"Do you think there's much private tutoring at your daughter's comprehensive?" I asked a father. He was taken aback. "No," he said, "I don't think so. I haven't come across it. But I'll ask my daughter, if you like." A day later, he sent me an e-mail. Headed "We are rubbish parents", it said: "I've asked Emma. She says ALL her friends are being tutored for their GCSEs, except her. We are shocked. It seems like cheating."
In London and other big cities, private tutoring is booming. It has become one of the most important, yet also unacknowledged, factors in a child's school performance. It disadvantages working-class children and undermines any pretensions to a comprehensive school system. Not only that, but it distorts the league tables of test and examination performance, which are supposed to reflect the quality of teaching in schools, and thus makes a nonsense of the government's entire strategy for raising standards.
It makes a nonsense, too, of the premium house prices that were widely reported last month. According to an economists' study, parents are paying as much as [pounds]45,000 extra for houses within the catchment areas of top-scoring primary schools. Yet the evidence from my inquiries suggests that in many schools the high scores have more to do with the tutoring that the parents arrange for their children than with anything the schools and their teachers do.
There is no official information on the extent of private tutoring, because it is in nobody's interest to collect it. Parents are often reluctant to admit to it, and schools would rather take the credit for their pupils' results themselves. But the anecdotal evidence is sobering.
Three years ago, a quarter of the 11-year-olds at one high-achieving north London primary school were being tutored. Last year, the proportion was one-third. This year, it's half. At another, lower-scoring school nearby, one-sixth of the top year were being tutored three years ago; this year, it has doubled. A third school has just two middle-class children. Each has a tutor.
Ask parents in other areas of London and you find the same story. In some schools, more than half of 11 -year-olds have had at least 18 months of private tuition in English and maths before they sit their tests at 11. At other primaries, none of the children is privately tutored.
One tutor, Sarah Mills, an ex-teacher, says she feels furious when the annual test results are published and top-scoring schools are praised. "The whole thing is really dishonest. In the best schools, half the pupils are being tutored, and they get terrific results. Every year, I come close to telling the local papers: this is a sham."
It's a conclusion that some disillusioned parents are reaching for themselves. Adam sends his son to a highly rated and, he now realises, highly tutored primary. He was attracted by its glowing Ofsted reports and its test results. Yet at the age of six and a half, his son was bored and could scarcely read. "The school wouldn't give us straight answers, they weren't dealing with it, they were very lackadaisical. They just said he was doing really well, when he obviously wasn't. So we took him to a tutor, and after a year he's catching up. We'll keep it going. Because the frightening thing is, you're gambling with your child's future, and the school just wasn't interested in making things happen... The longer I've been there, the more convinced I've become that the good marks the school gets are mostly due to the prevalence of private tutoring."
At the same school, the mother of a ten-year-old asked one teacher why the class rarely had any maths home-work. "Oh, I don't tend to give homework any more, because I know most of the children are being tutored," she said cheerfully.
Yet another mother, an American, and therefore an outsider to the British education system, was worried by her son's slide from middle to bottom maths and English sets between years five and six. She was stunned when she realised that he had been falling behind because all his friends had tutors. She hadn't known.
The hard research evidence for this phenomenon is sparse, but it exists. Diane Reay and Helen Lucey of King's college London studied 454 top-year children at eight London primaries. Reay says private tutoring has grown exponentially: it has become almost the norm among the middle classes, and it is increasing the social class differences in educational attainment.
A decade ago, Reay says, working-class families didn't mention tutoring. Now most of them know that it's going on, and feel they are failing their children because they cannot provide it. Aspirational working-class parents are desperate, and many make huge efforts to find and pay for tuition. But because they are not part of the middle-class information networks, and because they cannot afford the best teaching, they get significantly different results.
Reay came across one primary school where 65 per cent of 11-year-olds were being tutored. A significant minority of their parents spent more than [pounds sterling]100 a week on tutoring--more than many of the black and working-class families were living on. One African-Caribbean mother, with a low-paid husband, anxious that her eldest daughter was falling behind the rest of the class, paid for five sessions with a tutor, at [pounds sterling]20 a time. But she had four other children. When a younger child outgrew his trainers, she made the bleak calculation that it was impossible to pay for them all, and that it was pointless to try.
The primary schools have every reason to turn a blind eye to private tutoring that boosts their league-table scores. But what really matters to the parents is to get their children the best possible secondary education -- either by ensuring that they will be placed in the top sets at their comprehensives, or by helping them win a place at private or selective state schools.
Greater London still has selective state schools in the outer boroughs, and the competition for places is fierce. For example, in Enfield, the Latymer School, where almost every child gets at least five good GCSEs, has more than 2,000 applicants each year for 180 places. For working-class children from other London boroughs such as Hackney or Tower Hamlets, a place at Latymer is often the only escape from the local comprehensive, officially deemed to be failing.
But an untutored child from outside Enfield has very little chance of getting in to Latymer. Primaries in other boroughs will not prepare children for the entrance examination, often as a point of egalitarian principle, and the primary syllabus usually hasn't covered the ground that Latymer tests. The consequence is that the 11-plus, here as in other parts of the capital, has in effect been privatised. Only those who can pay have a chance of success, and the social bias that has always existed in the 11-plus has increased enormously.
I came across one clever, determined, highly motivated black child from a low-achieving primary in Stoke Newington. She had been top of her class all through school, and when she found that her best friend, white and middle-class, was being tutored for the Latymer exams, Grace decided to enter them, too. But her mother, a care assistant, could afford only six weeks of tuition just before the exams. It wasn't enough. Grace was competing against children with a year of tuition behind them, and she has gone instead to a school judged by Ofsted to be unsatisfactory, and which has a severe problem with bullying.
Grace will now find it much harder than her friend to gain academic success. The government is trying to redress that imbalance by offering more help to bright, deprived children in inner-city schools. Its Gifted and Talented programme aims to identify and coach the top 5 or 10 per cent. But Reay says that, even here, there is preliminary evidence that tutoring is subverting the original aim; middle-class children are being coached so that they will be chosen for the scheme.
The hypocrisy that surrounds the issue of access to grammar schools is astounding. I once asked a parent/staff meeting at a state primary why the school did not offer children any preparation for selective tests. Everyone present, including the head teacher, found it a distasteful suggestion, and said that the school believed all children should go to the local comprehensive. A defensible principle, except that the head had her children in private schools, and every parent present either already had, or went onto, tutor their children for selective exams.
