From The Sunday Times

By Jack Grimston

As many as half the children in London have received private tuition as parents become more and more desperate to win places at the best schools, new research has found.

The latest edition of the Good Schools Guide has found the recession has had no apparent effect on parents’ willingness to pay between £20- £40 an hour to top up their children’s education.

The boom is being fuelled both by parents’ ambitions for children to win places at the best universities and by a glut of unemployed graduates tutoring part-time while they look for a full-time job.

Tuition agencies report growth of 15%-100% last year, with popularity growing quickly in cities such as Birmingham and Manchester as well as in the traditional heartlands of London and the southeast.

“It has reached epidemic proportions in London,” said Sue Fieldman, regional editor of the Good Schools Guide, who estimates that half the children in the capital receive tutoring at some point in their school career. She added: “The boom area in 2009 — and we anticipate the same for 2010 — was tutoring to get into grammar schools.

“There is now such a difference between the best grammar schools and the worst comprehensives that parents are tutoring for the 11-plus from an earlier age.”

Mylene Curtis, managing director of the national agency Fleet Tutors, which teaches 6,300 children, said numbers had grown 15% in the past year.

She said parents were worried that only a few schools could give children a good chance of a place at a leading university.

“There is a fear factor among parents,” said Curtis. “They are unsettled by constantly changing initiatives, lack of confidence in local schools, dropping standards and under-qualified teachers.”

Kate Shand, founder of Enjoy Education, an agency in Chelsea, west London, said business had doubled in the past year. But she cautioned parents should manage their own expectations and not tutor children for schools where they were extremely unlikely to win a place.

“It is not about irrational fears and pushy parents,” she added. “If you have a choice of one, two or three schools in your area, you have to get them into those schools, especially when you are managing two, three or four children.

“It’s about quality of life so parents can avoid having to spend the whole time trekking from place to place, spending most of their life in the car.”