The torment of mentoring spoilt rich kids

For 20 years of my adult life, I moonlighted as a private tutor. After a full day in the office (at a literary job which paid me the price of a Mars Bar p.c.m.), I would traipse the streets, from Notting Hill mansion to cramped suburban flat and everywhere in between, leaving a trail of English comprehensions, Latin translations and Ancient Greek primers in my wake. Not many private jets were involved, but I did run through so much shoe leather that I tried to claim a new pair of brogues as an expense. My accountant, alas, was having none of it.

Every so often, the press sensationalises the world of tutoring. That we were paid up to £1,000 per hour is entirely untrue, more’s the pity. Even the £60 an hour or so that an experienced tutor commands only adds up if you do four or five hours a day, but there is nary a whiff of that. We are also supposed to spend our days assuaging the neuroses of stupendously rich parents trying to ensure their children places at schools and universities to which they’re patently unsuited. There is some truth in this, but it is far from being the whole picture.

Matt Knott began tutoring in 2008, a few years after I did, and this frequently hilarious memoir showcases his experiences. He is a fully paid up member of the middle classes, from a lineage of schoolmasters stretching back to the 17th century. His parents were teachers in a public school, where he was a pupil, and he became acutely aware of the differences between his family (camping holidays in Cornwall) and his richer classmates (skiing trips, etc). He barely questions his own privileges, not stopping to ponder whether his parents’ profession (and his school) might have oiled the wheels into Cambridge, nor how their support enables him to try to be a screenwriter.