The booming world of specialised private education for the super-rich

Wanted: part-time tutor for a budding young architect student. Potential pay: over £2m.

Welcome to the booming world of specialised private education for the super-rich where earnings for tutoring, even when moonlighting, now dwarf conventional salaries.

This week, architects reacted with astonishment when an Oxford tutor agency offered a salary seven times higher than that of the average building designer for an “excellent young professional architect to provide academic support and mentorship to an ambitious architecture student preparing to commence her university studies”.

The client does not even want the successful applicant to quit their day job in exchange for £288,000 a year and nine weeks’ holiday. They will be asked to help with coursework and exams and “leveraging connections to secure placements in other prestigious architectural firms”. The arrangement could last the full seven years of the student’s architectural training. The benefactor, who is not a family member, is said to believe they could be the next Zaha Hadid.

The search is just the latest sign of a boom in private tutoring for the children of the 0.01% wealthiest people in the world. Adam Caller, the founder of Tutors International, the 25-year-old firm that posted the advert, told the Guardian: “I am absolutely swamped with inquiries. It’s never been like this.”

It also illustrates a new frontier in achieving a competitive advantage in life: buying tutors to boost professional connections.

The case, first reported in the Architects’ Journal, comes as private tutoring also increases in the mainstream, with 30% of young people in England and Wales aged 11-16 reporting in 2023 that they have had private tutoring. That data comes from the Sutton Trust, a social mobility charity which warns the practice serves “to reinforce the advantages of existing privilege”.

Other jobs currently on offer from Tutors International include:

• $190 an hour for an Arabic speaker to tutor three children aged seven and under until the end of the summer in homes in Ibiza, the Cotswolds and Surrey.

• $180,000 a year and a private villa to tutor three children in French, reading and maths in Djibouti.

• $360,000 a year for two tutors to travel with two boys who are part of a family “involved in motor sports, equestrian sports, and art, at a very high level”. Prospective tutors are told one boy’s “passion for Lego” highlights “a keen analytical mind”.

“[Clients] want the very, very best people to come and work for them,” said Caller. “The jobs are a lot harder than they look. There is no such thing as home. You are not selling your soul but you are committing your lives to these families, so they have to offer [tutors] something really spectacular. Most of my clients are billionaires or certainly have hundreds and hundreds of millions.”

Caller said he had 40 tutors working around the world, including one being paid £320,000 a year as a back-up for an A-level student at a London public school, another paid $280,000 by a professional golfer to homeschool children, and one in the UK getting £300,000, an apartment, car and flights to help a student who failed their first year at Cambridge University get back on their course.

Clients from Russia and China have largely dried up, but the biggest demand was from Italy, UAE and the US, Caller said. Other clients come from Britain, Monaco, Spain, France, Thailand, Canada, South America, South Africa, Qatar and Australia. The agency charges 33% commission on top of the salaries.

The architect role is being funded by an Italy-based individual for “an exceptionally motivated and focused” student who is applying to study at universities in the UK and Italy.

The job specification says the successful candidate should be “educated and polished, with excellent manners” and happy to run some tutoring sessions around food, “talking about architecture while cooking or over lunch”.

The advert was taken down this week from the Royal Institute for British Architects jobs website.

“The post was published before it had been manually checked and has now been taken down pending further discussion with the external recruiter,” said a spokesperson for the professional body. “We will continue to review our processes which will, moving forward, include a manual review of all adverts placed.”

The RIBA’s own data shows that the average salary for an architect with at least five years’ experience is £39,000.