A PRIVATE AFFAIR

The Guardian calls it a national scandal but even top Labour

figures are doing it. Rachel Johnson on the amazing

ubiquity of private tuition

MY eight-year-old daughter attends a Church of England primary school in Notting Hill. It is a cracking good school, and she is very happy there. My younger son also goes to what some of my middle-class friends term 'Free School'. and I have to admit to some feelings of righteous smugness that (1) we are saving many thousands of education pounds a year, and that (2) we are in the teeny-tiny minority of parents in my part of Notting Hill to use the state system.

That said, my daughter has started seeing a private tutor for an hour a week to help with her maths, which is as bad as mine was at her age. I know that if she is to get into anywhere pacy at 11, she will need a leg-up on the maths front.

I have a further confession to make. Not only will my eight-year-old daughter start

seeing a nice lady up the road (we were

very lucky to get a slot) who last year helped a girl I know win a place at —

hushed tones — St Paul's, but I also once hired a chap to help my son with his homework.

Yes, I paid £20 per hour of good money for Will to steer my son through long divi sion and making Viking longships out of egg cartons, because these are essential skills that I happen not to possess. I should add that my elder son attends a top private prep school in Hampstead, so it is not only those of us whose children attend state schools who are inflating demand for the country's fastest-growing service; it is also those whose children are privately educated — and how!

I mention this so that you know where I am coming from. It is perhaps no surprise to learn that I am one of the many, many parents who have resorted to top-up private lessons. But I know that it will come as more of a surprise to hear that the Blair boys have received private tuition in Alevel history and other subjects to supple ment their full-time education at the London Oratory, a selective Catholic comprehensive in Fulham.

One or possibly more young male teachers at league-table-busting Westminster School in Dean's Yard, a cricket ball's throw away from Downing Street, have been traipsing in

and out of the family flat, where Cherie keeps them supplied with attention-stimulating cups of coffee. It is a private arrangement between the handful of tutors concerned and the family. A Downing Street spokesman issued The Spectator with a statement: The Blairs' children are entitled to carry out their schooling free from intrusion, and any issues relating to their education are entirely a matter for the family.'

I am sure to attract vilification for having broken the °mend surrounding the Blair children, but there are good reasons for spilling these beans. Where, and now how, politicians' children are educated has always been of public interest, legitimately or otherwise. I don't want to be too partypolitical about this, but it was only a few days ago that Robin Cook, standing in for Mr Blair at Prime Minister's Questions, tore a strip off IDS for sending 'his children to Eton' and accused him of not touching any state school with a bargepole. In fact, only one Duncan Smith goes to Eton, and all four were educated at a Roman Catholic state school.

Whatever. But there will be many, I know, who will argue that the Blairs are trying to have their cake and eat it. They are dutifully putting their children through the state sys tem, but they are effectively garnishing this education with private lessons after school. And not just from the legion of tutors available in the Yellow Pages, but from first-class teachers at Westminster, aka the Great School, alma mater of six prime ministers, the philosopher John Locke, and. er, Tony Benn. As the Good Schools Guide puts it, the 'famous designer-label central London boys' school'.

But I won't carp, and I know that many

more will share my solidarity. It's up to people to educate their children as they please. Why should they be subject to the doctrinaire requirement that the offspring of Labour party top brass receive their education entirely at the hands of the state? Presumably, the Blairs are only acting in extrernis and exactly as do many other parents, who are concerned that their children are falling behind/need an extra push to move on to the next stage.

My daughter's tutor told me of the 'incredible but necessary dedication' of one of her clients, a clerk in a bank, who lives in Brixton and whose bright daughter attends a rough comprehensive. Every week after work, she would bring her daughter by bus from Brixton to Notting Hill, so that she could receive an hour's lesson. The mother's determination and drive, like Cherie's, is admirable. The snag in this case is, of course, that the Blairs are not white-collar workers from Brixton; they are our First Family, and their natural concern for their children has proved keener than their political smarts.

For this country's two-tier educational system has caused some of the bitterest feuds in that party. Remember the hoo-ha over Harriet Harman's children? It is also widely thought that Lord Falconer, Blair's chum, was denied the chance to fight a safe seat because he insisted that his four children attend private schools.

And while some Labour politicians' children do go private — Paul Boateng's, among others — toeing this party line has caused understandable anguish for Labour parents, who are no different from Mrs Blair (and most other aspirational parents) in that they want only the best for their children. In fact. the Blairs are only following the advice of Margaret Hodge, who, before she became higher education minister, was heard explaining to a parent who was agonising about her child's performance in a sink school in Islington that the only way to do it was how they all did it. 'You use the state system and tutor them on the side,' she is reported to have said.

Now the salient point here is that the Stairs are only following the herd. Their children are being tutored only because everyone else's are, if the parents can afford it.

Private tutoring is rapidly becoming the norm in state schools; not just because of the fierce competition for places at the best state secondaries, but because the amount of AS-level coursework is astonishing: too much for teachers to supervise and too advanced for average parents to assist with. A recent King's College, London study of 454 year-eight children in eight London primaries revealed that in one school 65 per cent of 11-year-olds were being tutored. The director of one London tutor agency has 3,000 teachers on his books, and adds between 50 and 60 children to his client list every day. Tuition rates range from £15 to £36 an hour.

Nice work if you can get it, right? Well, there's more to it than that. Academics and educationists have pointed out that tutoring obscures a school's real teaching performance. It disadvantages working-class children. It disguises a school's rightful position in the dreaded league tables based on GCSE and A-level exam results, and it even entices families to move house on the basis of results achieved not by the school but by its pupils working one-to-one with tutors.

Indeed, the Guardian recently called the prevalence of out-of-hours tutoring for state-school pupils a 'national scandal'. And Chris Woodhead, our former chief inspector of schools, has suggested that schools be forced to reveal how many of their children are being privately tutored,

and that education inspectors collect that information. Jenni Russell, a journalist, spent weeks researching the effects on the state sector of private tutoring, and following publication of her article received 87 emails from parents and teachers thanking her for bringing the subject to national attention. 'I call it pay as you learn,' she said. The huge extent of private tutoring comes from two pressures. There's the pressure on children to pass too many exams, particularly with the introduction of AS-levels, and there's the pressure from parents on the state system to deliver higher standards. As a result, we are seeing a secret privatisation of the state system, which disadvantages those who cannot afford or do not want to tutor. You can't get what state schools claim to be delivering without private tutoring.'

And what of the pupils? Just think of how much the school-'n'-tutoring-'n'-double-homework timetable eats into the hours spent loafing about watching telly, on their PlayStations, and eating carcinogenic snacks. One observer of the trend, Dorothy Brown of the parents' advice group Exploring Parenthood, has warned that all this private tutoring is turning our children Japanese. In Japan, primary-school children are in school for 12 hours, then go on to juku evening crammer classes.

So what are the advantages? Well, tutoring takes the heat off schools to teach; it reassures parents that they are doing all they can; it gets the work done. But these are surely shortsighted ambitions. Wouldn't it be better and fairer if we (me included) just let the schools get on with it without the intervention of parents and tutors?

And Mrs Blair, be warned. If children are put under too much pressure, they can turn off and simply not learn. I see from my state schools' handbook that the average homework for a 14-year-old at the Oratory is set at 13 hours a week. For a 16year-old that goes up to 15 hours. Isn't that enough for any teenager?