19th February 2016 1:00
By Blue Tutors
I was recently reminded by someone who tutors for an extremely wealthy family of the strange disjuncture that can occur between tutors and the families they work for. Interestingly, in this case the tutor and the family seem to have a lot in common; the tutor went to Oxford, and the family want their child to go to Oxford. But the similarities end there. The family have booked a tutor on the basis that, as an Oxford graduate, they will be best placed to help their child. However, the tutor has found, as many do, that they are from different worlds, which can make helping students secure a place a difficult endeavour.
Many people think that Oxbridge is the reserve of the superrich. Whilst the seriously underprivileged are still in the minority of the student population, the majority of students are hardly super-rich, and many students are, well, normal. This especially goes for those who decide to tutor after they graduate. Whilst many graduates enjoy teaching and continuing academic work, most also need the money. It can, then, be strange for Oxbridge tutors to find themselves tutoring for families who expect them to relate to or even understand their lifestyle.
The fact is that whilst many Oxbridge students are privileged compared to the majority of students, most really can’t relate to the lifestyles of the super-rich and some may not know where to begin when it comes to helping the children of the super-rich secure a place at university. Tutors to the super-rich have described their students assuming that places can be bought, and being utterly unconcerned about studying. Others have found that their students are incapable of sitting down to revise, their lives full of activities and demands that divide their attention to the point of exhaustion. The reality is that Oxbridge tutors aren’t the product of elite lifestyles; they’re the product of intelligence, hard work and dedication – things money can’t buy.