‘You get paid well because it’s extremely difficult’: life as a private tutor for the rich

‘The knack of this kind of teaching is seeing the textbooks as launchpads but not limits.’ Photograph: Ianni Dimitrov Pictures/Alamy

This week, a job advert emerged for a private tutor to an architecture student with potential earnings of more than £2m. Here, Stephen*, who has worked as a private tutor to wealthy families for 16 years, describes what it takes. He has studied at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Pennsylvania. He speaks French, Italian, Japanese and English and plays the guitar and shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese vertical bamboo flute.

I have worked as a private tutor since 2007 including with families sailing round the world, living busy lives in London and on the continent and wintering in the Alps. Jobs generally last at least a year. My longest is four years. But in each case my intention is the same. Teaching is about making a positive contribution to the lives of young people.

My first position came after I responded to an advert in the Times Educational Supplement for a role on a yacht. It sounded very exciting.

There were three young children and the parents were very young at heart. They had a vision for a great family adventure. We sailed from Mallorca for nine months through the eastern Mediterranean, through the Red Sea to the horn of Africa and on through the Indian ocean to the Maldives. Then it was on to Thailand, Bali and through the Java Sea to Borneo, through the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu and ending in Australia.

You become part of the family to some degree in these posts, yet you must never forget professional boundaries. Physical space is very limited on a yacht – regardless of how big it is – so part of the challenge, and part of the fun, is what I’d call dynamic flexibility. The learning needs to be constantly being adapted.

On the voyage from Mallorca to Australia, many times in the middle of lessons one of the crew would spot dolphins off the bow and pencils went flying as we dashed up to see them. I would try to use that experience in lessons, perhaps as a topic for a poetry exercise or we might look at dolphins in Greek mythology.

The knack of this kind of teaching is seeing the textbooks as launchpads but not limits, and using an enormous amount of creativity to bring learning alive. Not least because family circumstances can change through travel, sudden things arising, changes of mind, who knows what. You have to be prepared to teach outside the framework.

You need a positive relationship with the family. You have to remain conscious and deeply respectful of your position. You are brought in as a trusted addition to the family circle, but you’re there to provide a professional service whose quality is going to be judged not just on results but on the happiness and enthusiasm of the children.

You have to be self-sufficient in dealing with these dynamics. There’s no board of governors, no headteacher you can consult. You send regular reports to Tutors International, the agency, and the families do the same. So the relationship is monitored to ensure things don’t go off the rails.

You do have to consider the impacts on your private life. It isn’t nine-to-five and obviously you don’t work from your own home. Traditional support systems don’t exist in the same way. That kind of flexibility doesn’t lend itself very easily to a pattern and lifestyle that many people like. So there are some very big questions involved before taking roles like this.

For education, these are big salaries. People might look from the outside at the sums involved and say woah, a salary like that to do a bit of teaching? Where do I sign?

But you must bring your absolute best game and every skill and intuition you’ve got to these positions: your best personal skills, your most sensitive awareness of family dynamics, your deepest insights and most vibrant creativity as an educator. And this is why these jobs are extremely difficult. You get paid well because you must be “on” in a way that I’m not sure many other jobs require. It requires internal dedication and enormous amounts of commitment, and we get compensated for that. Anyone who qualifies for one of these positions probably knows what it is to drive themselves in academia and in previous jobs and has an intense sense of wanting to fulfil their own personal potential while achieving the goals that the positions require.

The most common curriculums I have followed are British, American and elements of the international baccalaureate. I sometimes help with the university applications. I’ve been on university visits with students to take them around, ask questions, be supportive.

You ask if by giving this kind of intense high-level education to people who are already very privileged I feel that I am entrenching privilege. I have never thought about it in that way. When you’re in post, you want to be the best, most effective professional you can be. That becomes your sole focus. The rest is incidental, it fades into the background.

* not his real name

As told to Robert Booth