Teaching The Rich

A private tutor for the super-rich details the oftenoutrageous perks and drawbacks of the job

In autumn 2008, Matt Knott was at a loose end. After graduating from Cambridge, he was back living with his teacher-parents in Dorset. His plan to write “a heartwarming comedy set in the fictional town of Piddle Newton” wasn’t going well. And the global economy had just collapsed.

So when he heard you could earn £30 an hour tutoring rich people’s children in London, he joined an agency there run by a woman called Philippa. Before long, he’d entered a strange new world where “PJS” were private jets rather than pyjamas— and where, luckily for his purposes, a Cambridge-educated tutor for your child was a status symbol to rival a Gucci handbag.

Knott’s initial duties were as a “study buddy”, which, in theory, involved supervising homework and, in practice, fighting off his tutees’ pleas to do it for them.

But there were perks too, such as accompanying families to St Moritz and Tuscany—where popping out to dinner meant taking a helicopter to a restaurant in Rome.

Here, Knott looks back on his experiences with a convincing range of emotions. There’s certainly indignation at the unexamined social privilege he encountered.

Yet there’s also sympathy for the children under such pressure to get into a good (ie, expensive) school, even when they’re palpably not up to it. Meanwhile Knott, who describes himself as “very, very gay”, keeps us fully up to date with his largely unsuccessful love life—sometimes in fairly explicit detail. Whatever he’s writing about, though, he’s generally extremely funny, in a book that fizzes with great one-liners.

In this extract, he’s about to meet a mother and son from somewhere near the bottom of the new social scale he’s coming to know—with the aim of helping out on GCSE coursework about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:

it sound like Carolyn had glossed over her investments in North Korea. When I arrived at her address, it was a smart four-storey townhouse that had to be worth several million. Carolyn was very trim and dressed in Ugg boots and a fur gilet. In fact, it’s what I would have worn if I was going as a yummy mummy to a fancy dress party.

‘It’s all a bit of a mystery, Matt,’ Carolyn said as if we were old friends. ‘Historically Horace was always in the top third of his year.’

I presumed she meant the lower end of the top third, since here was a woman who would not have hesitated to place her son in the top quarter or fifth, nor even to whip out a pie chart highlighting his flair for algebra, had the data allowed. This job was beyond the usual remit of a study buddy, but I had written my own GCSE coursework on the play in question and had convinced Philippa to let me branch out.

‘Horace is waiting for you in his room,’ said Carolyn.

I made my way up to the top floor,