprisingly little regional variation as their graphic below illustrates.

At The Tutor Pages, we would roughly concur. For the thousands of private tutors advertising on The Tutor Pages over the last 5 years, we calculate a median average price of exactly £25/hour. Hence we would also agree with First Tutors’ assertion: that tuition does not have to be for the ‘privileged few’, and that their ‘clients come from a diverse cross-section of British society, all of them wishing to better their children’s prospects’.