Meet the ‘super-tutors’
coaching children (supposedly on half-term break…) to get into the best schools Can an elite holiday club costing £1,500 a week give pupils the edge in their entrance exams? Luke Mintz reports
In a brightly lit studio in the heart of Chelsea, six boys and one girl are lying flat-out on yoga mats. “This is your safe, relaxed, calm pose,” their instructor assures them as she guides the children through their “lion’s breath”, a deep inhalation exercise that will, they are told, help focus their minds during the five hours of tuition that lie ahead.
It is the first day of October half-term at Class Action, a “super-tutoring” club aimed at Britain’s elite. Aged between six and 11, the yogees are mostly the offspring of bankers and oil executives, plus one headmaster, who have each shelled out £1,500 for the five-day course. As millions of other schoolchildren up and down the country spend their week dilly-dallying on Fortnite, these children are brushing up on trigonometry with teachers from some of the UK’S leading public schools.
Their parents claim to have little choice: clubs like these are necessary if they are to have any hope of getting their son or daughter into an elite private or grammar school, they say, where applicants outnumber places by about 10 to one, according to last year’s The Good Schools Guide.
The rat race has become particularly savage this year: figures published last month by the Sutton Trust show that 27 per cent of 11- to 16-year-olds in England and Wales have received private tuition, up from 18 per cent in 2005, and rising to 34 per cent in “high-affluence” households. Parents in the capital are now paying an average £70,675 extra to buy a house inside the catchment area of a good school, according to Santander; the Uk-wide average is £26,860.
Each day of the club begins with a yoga and mindfulness class, accompanied by an organic fruit smoothie. Next, children are taken through intensive maths and English lessons, broken up with sports, including cricket at Lord’s and a football training programme developed by Andy Gray, the former England midfielder who also played for Crystal Palace and later managed the Sierra Leone national team.
Some parents have complained about the yoga and sports, demanding that the time is instead spent on exam preparation. But the club’s founders say that in our “age of anxiety”, in which round-the-clock social media is contributing to a mental health crisis among children, regular exercise and “mindfulness” are the new ingredients that will give pupils an edge in their forthcoming 7-plus (demanded by some prep schools) and, for admission to grammars, 11-plus entrance exams.
Businesswoman Myca Lee, who founded the club earlier this year, says that middle-class children are facing a crisis of “over-tutoring”, especially in London, where dawn-till-dusk exam practice is making children anxious and causing them to self-harm. Worst of all, according to some particularly tigerish parents, is that over-tutoring drains pupils of their enthusiasm and makes them less likely to succeed in those all-important tests. If intensive exam preparation is broken up with regular outdoor exercise and meditation, the thinking goes, children will score significantly higher.
Lee came to this realisation after sending her nine-year-old son, Constatijn, to a “hothouse” private school in Belgravia. “I found that all the parents were tutoring their children,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh, goodness, what do I do?’ I wasn’t in that world, and I didn’t bother in the first year; I thought I could teach him at home. And then by the end of Year One, I realised we needed a tutor.”
She found him a £100-an-hour teacher, but sports-mad Constatijn struggled to contain his energy. Lee eventually abandoned the rat race altogether, transferring him to a new school in Ascot where he had easier access to the outdoors. She also discovered the “Zen” influence of yoga, which Constatijn found immensely helpful; she now makes him meditate every night before bed.
“It’s what I want for my son, and I don’t buy into the whole, ‘He needs to go to these certain London schools’. He’s going to go out one day as a man into this world, and I need him to have social skills. What’s happened to a few generations is that some kids can’t even look you in the eye.”
It is easy to write much of this off as an eye-catching gimmick designed to appeal to the ferociously competitive instincts of middle-class parents. Indeed, on my morning at the school, I catch some of Andy Gray’s football practice: the pupils love it, scurrying outside as soon as the opportunity allows, but the class amounts to little more than some kickabout games, and it’s difficult to see why a Premiership star was necessary – along with his presumably hefty fee. And given that Gray retired in 1998, I wonder whether any of the children even realise who he – or his colleague, former Palace team-mate John Salako – is.
That said, the pupils clearly appreciate their yoga lesson – one boy excitedly asks if they can practice their “Cobra” move early today – and the quality of teaching is first-class, with all of the tutors coming from top universities, including several Oxbridge graduates, the club says. Lisa Powell, a former teacher at the £13,925-per-term Harrow School who later became a “super tutor” for the children of international business moguls and foreign aristocracy, is in charge of sourcing teachers, and says she is “unapologetically tough in what we are producing”. She admits some parents might “roll their eyes” at the yoga and smoothies, but says she was “shocked” to see how much it helped children to concentrate. Despite the club’s hat-tips to mindfulness and meditation, most of the day is still spent inside classrooms, and many British children, who are among the most overworked in Europe, will shudder at the thought of spending the bulk of their half-term polishing their algebra and grammar. Janette Wallis, editor of The Good Schools Guide, says that extra tuition can help struggling children but is unlikely to make a difference for pupils who are already doing well. “How much icing can you put on a well-baked cake?”, she has said.
If middle-class kids really are facing a crisis of “over-tutoring”, I ask, surely their parents should let them relax over half-term? “Well, that’s their choice,” answers Lee. “What we’re putting out is that option, if you want to have that balance of [tuition with] structured sports. But if you want your child to run around and be happy, they have that option, too.”
What’s more, Lee says, competition for school places has “changed completely” since she spent her school holidays connecting with nature in the Eighties, with an influx of wealthy Chinese, Russian and Saudi families driving up demand for places at British private schools. “My neighbour’s son went to my son’s school 20-odd years ago, and she was shocked when I told her how stressful it was [to get in].”
One of her friends feared her marriage would collapse over the stress of landing her son a place at prep school. Powell adds: “A parent was saying to me the other day, ‘There’s only 18 places available and there’s 1,000 children sitting the exam’. You can see the panic.”
Perhaps, although there is no such panic on display at Monday’s yoga class, which finishes with the children lying on their backs, inhaling peacefully through their noses and out through their mouths – an ocean of relaxation.
Maybe their parents should take a leaf out of their book.
‘Middle-class children face a crisis of over-tutoring’